Thursday, March 31, 2022

March 31: Ukraine (2)

Ukrainian president says defense is at a ‘turning point’ Russian bombardment of areas around Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv and intensified attacks elsewhere in the country further undermined hopes for progress toward ending the brutal war. ....... A delegation of Ukrainian lawmakers visited Washington on Wednesday to push for more US assistance, saying their nation needs more military equipment, more financial help and tougher sanctions against Russia. ....... “If we really are fighting for freedom and in defense of democracy together, then we have a right to demand help in this difficult turning point. Tanks, aircraft, artillery systems. Freedom should be armed no worse than tyranny,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address to the nation, which he delivered standing in the dark outside the dimly lit presidential offices in Kyiv. He thanked the US for an additional $500 million in aid that was announced Wednesday. ......... There seemed little faith that Russia and Ukraine will resolve the conflict soon, particularly after the Russian military’s about-face and its most recent attacks. ....... demoralized Russian soldiers in Ukraine were refusing to carry out orders and sabotaging their own equipment and had accidentally shot down their own aircraft. ........ Putin had apparently “massively misjudged” the invasion. Although Putin’s advisers appeared to be too afraid to tell the truth, the “extent of these misjudgments must be crystal clear to the regime ...... Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about the poor performance of his military in Ukraine because they are too afraid to tell him the truth. ....... Five weeks into the invasion that has left thousands dead on both sides, the number of Ukrainians fleeing the country topped a staggering 4 million, half of them children ...... the faint outlines of a possible peace agreement seemed to emerge when the Ukrainian delegation offered a framework under which the country would declare itself neutral — dropping its bid to join NATO, as Moscow has long demanded — in return for security guarantees from a group of other nations. ...... Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying Wednesday that Ukraine’s willingness to accept neutrality and look outside NATO for security represents “significant progress ....... But those statements were followed by attacks. ........ Top Russian military officials say their main goal now is the “liberation” of the Donbas, the predominantly Russian-speaking industrial heartland where Moscow-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces since 2014. ....... The UN is looking into allegations that some residents of the besieged and shattered southern city of Mariupol were forcibly taken to areas controlled by Russian forces or to Russia itself. ...... Germany said Russia had reassured it that European companies won’t have to pay for Russian gas in rubles, a prospect that raised fears that Russia could cut off supplies. Also, Poland said it would end Russian oil imports by the year’s end.

. A nurse's death raises the alarm about the profession's mental health crisis . They want to see more support for their colleagues dealing with the emotional fallout from the pandemic – people who for two years have put in grueling hours together fighting a brutal virus. ........ "If we don't talk about it, it's not going to get better," says Paredes. ....... Most nurses and other frontline health workers worked relentlessly over the past two years, surge after surge, through countless deaths and severe staffing shortages. And now, a majority are struggling with psychiatric symptoms, research finds. Mental health care providers worry that they will soon see a wave of associated problems, like substance abuse and suicide risk. ........ more than 70% of health care workers in the country have symptoms of anxiety and depression, 38% have symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, and 15% have had recent thoughts of suicide or self-harm. ...... "You hear it in people describing how in their dreams they see [things] like body bags," she says. "Or, a lot of these anxiety dreams where they're not in control. Like a building's on fire and they can't get there." ........ "When you're doing shift after shift and you're just exhausted, you don't have time to emotionally process it" ...... "It's similar to when people are in a combat zone. But at some point you do need to respond as a human and put it back together." ....... A lot of what they talked about was witnessing death every day, which wasn't the norm before the pandemic. ...... "Like every other hour, you get a new patient and then they also die. And you really don't realize how traumatic it is until you're having a moment when you clock off, and think about [what happened in] the last 12 hours" ....... He was the kind of person who "cared deeply about everybody he met," says Paredes. "He took time to get to know people and get to know their stories." ....... After his first suicide attempt, Odell sought treatment. He started seeing a therapist regularly and got on medication. But last year, he went through a break up and lost his mother to dementia. ........ He had three months' refill for his depression medication, but was waiting for insurance to kick in to continue treatment. ....... But there were no obvious signs that he was still struggling, says Walujo, who saw him almost every day. "So this all just came out of nowhere." .......... "Going into 2021, I realized I'd actually forgotten large pieces of 2020," she says. "I had to speak to a therapist about this, and they told me that I most likely was suffering from symptoms of PTSD." ....... "We want nurses to realize that you're not alone" ...... "Veterans are in a unique position to be able to provide some insight and also help our brothers and sisters that are in the nursing field and frontline health care workers" ....... There's significant overlap between what soldiers experience at war and what health care workers have been through the past year, he says, that put them at a higher risk of PTSD and suicide. ....... "If you're able to access people in an early stage of whatever they're experiencing, then that's a crucial catch" ........ Call before the crisis. Call whenever you're starting to feel a little bit stressed." ....... But "the hospitals have not wanted to acknowledge how short-staffed we are. They don't want to acknowledge that relying on travel nurses and staff nurses working overtime shifts isn't sustainable. People are worn out." ...... "They need to do more to protect us," he adds. "They have a moral obligation to protect us."

. 'Heavy fighting' expected in suburbs of Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, in the 'coming days,' intel says The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence said Thursday that "Russian forces continue to hold positions to the east and west of Kyiv despite the withdrawal of a limited number of units" and that "heavy fighting will likely take place in the suburbs of the city in coming days."

Putin says Russia will enforce rouble payments for gas from Friday . Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he had signed a decree saying foreign buyers must pay in roubles for Russian gas from April 1, and contracts would be halted if these payments were not made.

Why the U.S. Was Wrong About Ukraine and the Afghan War U.S. intelligence agencies thought the Afghan military would last longer and predicted Kyiv would fall faster, showing the difficulty of assessing fighting spirit. ........ just seven months ago, when the Taliban rolled into Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, unopposed. Most Afghan troops abandoned their uniforms and weapons. The president fled to the United Arab Emirates ....... In Afghanistan, intelligence agencies had predicted the government and its forces could hold on for at least six months after the U.S. withdrawal. In Ukraine, intelligence officials thought the Russian army would take Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in two days. ........ The miscalculations demonstrate that even in an age of electronic intercepts and analysis assisted by vast data collection, human relationships still matter in accurately assessing the morale of a country or military. ........ Over the last week, Ukrainian forces have used tanks and fighter jets to attack Russian positions outside Kyiv and other cities in a way that demonstrates that their objective is not to take back territory, but to destroy Russian forces. It is a sign of not only savvy strategy but

a clear intent by Ukraine to defeat the Russian military and win the war

. .......... “If there was a blind spot, I think it was less in believing Ukrainians wouldn’t fight and more about believing the Russian military was more capable than they turned out to be” ....... amplified by the Russian military’s struggle with complex maneuver warfare, supply problems, broken-down vehicles and lack of secure communications ........ Intelligence officials also had no way of predicting the leadership abilities of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, which have proven key in rallying the country to the fight. ......... In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, American officials believed the units they had trained would fight longer and harder than they did. ........ “To get the data you have to become close to your partner and the minute you do that, lack of bias goes out the window” ........ “Zelensky’s endgame may be victory, it may be getting Russian troops off his soil,” Mr. Cotton said. “Even if you didn’t think that a month ago, you have to concede it is certainly a possibility now.”

Black Tesla employees describe a culture of racism: ‘I was at my breaking point’ . A single mother was excited to land a job at Tesla. About three years in, she was fired, she said, after complaining that Black workers were frequently called the N-word on the assembly line. ...... A former refinery worker couldn’t wait to get into green energy. She said she soon found herself and other Black workers assigned to the most arduous tasks in a corner of the factory co-workers called “the plantation.” ........ An Army veteran was promoted to a fleet manager job. He said he was fired after he complained that his boss called him and two Black co-workers “monkeys.” ....... They say Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas, gave them the hardest tasks and routinely denied them promotions. ........ “There was a time where I worked three months straight — no days off.” ....... Besides the unequal assignment of factory tasks, verbal harassment was a daily affliction ...... Chatman didn’t hear Asian workers use the N-word, she said, but they “would make chicken jokes,” a stereotype mocking of Black Americans’ diet. ........... Tesla’s billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, would come through the front of the factory “with his entourage,” Chatman said. “They didn’t want a Black face up there,” she said, adding that Latino colleagues were left up front while Black workers were moved to the back. ......... After her HR complaint, Chatman said, she was no longer harassed. She said the lead was fired after complaints from multiple workers. But she soon saw him back at the factory, rehired in a non-supervisory job. ........ Workers called Tesla’s factory “the plantation,” and “the slave ship,” not just for the brutal work pace that everyone experienced, but especially because Black workers were routinely segregated into a corner of the factory that lacked air conditioning and work conditions were most crowded, Romby said. ........ He’d overhear white supervisors berate Black, Asian and Latino workers, often directing the N-word at Black employees. “Things like, ‘Tell that n— to get over here.” ....... He had ideas for improving the fleet but said he was never taken seriously. “They didn’t like how much the company was spending on equipment, but they wouldn’t hear my suggestions on how to cut costs. I said if you people put more money into training people [to use the equipment properly] rather than buying new equipment, you could save a lot of money. Never once did that start to happen.” .......... Jones now runs the skateboard company he founded, Spread the Shred. Sometimes he thinks about Musk, who once told employees who were targets of racism to get a “thick skin.”

Counteroffensive in Ukraine Shifts Dynamic of War President Biden met with European leaders in Brussels to reinforce solidarity against Russia’s invasion and proposed excluding Russia from the G20. Ukraine said it had destroyed a Russian naval ship. ........ President Biden and leaders of more than 30 nations convened Thursday to demonstrate united opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, announcing new economic sanctions, aid for refugees, deployment of additional forces to Eastern Europe and grim preparations in case Russia uses chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

A sense of stalemate settles over Ukraine as heavy fighting grinds on.
Russia’s invasion is reawakening memories of World War II for older Ukrainians.



In Putin’s misbegotten war, NATO sees both danger and opportunity.
How to Clean Your Shower Curtain Few things can throw cold water on bathtime quite like life-forms on your shower curtain. Typically, these are gray flecks of mildew or colonies of pink mold (technically, a bacteria, Serratia marcescens). Microbes tend to appear gradually until they’re suddenly in full bloom.

The Best Electric Blanket and Heated Mattress Pad Combine chilly temperatures with a drafty house, and you could end up with high utility bills. But using electric bedding to heat your bed costs just pennies a night.
The Scars of Ukraine’s War, Illuminated in Fiction Two newly translated books highlight everyday lives transformed by conflict. ....... In 2019, I read about a condition called uterine prolapse; it occurs when weakened pelvic muscles cause the uterus to detach, drop down into the vagina, and in some cases, even slip out. I learned that more cases than usual were being reported in a city in the Donbas region of Ukraine, where skirmishes between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army had left the area war-ravaged long before the full-scale invasion currently strangling the country. A gynecologist in Avdiivka, a suburb of Donetsk, told The New York Times that the uptick in cases was most likely due to a combination of stress and heavy lifting; damage to pipes and other infrastructure forced residents to carry pails of water up flights of stairs. One woman with the condition, Liudmila, said she now had to decide between an expensive medical procedure and repairing her roof, which had been destroyed by shelling. “The winter is coming,” she said, “and I am going to stay either without a roof over my head or with my uterus falling out.” ......... battle scars are more often psychological than physical. Her characters, much like Liudmila, have not been afforded the time or space to attend to the shocks of war; life, or something like it, must go on for these women. Many are internal refugees who fled the brutal fighting that first broke out in east Ukraine in 2014, and have resettled in a Kyiv that regards them with apathy or suspicion ....... In the Kyiv metro, we meet a jovial woman named Xenia who appears enthusiastic about her new career selling stationery on the subway. Advertising double-sided markers, she yells to the passengers, “They highlight the main idea!” When someone shoots her a dirty look, her veneer of happiness rapidly disintegrates, and she collapses. The narrator makes vague reference to “all the other sorrows that had vexed her over the last two years,” without explaining what they are, because, after all, no one has bothered to ask. ............. an overlooked population — poor women in Ukraine’s industrial east — within an overlooked conflict. ....... A beloved manicurist goes missing, but no one notices at first; another woman disappears into a forest. ........ In one story, “The Stars,” horoscopes in the local paper advise when it is safe to walk around outside based on readers’ zodiac signs: “It turned out that Pisces could be sure of their well-being and safety from 3 to 5 p.m. that day.” ......... Readers looking for clarity about the political factions and internal divisions that led to the conflict will find instead hazy dream sequences, witchcraft, a woman who loses the ability to walk in Maidan Square and jokes, “I am a living monument.” ........ In “The Stars,” some believe they’re being bombed by Canada; apparently, Trudeau is after their coal. ......... The novelist Andrey Kurkov has said that while he is ethnically Russian, he considers himself “politically Ukrainian.” Kurkov was born in 1961 in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), but moved to Kyiv as a child. Russians, he told Agence France-Presse in February, subscribe to the “collective mentality.” For Kurkov, the czars, the Bolsheviks and now Putin have been trying to impose this worldview onto Ukrainians, but “Ukrainians are individuals,” he says. ....... He is best known for “Death and the Penguin” (1996), a satirical crime thriller about an obituary writer named Viktor living in 1990s Kyiv whose sole companion is his pet penguin. Like the post-Soviet man, the penguin has been cut off from his collective (back home in Antarctica) and is adrift in a free world. It shouldn’t work, but it does. .......... Firmly neutral, Sergey has no dog in this fight — just his bees. One of his most prolonged considerations of new political realities is what will happen to his regional society for beekeepers if Donetsk were to become independent. “Was there a society in Donetsk these days?” he wonders. “If there was, it wouldn’t be the region’s, it would be the ‘republic’s,’ and that meant he was no longer a member.” ........... Over the course of the novel, his resolve to stay neutral is shaken, particularly when he sees how Russian occupying forces have treated his beekeeper friend, a Crimean Tatar named Akhtem. There are hints of an awakening. He notices his bees, which he had once heralded as a species that had achieved pure communism, refusing to make room for a newcomer from another hive. Suddenly their communalism looks like little more than cruel tribalism.

Sergey reprimands them: “Why are you acting like people?”

........ the Russian characters in “Grey Bees” come off to me as eerily cold, almost monstrous — snipers, cops, Putin apologists — as if the actions of the Russian government were in some ways reflective of a deeper national character .......... recalls Kurkov’s professed view of Russian and Ukrainian people as fundamentally different, each with a unique “mentality.” ......... Now, Ukrainians are fighting for the right to be many people, speaking many languages, refusing to be separated.

The Battle for the Mural — and the Future of Belarus It started as an act of graffiti at a playground in Minsk. It turned into a remarkable campaign of defiance against an increasingly totalitarian regime. ........ They positioned their spotters to watch for the Belarusian security services, the siloviki. They agreed on a plan to create an emergency diversion if they arrived. ....... There were more than 1,000 political prisoners in detention; sentences for those who opposed Lukashenko’s regime stretched into decades. Now Russia had launched an assault on Ukraine, and Lukashenko had sold their country to the Kremlin as a giant military base. ........ If they had overthrown Lukashenko, the man thought, probably none of this would be happening. Vladimir Putin would not have had the strategic assets to be able to carry out this war — no support from the northern flank, no airfields for refueling planes, no silos to keep the missiles. ........ The appeal of buying there was obvious — it was a 10-minute drive from downtown Minsk, with a supermarket across the street and good schools nearby. It was a short walk to the Belarusian capital’s largest park and the shores of the big lake that locals in the landlocked country referred to as the Minsk Sea. .......... It was a few days before the August 2020 presidential elections, which until recently Diana and pretty much everyone else in Belarus had expected to be the sixth straight election President Lukashenko would win through a combination of voter apathy, oppositional disarray, electoral suppression and outright fraud. But for the first time in his 26 years in power, the usual script of the regime’s election interference had gone awry. ........... The D.J.s replied that they were just doing what they thought was right. Almost immediately, they were arrested. ....... For more than two decades, Belarusians had existed in an equilibrium of quiet authoritarianism. If the repressions didn’t directly touch them, most people tolerated them. The country’s national anthem started with “We, Belarusians, are a peaceful people,” and a common proverb to describe the national psyche was “maya hata s krau” — which translates roughly to “my house is on the side.” Whatever is happening outside my family is none of my business. .......... In 1991, the year before Diana was born, the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine negotiated the end to the U.S.S.R. at a hunting lodge in western Belarus. .......... Diana’s compatriots were among the least interested in independence — 83 percent of Belarusians had voted against it. Still, they emerged one day into a new reality of seismic proportions; their state, their ideology and all the order they knew had melted away. As an only child after perestroika, Diana was allowed to do whatever she wanted, too young and too loved to realize the real toll of the upheaval running through the former Soviet empire. ............ In the chaos of the 1990s, she recalls, everyone knew that if a cop came to the bandits’ side, it would end poorly. Her parents straddled the new divide neatly — her mother worked for the state, while her father worked the corner. He tried everything to get in on the new economy. He drove plush toys from Smolensk, Russia, hawked meat at an open-air market and thumbed stacks of rubles on the black-market currency exchange. ......... Minsk was bombed so brutally, the Wehrmacht had to wait for the fires to subside so they could enter the city. Whether because of extermination, displacement or deportation, by the end of the war, Belarus was missing half its population. ......... previous institutions other than the Communist Party remained intact. ....... In Belarus, too, as the economy was liberalized, standards of living dropped, while criminality climbed. Diana didn’t remember the food lines, but her grandmother often told her that while life in the Soviet Union was difficult, it was stable, and the people were kinder. ........... Lukashenko made his entrance into this morass. The former head of a small collective farm, he was elected to Parliament in 1990 but remained unknown until he became head of an anticorruption committee three years later. He shot to fame after giving a speech denouncing high-level corruption on the floor of the legislature when he was 39. Lukashenko presented himself as a mix of everyman populist and cherry-picked Soviet-nostalgist, bellicose and bombastic. He defeated Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich with 80 percent of the vote in the 1994 presidential election. ........... Almost immediately after taking power, Lukashenko began to impose autocratic rule. He censored state media; he closed Belarus’s only independent radio station and several newspapers. Lukashenko stripped powers from the Parliament. He oversaw a referendum to resurrect Soviet national symbols and made Russian a state language. In 1999, Belarus and Russia signed a treaty that committed them to merging into a confederal state at some future point. (At the time, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia was so sick and unpopular, Lukashenko believed he might head the eventual union.) ............ By the end of the ’90s, Lukashenko controlled all executive and judicial authorities, the Central Election Commission, unions and the military and law-enforcement structures. Through a 2004 constitutional referendum, he abolished presidential term limits. ......... In some ways, Lukashenko’s autocracy outgrew even the U.S.S.R.’s model. Belarus had no ruling party, no place to incubate rivals or create factions — the elites existed at Lukashenko’s pleasure. The president made all key personnel and economic decisions, including the appointment and dismissal of heads of cities and districts, lower-court judges and directors of major factories. The K.G.B. was never disbanded. Instead, “curators” were placed in important institutions. ............ Because Belarus was slow to privatize, oligarchs never had much of a chance to materialize. Half of the economy remained under state control. Lukashenko instituted a short-term job-contract scheme in the state sector, which was used to target anyone who became too political. Placements in institutions of higher learning were similarly weaponized. Independent journalists were jailed intermittently and then released, the steady two-step of a repressive state. ........... Lukashenko’s was a soft authoritarian system, with the requisite window dressings. If you were a private nonpolitical citizen, you were unlikely to encounter the K.G.B. There was little fear of serious consequence for an ordinary citizen making a joke. People could openly talk about hating the president in cafes; they could make fun of his often nonsensical ramblings. They could mock his mustache, his combover and his rural accent. ............... There were small, unpopular opposition parties, which were allowed to rent office space in the capital. They registered for elections. There was no personality cult — no portraits, streets or statues dedicated to the Great Leader. Instead, the regime relied on technicalities, like an article in the criminal code covering insults to the president, which it used to persecute critics. The authorities rarely shuttered publications outright, preferring to impose crippling fines instead. ............ But most crucially, for well over a decade, Lukashenko was genuinely popular. A level of propaganda undergirded his rule, reinforcing the perception of a social pact in which the state would provide for the citizen. Lukashenko relished his supporters’ calling him Batka — Father. .......... Most experts agree he would have won elections without rigging them. Belarus’s economic growth hovered in and around the double digits. The economy was buttressed by money the state earned refining duty-free Russian oil and gas and reselling it. Excluding the Baltics, Belarus was the former Soviet republic with the highest standard of living. Belarus’s per capita G.D.P. was nearly twice that of neighboring Ukraine. Life expectancy was higher than in Russia. ........... but only those in the “opposition ghetto,” as it was called, received outlandish sentences. .......... Most citizens steered clear of anything political, and many believed what their TVs told them. .......... When she got to university in Minsk, where she studied materials science, Diana realized she had been fooled by state television. In 2011, runaway inflation struck the country — there was a major currency devaluation, and the regime imposed price controls on basic goods and food. ........... The authorities responded with their usual farce — they banned applause unless directed at veterans. They arrested a one-armed man for clapping. They accused a deaf and mute man of shouting anti-government slogans. When people started to protest by flash mob, the authorities banned standing around doing nothing in a group. ........... Tut.by was allowed. The portal was started in 2000 by the businessman Yuri Zisser, often referred to as Belarus’s Steve Jobs, and was read by 62 percent of the population, reaching people across the political spectrum. The regime had invested heavily in telecommunications infrastructure and left most of it alone, focusing efforts on television propaganda. ............ nonstop news in Minsk, with everyone glued to the daily developments. ............ Lukashenko, who often played Russia and Europe against each other for his own gain, did not recognize the annexation of Crimea and refused to join the Kremlin’s boycott of the West. Since Putin’s election in 2000, relations between the two presidents had been strained. Russia subsidized the Belarusian economy and by extension kept Lukashenko in power, but Lukashenko rarely made it easy for the Kremlin. Belarus was an important transit country for Russian gas exports to Europe, and Lukashenko knew Putin was loath to see political instability along the border. For years, Putin had pushed for closer ties, economic and military, based on the 1999 union agreement, but Lukashenko balked. Though Belarus agreed in 2014 to join Russia’s version of the E.U., the Eurasian Economic Union, Lukashenko stalled Russian demands for a new air base in Belarus. He wavered on extending leases on two military facilities. ............... Watching the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Lukashenko seemed to decide that an overreliance on the Kremlin could lead Belarus to the same fate. He flirted with the European Union and the United States and began a limited political liberalization, marketing Belarus as a Slavic Switzerland — a neutral country where negotiations and peace talks, like the Minsk Accords for a cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, could be held. Most Belarusians agreed — they didn’t want to be part of the E.U., nor did they want to merge with Russia. The status quo was fine. ............... The first vacation she took, Diana and Tima went to Cyprus to sit by the sea. ........... In March 2020, when Covid hit, Lukashenko dismissed the virus as “psychosis” that could be treated with a shot of vodka, a tractor ride or a sauna visit. ........... Vasili, the coder, preferred Valery Tsepkalo, a former diplomat who started Hi-Tech Park in 2005, Belarus’s successful version of Silicon Valley. .......... After Lukashenko distanced himself from Russia in the wake of the Crimean annexation, Moscow had shown its ire. The Kremlin tried to increase the price Belarus paid for oil, while Belarus tried to raise gas transit taxes. Lukashenko repeatedly complained that the Kremlin was trying to bully Minsk into a union with Russia. As relations deteriorated, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became the highest-level U.S. official to visit Belarus in decades. When the presidential campaign began, Lukashenko openly accused Russian oligarchs and “higher” people of interference. He detained 33 mercenaries from a Kremlin-linked security contractor, the Wagner Group, whom he claimed had been dispatched to depose him. .................. By mid-July, all three candidates had been removed from the ballot — two were in jail, and one fled the country in anticipation of his own detention. The campaigns united under Sviatlana, who was running on three demands — release of political prisoners, curtailed powers for the president and free elections. Charismatic and earnest, she was adored for her image as a Decembrist’s wife — women who had given up their lives and followed their husbands to exile in Siberia. ........... Golos later tabulated that Sviatlana won at least 56 percent of the vote. ......... In seven years of relative liberalization, as Belarusians like Diana had come of age, they had forgotten what totalitarianism was capable of. ........ For three days, the wide boulevards and tidy parks of downtown Minsk were full of protesters, most of whom had ventured into the streets for the first time. They were met by riot police, tear gas and stun grenades so loud the residents could hear the echoes in their homes. The authorities cut off the internet — the only way to understand what was happening was to go outside. ...................... Nearly 7,000 protesters were arrested in four days. Hundreds were beaten and tortured. Lukashenko called protesters “drug addicts” and “prostitutes.” ........... an unprecedented level of brutality by the regime .......... Hundreds of thousands of citizens had joined weekly Sunday marches demanding a recount. ...... A Belarusian American from Florida visiting Minsk came to take a photograph. .............. During the postelection melee, Sviatlana had been detained and forced into exile in Lithuania. From Vilnius, she had started calling herself the “leader of democratic Belarus.” ........ A quasi-state had reconstituted itself around her as other political figures, NGO workers, campaigners and civic activists fled or were driven out of the country to Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania or Poland. Those who had not fled were arrested; there were no protest leaders left in Minsk. .................. Sviatlana and the opposition had taken pains to paint themselves as Russia and E.U. neutral. This had nothing to do with wanting to join the E.U. or NATO, they said — they just wanted free elections. ........... By October, three months after the election, 16,000 people had been detained. There were 101 political prisoners. .......... The following day, there was a minute of silence. It felt as if Minsk froze all at once. As soon as it was over, cars started beeping, and the city wailed in unison. Even more people thronged the Square with candles and flowers. “We won’t forget, we won’t forgive,” they chanted through tears. .......... The morning after the march, residents woke to a police patrol that would stay on the Square 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly five months. A pair of officers stood at each building, and three pairs walked the children’s playground. The mural had been painted and repainted so often no one could say exactly how many times, but they thought it was at least 18. Now it was gone again. ........... The cost of even small protests was rising. By April, there were more than 350 political prisoners. What was previously a five-to-15-day administrative detention was now indefinite pretrial detention with possible criminal charges that carried years of prison time. ............. They would all walk around the neighborhood for a while, taking different routes, arriving home at different times through different entrances. .......... On Friday at 7 a.m., plainclothes police officers arrived at her door. She held them off for an hour, stalling by calling the police on the police. .......... She erased the chat and her contacts. She unsubscribed from opposition Telegram channels. She came out of the bathroom with a clean phone............ “Any abrasions on your body?” “No.” “There will be.” “Are you pregnant?” “No.” “You will be!” .......... Diana turned around and saw a boy who couldn’t have been older than 18, shorter than her by a foot, poorly playing the role of intimidator. “Even your jokes are beneath you,” she retorted. ......... Diana was charged under Article 341, the desecration of structures and damage to property, punishable by up to three years in prison. She remained hopeful that the investigators were simply following protocol. She decided she would not be afraid. .......... The investigator had the option of letting Diana and Vasili out on bail, but he chose among the most punitive measures of restraint available. Vasili remained in pretrial detention and was taken directly to a prison about 35 miles northeast of Minsk. Diana, as a single mother, was put under house khimiya, similar to house arrest. She was prohibited from going outside except for travel to and from work. She couldn’t even take Tima to school. She was not allowed to use her phone or the internet until her and Vasili’s joint court date in August. ............

Throughout the country, repression had seeped in like gas, slowly tainting the air they breathed.

......... According to the Belarusian Association of Journalists, the authorities detained about 400 journalists on administrative charges between August 2020 and March 2021; at least 100 were given short jail terms. The authorities moved forward with laws that would make it illegal for journalists to “discredit” the state, thereby prohibiting any criticism of the regime. .......... On May 18, Tut.by’s offices were raided. The state detained 15 employees, including the editor in chief, the general director, journalists, project managers and accountants. Tut.by was charged with tax evasion and declared “extremist.” Belarus’s pre-eminent publication was destroyed. The outlet’s remaining journalists fled to Kyiv and started running a news website called Zerkalo, which means mirror. ........... The E.U. added a fourth round of sanctions and blocked most flights to and over Belarus. Lukashenko responded by prohibiting Belarusians from leaving the country altogether; only those who had permanent-resident status in other countries or a few official exemptions could cross. In June, Belarus’s premier human rights organization, Viasna, recognized Vasili as a political prisoner — he was one of 608 by the first anniversary of the stolen election. ............. PEN Belarus, whose president is the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich ......... Lukashenko signed a decree that those caught participating in extremist activities or causing grievous harm to the interest of the republic could be deprived of citizenship. ........ When they arrived in Ukraine, they jumped up and down like children. ...... “There are particles of freedom in the air!” they screamed. ........ Warsaw was big and gray and cold. Nothing was familiar. She had set up donation pages on different diaspora websites, but little help had arrived. She was eager to put Tima in school, find a permanent apartment and start looking for work. We attended a Belarusian solidarity protest, which were held weekly in downtown Warsaw. That Sunday it was damp and rainy. The crowd was small. Most people wore masks, concerned about their security even in Poland. We didn’t stay long. ................. Diana still lived inside the chat, spending hours talking and planning. ....... Waves of repression over three decades had already created a small, fragmented core of exiled Belarusians in opposition, mostly concentrated in Poland and Lithuania, funded by governments long suspicious of Russian ambitions. Then in 2020 they were joined by new arrivals fleeing the latest crackdown — Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Georgia had flexible residency or humanitarian-visa policies toward Belarusians. As more people fled, they called themselves not refugees or exiles but “relocants” — waiting to go home. ......... Unlike other exiles and refugees, the Belarusians I met over the course of three months in Vilnius, Warsaw and Kyiv had not set about constructing new lives. They kept their Belarusian SIM cards and paid their monthly bills back home. They had apartments in Belarus they hadn’t sold, cars they had parked somewhere. Their immediate family members remained, and so they worried about retaliation. Many had assumed they were leaving for only a month, just long enough for the situation to blow over. ................ When Sviatlana first arrived in Vilnius, a small army of volunteers joined her, living in a Hilton for months. As the leader of democratic Belarus, Sviatlana traveled constantly. She met Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Biden — advocating for the unfinished revolution and for stronger sanctions against the regime. “Until people are free, you simply cannot stop,” Sviatlana told me in Vilnius. ............. The new exiles formed various pseudo-state structures around her. There were advisers on the future Constitution and economic reform. A group of former security-service members set up ByPol, short for Belarus Police, working to encourage more defectors, investigate claims of police abuses and release their findings. Another group calling themselves the Belarusian Cyber-Partisans aimed to disrupt regime communications, cripple infrastructure and leak names and addresses of security-service members.

A collective of programmers coding pro bono found a way to send donations to Belarus in untraceable peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transfers.

................ Lukashenko recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea and signed a 28-point program that moved Belarus and Russia closer to the 1999 union state. Lukashenko and Putin approved a joint military doctrine but no further political integration. ........... Since the summer, the Lukashenko regime had assisted refugees in flooding the borders of Lithuania and Poland to force the E.U.’s hand on sanctions against his country. Poland, which accepted practically no Syrians in the 2015 refugee crisis but had opened its borders to white, Christian Belarusian protesters, was a billboard for the hypocrisy of the bloc. Lithuania had started constructing a razor-wire fence at the border with Belarus. In November, Polish border guards fired water cannons in freezing conditions at families with children. ........... “Remember you are coming to prison,” one journalist wrote to me from Minsk as I packed. ......... Minsk was austere, brutal and beautiful, as spotless as everyone had promised, but also empty and so cold that being outside burned my skin. .......... They would be watching, and once they made sure I was alone, they would message me the number of a parking spot. ............ There was also the probability that I would have a tail or a minder. Most people were too afraid to meet with a journalist. Others who had agreed to meet wanted to do so outside to check if I was being followed. ................ and into an apartment where a group was already waiting for me. ......... They thrummed with energy and thoughts they needed to put somewhere. They told me about their acquaintances who had been forced to resign from civil-service positions for having signed for Babariko’s candidacy. Neighbors were reporting on neighbors. Children were forced to pose with the green-and-red flag or recite Lukashenko’s biography. The group couldn’t gather in cafes or anywhere outside of apartments anymore. They knew they could be arrested at any time, yet they laughed so loudly and boldly at the kitchen table, as if the danger were an illusion. This duality was almost impossible to process. ................ “Germans captured a Russian, a Belarusian and an American. The American is told, OK, betray your people, where are they hiding? If not, then we will hang you. He’s like, I won’t, and they hang him. They come back in the morning to check if he’s dead, and he is. They call in the Russian. They say, tell us where your fellow partisans are. If not, then we will hang you. He refuses, so they hang him. They come back in the morning to check if he’s dead, and he is. Now, they ask the Belarusian, tell us where the partisans are. He says he won’t, so they hang him. They come back in the morning, and he’s still alive. They’re like how is this possible? He’s like, ‘Well at first it was bothering me over here’” — he gestured to his neck — “ ‘but then I got used to it.’” ............. a preplanned joint exercise called “Allied Resolve 2022.” .......

No one believed the war was coming.

.............. Sanctions risked hurting the average citizen; they had a mixed record of effecting political change. ........ In Warsaw, Diana had been working on a plan to open a house for newly arriving Belarusians — a community where people could get advice on residency, refugee status, health care and schools. The group she was working with, Courtyard Activists Abroad, pivoted to providing supplies for Ukrainian refugees. She attended protests at the Belarusian and Russian Embassies. She grappled with a sense of shame. All along they wondered if they could have done more to stop Lukashenko, to free their own people and by extension to stop this war. ........ We could have overturned the buses, even if they had 20 siloviki in them. We had thousands in our marches. But we didn’t try. Instead, we were peaceful. We walked with flowers.” ............ Though the regime had spent a year and a half decimating the ranks of the politically active, thousands of Belarusians still took to the streets. Across the country, more than 800 people were arrested. (In Russia, with a population roughly 15 times greater, 2,000 people were arrested that same day.) ...........

Westerners often looked at Belarus as if it were Europe’s own little North Korea.

Lukashenko himself mocked reporters who called him “the last dictator of Europe.” .......... regimes and freedoms vary, and repressions exist in shades ......... only 3 percent of Belarusians supported entering the war alongside the Russian military ........... It had been foolish to believe that the U.S.S.R. could collapse so peacefully, that its ghosts would not demand placation. Now they were all paying the price. .......... even more puzzling is the choice to remain. “I have no fear for myself; I have fear for my family,” Shamberbetch told me. “I want to send my relatives abroad. I want to stay here as long as possible, to fight. When I realize there’s nothing I can do here anymore, I’ll leave the country through the woods.”



A Russian negotiator’s positive language clashes with the hard-line rhetoric from Moscow. . The Kremlin’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, read a statement broadcast on state television that described Ukraine’s proposal on Tuesday to declare neutrality as a core concession to Russia ........ “Yesterday, the Ukrainian side for the first time outlined its readiness, in writing, to fulfill a number of important conditions for building normal and, I hope, good neighborly relations with Russia.” ........... Some Russian analysts and Western officials see the diplomacy as little more than a way to buy time while Russian troops regroup. Russia’s promise to wind down military operations around Kyiv, which the Russian Defense Ministry cast as a good-faith gesture of de-escalation, in reality appeared to be a way to explain away a battlefield defeat. ....... The aim of gathering forces near Kyiv was all along not to take the city, but to tie up and weaken Ukrainian troops in the area, the ministry claimed in a statement. “All these goals were achieved,” the ministry said, adding it would now focus on “the final stage of the operation to liberate” the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine. ........ senior Russian officials were unlikely to know what Mr. Putin was really planning, leading to this week’s mixed messages. ....... “The problem with the Russian regime is that, once again, no one understands what Putin wants,” Ms. Stanovaya said. “As a result, we get this informational chaos.” .

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