American truckers distance from Canada protests

The Canadian truck protests started over vaccine mandates. But the trucking industry in the U.S. is more concerned about things like where to park their rigs.


A trucker fuels up his truck at the Loves Truck stop on Nov. 5 in Springville, Utah. 

| George Frey/Getty Images

By TANYA SNYDER and ALEX DAUGHERTY

02/11/2022

The vehicle blockades that have snarled North American supply chains, paralyzed Canada’s capital and inspired threats of a copycat convoy to Washington, D.C., may have started with truck drivers irate about mask and vaccine mandates. But the grievances of the protests’ biggest champions bear little similarity to the demands that U.S. truck drivers’ union reps and trade groups typically bring to Washington.

Start with this fact: Truck drivers in the U.S. already don’t have to wear masks, and the vast majority are not required to be vaccinated against Covid, unless they plan to cross an international border.


Instead, the typical top gripes for trucking advocates with the Biden administration and Congress include Washington’s failure to help drivers find a safe place to park and sleep for the night.

In fact, the top U.S. trucking advocates have taken pains to disavow the trucker blockades, including one that has stalled traffic for days at a key trade chokepoint between Detroit and Windsor, Ont.




Protestors block traffic at the Ambassador Bridge, linking Windsor, Ontario and Detroit on Wednesday. | Nicole Osborne/The Canadian Press via AP

The U.S. Teamsters union issued a statement Thursday saying it “denounces” the blockade, adding: “Our members are some of the hardest workers in the country and are being prevented from doing their jobs.”

A leader of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, a coalition representing more than 150,000 independent truck drivers in the U.S., echoed that sentiment in an interview on Wednesday.

“I do not support any disturbance or destruction,” said Lewie Pugh, executive vice president of OOIDA and a long-time truck driver. While the group opposes the cross-border vaccine mandate that has inspired the Canadian protests, Pugh said the demonstrations are beginning to cost truckers the public’s support and goodwill.

And the industry’s biggest trade group, the American Trucking Associations, said Thursday that it “strongly opposes any protest activities that disrupt public safety and compromise the economic and national security of the United States.”

Six things to know about Canada’s trucker protest

Many of the nation’s approximately 3.5 million truck drivers are free to disagree, of course. But for all the talk on Facebook and elsewhere about truck convoy protests impeding the Super Bowl or other facets of life in the U.S., its supporters’ rhetoric for the most part doesn’t focus on issues specific to truckers. The largest of those groups, “The People’s Convoy,” exhorts citizens to join it to “bring back our freedoms, our civil liberties, and bring an end to all unconstitutional mandates.”

U.S. truckers have been largely free of such mandates — constitutional or not — since November, when Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test requirement for many private-sector employees would not affect truck drivers whose workplace is in “a cab driving by yourself.” The Supreme Court drove the final nail by staying the entire mandate last month.

The trucking group ATA, which fought against those mandates, is taking a victory lap during a virtual event on Friday, billed as “How ATA Stopped the Vaccine Mandate.”

Not that truckers still don’t have a long list of gripes about Washington. Pugh said they have long complained about costly and burdensome regulations. Meanwhile, they have had limited success pushing Congress to help expand the supply of overnight parking spots for truck drivers, a chronic burden for truckers’ quality of life. Advocates for large and small trucking companies have also been embroiled in an intra-industry dispute over a federal mandate requiring the use of electronic devices to keep track of how long truckers drive.

“Every administration promises you this and promises you that,” Pugh said, adding: “Parking is in a crisis in this industry. Truckers should at least be able to have a safe place to park and sleep at night. And once again they don’t get it.”

Pugh said he understands some truck drivers’ anger over the Canadian vaccine mandates, calling it just “the straw that broke the camel’s back” after years of governments ignoring their needs.

The industry also spends significant effort on issues related to the use of electronic logging devices to track driving hours and safety and environmental regulations, and currently has its hands full with supply chain snarls and not enough drivers to meet demand.

“Parking is in a crisis in this industry. Truckers should at least be able to have a safe place to park and sleep at night.”

Lewie Pugh, executive vice president of OOIDA

But if a trucker protest convoy does roll into Washington, it wouldn’t be a new phenomenon.

In May 2020, near the onset of the pandemic, dozens of truck drivers blasted their horns around the White House to object to low shipping rates, certain safety regulations and the threat of self-driving vehicles taking away some truckers’ jobs.

Seven years earlier, right-wing activists’ threats to jam the Beltway with as many a million big trucks fizzled, drawing about 30 participants and little noticeable effect on traffic.

Even Brian Brase, one of the leaders of the movement for a copycat convoy in the U.S., also organizes a yearly nonpolitical convoy to Washington to promote trucking, the website for which claims they oppose “protests, shutdowns, or strikes.” Those trucks park legally on the National Mall, and drivers have conferred with federal officials during past events.

Past videos of the annual trucking convoy include interviews with drivers seeking better rates, fewer regulations on driving times and more parking spaces for big rigs.

Mental health push in Congress sparks lobbying frenzy

Dozens of companies and groups have intensified their lobbying in recent months as congressional efforts have gained momentum.


Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and committee chair Sen. Ron Wyden arrive for a Senate Finance Committee hearing about youth mental health on Capitol Hill on Feb. 8. 

| Drew Angerer/Getty Images


By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and MEGAN WILSON
02/13/2022 

Democrats, fearing their health care agenda is trapped in limbo, are pivoting to an issue they think will resonate with millions of Americans: cracking down on insurers who routinely deny mental health and addiction claims.

Congress has attempted to solve the problem at least three times, with laws dating to the mid-90s, but a new federal report shows health insurers regularly violate laws, refusing to pay for mental health and substance abuse services or making patients jump through hoops to get care.

Now, the insurance industry and its allies, which have successfully staved off tougher enforcement, are lining up against the measures. The companies are talking with committee chairs and sending letters to key lawmakers to stop a pair of bills, including tougher enforcement such as stiff fines.

“When you have an access problem that is as complicated and multifaceted as mental health care, it would be wonderful if we could find a single silver bullet solution that would solve it,” said Kristine Grow, a spokesperson for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s main lobby group. “But that’s just not the reality.”

Mental health is a growing concern for state and federal lawmakers as the toll of Covid-19 becomes increasingly clear. With record levels of opioid overdoses reported, alongside spikes in eating disorders and mental health emergency room visits for children, a bipartisan group in the House and Senate is pushing to draft a comprehensive bill by this summer that includes tougher enforcement on insurers that flout mental health parity rules.

House and Senate committees will hold two hearings this week after holding several last week and hearing testimony from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), whose younger brother was schizophrenic and died in his early 50s after decades of treatment that ate up much of their father’s savings, said in an interview that putting some new teeth behind existing parity laws is a top priority.

“These big insurance companies try to find every way they can to ratchet down coverage,” he told POLITICO. “This is a very profitable industry and so many people feel like they’re not getting much for their money other than a lot of jazz at the other end of the phone.”

Insurers bristle at the accusations, telling Congress that they’ve tried to comply with a complex law and Congress shouldn’t slap fines on them.

“Congress should delay additional legislation related to [mental health parity] enforcement,” AHIP wrote in a letter to Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) in an October letter shared with POLITICO. The group argues that the Labor Department should first provide the industry with better examples of how they should document their compliance with the law before moving forward with ways to punish them.

“We’ve made a lot of good-faith efforts to comply,” Grow stressed in an interview. “It’s been a learning process for everyone.”

Dozens of companies and groups have intensified their lobbying in recent months as congressional efforts have gained momentum, according to a POLITICO analysis of lobbying disclosures.

Among the most active are health insurance companies and their corporate allies that are mobilizing against the new enforcement measures. In their telling, they’re being unfairly singled out when there’s plenty of blame to go around for the problem of unaffordable and inaccessible mental health care.


Mental health is, obviously, part of your overall health. If there are existing laws that require [parity], it seems to me that we have an enforcement issue.

Sen. John Cornyn

“They’re acting like it’s big bad insurers making tons of profits versus poor doctors going out of business,” complained James Gelfand, the executive vice president of public affairs at the ERISA Industry Committee — a group that represents the HR departments of large businesses and has joined with insurers against the proposed regulations. “The rank hypocrisy here is that doctors take no personal responsibility for their patients whatsoever. … They actively choose to participate in zero insurance networks. They go cash-only and tell the patient: ‘Good luck.’”

Other groups fighting alongside the insurers against the bills warn that they could enable mental health care providers to charge exorbitant rates for care and force insurers to pick up the tab, potentially raising premiums for everyone.

Mental health care providers, looking to counter the insurance industry’s claims, are also ramping up their lobbying and urging Congress on as they consider penalizing insurers.

“This is the big issue for us on the Hill,” Saul Levin, the CEO and medical director of the American Psychiatric Association, told POLITICO. “If you can’t provide care, what are we here for?”

There are two proposals moving on Capitol Hill that could be folded into a broader mental health package later this year, or tucked into a revamped version of Democrats’ social spending bill. One would give states resources to step up enforcement against insurers, and another would give the Labor Department the ability to impose monetary penalties on plans that don’t comply with parity laws. Despite congressional gridlock and a tight calendar leading into a midterm election, lawmakers hope the severity of the crisis pushes the policies through.

“There’s a lot of pent up anger and angst right now. So many people have lost loved ones,” said Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), who is leading the effort in the House. “How many more people have to die while [insurance companies] invest in stopping these reforms?”

Lawmakers say the need for legislative wins after a series of high-profile flops is also fueling the push on mental health.

“As soon as I realized that Joe Manchin had drawn a line in the sand [on Build Back Better] and was going no further, and even more so recently when he said, ‘It’s dead,’ I knew we needed to think about what are our next priorities,” said Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.). “And mental health is always a good one to focus on. That’s one of the areas I really believe we can get a lot of bipartisan support.”

Few issues stand a chance of winning 60 votes in the current Congressional climate, but previous mental health parity bills have won bipartisan support and Republicans have signaled an openness to stricter enforcement — particularly after the report the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services and the Treasury dropped in late January that some described as a wake-up call.

“Mental health is, obviously, part of your overall health,” said Cornyn, who Wyden has tapped to craft the “access to care” portion of the mental health package for the Senate Finance Committee. “If there are existing laws that require [parity], it seems to me that we have an enforcement issue.”

Under law, insurers aren’t supposed to charge higher copays, offer skimpier coverage or deny more claims for mental health and addiction care than they do for other medical or surgical services. Yet federal investigators found this often happens, and regulators don’t have many tools to swiftly hold insurers accountable. Some states have enacted their own stricter parity laws and enforcement schemes with varying degrees of success, yet violations are still common nationwide.

For example, according to the new report, health insurers “covered nutritional counseling for medical conditions like diabetes, but not for mental health conditions such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder.”

Insurers found in violation can be forced to reimburse patients for the services the companies should have covered. But lawmakers and advocates alike hope that the threat of fines can prevent the violations from occurring in the first place.

“This deterrent effect and ensuring people can get the care they need when they need it is really critical because, otherwise, it’s kind of a whack-a-mole situation where it becomes very difficult to police,” said David Lloyd, a senior policy adviser at the Kennedy Forum studying mental health coverage and parity.

GOP States Are Considering Laws That Penalize Banks for Fossil Fuel Divestment

An offshore oil rig is viewed from Refugio Beach State Park as a storm gathers along the horizon on December 26, 2021, in Goleta, California.

GEORGE ROSE / GETTY IMAGES

BY Chris McGreal,

 The Guardian

February 12, 2022
Covering Climate Now This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.

The influential rightwing lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is driving a surge in new state laws to block boycotts of the oil industry. The group’s strategy, which aims to protect large oil firms and other conservative-friendly industries, is modelled on legislation to punish divestment from Israel.

Since the beginning of the year, state legislatures in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Indiana have introduced a version of a law drafted by ALEC, called the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, to shield big oil from share selloffs and other measures intended to protest the fossil fuel industry’s role in the climate crisis. A dozen other states have publicly supported the intent of the legislation.

Texas has already begun compiling a list of companies to target for refusing to do business with the oil industry after the state passed a version of the law last year. Top of the list is the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock.

The push to blacklist firms that boycott the oil industry follows a meeting in December between politicians and ALEC, a corporate-funded organisation that writes legislation for Republican-controlled states to adopt and drive conservative causes.

At that meeting in San Diego, members of ALEC’s energy taskforce voted to promote the model legislation requiring banks and financial companies to sign a pledge to not boycott petroleum companies in order to obtain state contracts. The wording closely resembles that of laws drafted by ALEC and adopted in more than 30 states to block support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.

Similar laws are also being promoted to protect the gun industry from boycotts.

The legislation written by ALEC, which has a history of extreme denial of the climate crisis, claims that “American and European fossil energy producers … are among the most socially and environmentally responsible companies in the world”. It laments that “corporations are boycotting fossil energy companies by refusing to provide them with products or services”, and says that share selloffs by financial funds hurt investors.

“Banks are increasingly denying financing to creditworthy fossil energy companies solely for the purpose of decarbonizing their lending portfolios and marketing their environmental credentials,” the draft legislation says.

“This model bill proposes a strategy in which states use their collective economic purchasing power to counter the rise of politically motivated and discriminatory investing practices.”

The drive to pass the legislation follows the refusal of major financial firms to fund new oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. Banks and other financial institutions are also under pressure from environmental groups and customers to divest from fossil fuel companies. JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Goldman Sachs are among those firms to publicly commit to supporting the transition away from oil.

As with anti-BDS laws, any business with more than 10 employees would have to certify that it is not boycotting fossil fuel companies in order to do business with a state government. State funds, such as pensions, will usually be obliged to sell investments in corporations that refuse loans to the oil industry.

ALEC’s push comes after the Texas legislature passed a version of the law in June 2021.

That legislation was backed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an active member of ALEC that is funded in part by Koch Industries, which accused Wall Street firms of “colluding in a coordinated attack against Texas and our way of life” by denying capital to oil firms.

TPPF, which has several members also working inside ALEC and maintains close ties to Senator Ted Cruz and rightwing former Texas governor Rick Perry, then pushed for the law to be adopted by other states.

Jason Isaac, a former Texas state legislator who now heads TPPF’s initiative to defend the oil industry, sent a memo to participants in the ALEC meeting in San Diego in which he criticised “woke” banks and other financial institutions he accused of “colluding to deny lending and investment in fossil fuel companies”.

“The following model policy is based on anti-BDS legislation supported by ALEC regarding Israel and was recently passed in Texas to include discrimination against fossil fuels. Voting for this model policy, and encouraging more state legislatures to adopt it, will send a strong message that the states will fight back against woke capitalism,” the memo said, which was obtained by Alex Kotch of the Center for Media and Democracy.

In January, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick asked the state comptroller to put BlackRock, which manages an estimated $10tn worth of assets, at the top of its list of blacklisted companies because he said its pledge to work toward decarbonising the energy sector “will destroy the oil and gas industry and destabilize the economy worldwide”.

Patrick accused BlackRock chairman and CEO Larry Fink and his executives of making reassuring statements in private by saying the company “was committed to Texas and Texas’s vast energy footprint” but taking a different position in public by pledging to pressure energy firms to work toward net zero.

“Therefore, BlackRock is boycotting energy companies by basing investment decisions on whether a company pledges to meet BlackRock’s ‘net zero’ goals,” Patrick wrote.

BlackRock, which stands to lose about $20bn in Texas public sector pension funds, in fact remains a significant shareholder in oil and gas companies through index funds.

“BlackRock does not boycott energy companies,” it said in a statement to the Guardian. “We do not pursue divestment from oil and gas companies as a policy. We expect to continue to be invested in these companies and will work with them as they drive the energy transition to maximize long-term value for our clients. Our primary concern with the law is the potential negative consequences it could have on current and future Texas pensioners.”

The anti-BDS legislation has faced criticism and legal challenges. Several states were forced to amend anti-BDS laws to restrict them to larger companies after courts ruled that requiring individuals to sign pledges not to boycott Israel intruded on free speech rights. Kansas revised its law in 2018 after a Wichita teacher brought a federal lawsuit in response to being told to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel in order to keep her job. The city of Dickinson, Texas, dropped a similar requirement for residents applying for hurricane damage relief after an outcry.


Chris McGreal writes for Guardian US and is a former Guardian correspondent in Washington, Johannesburg and Jerusalem. He is the author of American Overdose, The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts.

Inflation Crisis Is Being Resolved on Backs of Workers. It Doesn’t Have to Be.

Workers at Jon Donaire desserts factory in Santa Fe Springs, California, picket in front of the company on January 10, 2022.

MYUNG J. CHUN / LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY James Dennis Hoff,

 Left Voice

PUBLISHED February 12, 2022

On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its latest report on inflation, and the news is not good for working people. According to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) — which measures the cost of consumer products — inflation for all goods, including food and energy, rose again in January, this time by 0.6 percent. This latest increase brings the yearly rate of inflation up to a whopping 7.5 percent, a figure not seen since the early 1980s when out-of-control inflation and a stagnant economy amounted to an all out economic war on U.S. workers. While wages for this same period have also gone up somewhat, rising between 4 and 4.4 percent, this is still far less than the current rate of inflation, and makes up for only a fraction of the value that workers’ wages have lost over the last several decades of neoliberal austerity.

Though unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention, these latest figures exceeded the expectations of most bourgeois analysts who have been claiming for months that the current rate of inflation is a transitory phenomenon caused in large part by the pandemic, increased oil prices, increased demand, and weakened and overstressed global supply chains. While these factors have certainly contributed to rising costs, they are by no means the end of the story. In fact, large corporations have unsurprisingly used the inflation crisis to jack up the prices of many basic goods, even those unaffected by supply chain disruptions, far beyond what is needed to cover increased production costs, making record profits off the backs of workers and consumers in the process.

As economist Matt Stoller explained in December, increased profit seeking of major firms in the meatpacking, auto, and retail industries, among many others, is leading to a generalized increase in prices across the economy and could account for as much as 3 percent of the current yearly inflation rate. And indeed, corporate profit margins, despite inflation and the ups and downs of the pandemic, have soared over the last year, to levels not seen since 1950, far exceeding what they were earning before the pandemic. From Exxon Mobil, to Tyson, AstraZeneca, Amazon, and Starbucks, corporations are making a killing even as working people across the world struggle to maintain the value of their already low wages. While bourgeois economists like Stoller believe this problem can be controlled through anti-monopoly legislation or taxes on excess profits, such rapacious profit seeking and increasing exploitation of working people is endemic to capitalist production and can’t be legislated away.

Despite this corporate windfall, however, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 1.5 percent, and other indexes declined sharply on news of the report, largely over fears of a quicker and more virulent response by the Federal Reserve to the crisis. It appears that a full point increase in interest rates could come as early as this March, and many analysts are predicting that the Fed may raise interest rates by as much as 1.75 percent by the end of the year. Interest rates are currently near zero. While on the surface, interest rate hikes may seem to be of little concern for most working people who have few, if any, investments, they are designed to “cool the economy” by simultaneously discouraging spending and encouraging savings, and this can have serious consequences for working people. As we [Left Voice] explained last month:

Higher interest rates have a real effect on workers. They make it more expensive to spend money, and reduce disposable income. For the most marginalized people in society, they can render basic needs less accessible. And historically, higher interest rates have also kept U.S. companies from expanding employment.

And of course, interest rate hikes have historically been used as a cudgel to punish working people and undercut the power of unions. In the 1980s, for instance, the Reagan administration and Federal Reserve chair Paul Volker oversaw a policy of increasing interest rates that led to the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs and an unemployment rate above 10 percent.

Furthermore, increasing interest rates will almost certainly lead to further austerity, as cities and states face increasing borrowing costs to maintain or fund new investments in education, infrastructure, public housing, and services for the poor or homeless, many of whom are still suffering from the negative economic and health effects of the pandemic.

The ongoing inflation crisis, the cost of which is being passed entirely onto the working class, is just another example of the failure of a system that prioritizes chaotic production in the service of profit over a planned economy built around human need. For the ruling class, there is no solution to the crisis that does not involve further pain for working people, but this does not mean there is nothing to fight for. Using the methods of class struggle, strikes, and mass demonstrations, we can unite the working class to demand a bigger share of the value we produce, to resist austerity, to fight for automatic wage and benefit increases, and to demand a freeze on the price of vital goods and necessities paid for by the profits of the corporations that oversee their production. It is only in such struggles that we can discover and build our true strength as a class, one capable of directly vying for power and control over the productive forces of society.

James Dennis Hoff is a political activist, teacher and writer who lives in New York City.

The Century-Old Renewable You’ve Never Heard Of

The ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) demonstration plant on Kume Island in Japan generates roughly 100 KW of electricity. A 10–MW plant could power the entire island. 

Photo credit: Okinawa Prefecture Industrial Policy Division / EOS

MARK BETANCOURT
02/12/22

This story by Mark Betancourt originally appeared in Eos and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Benjamin Martin came to the tiny Japanese island of Kumejima to work as an English teacher after graduating from a business school in landlocked Arizona. Now he runs a power plant fueled by ocean water. “I don’t have an engineering degree, and I do all the maintenance for our electricity,” he said.

 “It’s relatively easy.”

The plant, which looks like a cross between a lighthouse and a jungle gym, generates a negligible amount of power, only about 100 kilowatts (KW). It was built in 2013 to demonstrate a process called ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC. The idea behind OTEC isn’t new, and it’s deceptively simple. Like most power plants, the facility uses vaporized liquid to spin a turbine and generate electricity. The difference is that instead of burning fuel, the plant gets its energy from sun-warmed water from the ocean’s surface. Cold water pumped up from a depth of several hundred meters cools the vapor again, creating a heat engine.

For now, Kumejima depends mostly on diesel fuel, shipped in at a premium, to provide electricity for its 8,000 residents. But residents of the island hope to someday sever that dependency by building a 5-megawatt (MW) OTEC plant that, with a bit of solar, could cover all of its energy demand.

Such an endeavor would be expensive, and the plan is to help pay for it by sharing the cold-water intake pipe with the various cold-water industries already thriving on the island — from prawn farming to a deep-sea water spa, to greenhouses in which the water chills the soil so that it’s the optimum temperature for growing spinach. Cold seawater can even be used for air-conditioning.

“Our research center is cooled by deep-sea water, which reduces the amount of power we need for cooling by about 90 percent,” said Martin, who also serves as secretary general for the Ocean Thermal Energy Association, a group with members from around the globe who want to see OTEC deployed and expanded in the power sector.

On paper, they’re right to be optimistic. The theoretical potential of OTEC is vast. It could produce at least 2,000 gigawatts (GW) globally, rivaling the combined capacity of all the world’s coal power plants on their best day. And unlike many renewables, OTEC is a baseload source, which means it can run 24/7 with no fluctuation in output.

But the conditions necessary to make the process viable — at least a 20-degree Celsius difference between surface and deep water — occur only near the equator, far from most of the world’s power demand and much of its wealth.

That’s why, despite its simplicity and decades of small, successful demonstrations, OTEC has yet to take hold in the renewable power industry. Its high initial capital costs have kept investors away, especially as other renewables like solar and wind get cheaper by the minute.

But places like Kumejima and dozens of small island states, many of them among the poorest countries in the world, could benefit enormously from ocean thermal power. If they can raise the money to get started, energy independence and carbon neutrality may be literally at their doorstep.

“The island hopes to be 100 percent carbon-free by 2040,” Martin said of Kumejima. “But we need OTEC to get there.”

More of a Warmth Engine

The universe runs on contrasts and the forces of entropy. Thermal power, for instance, isn’t generated by heat but by its ability to do work as it cools. Even a modest amount of heat can do the job, as long as there’s a temperature gradient to be exploited.

Most OTEC systems use liquid ammonia, which has a very low boiling point, as what’s called the “working fluid.” Warm water from the ocean surface flows into a heat exchanger, where it causes the ammonia to evaporate. (Other “open” systems use the seawater itself as the working fluid, first exposing it to a vacuum to lower its boiling point.) As the vapor expands, it flows around the blades of a turbine. The vapor then enters another heat exchanger, where cold water pumped up from the deep ocean causes it to condense again. The pressure differential between the two chambers on either side of the turbine pulls vapor from one to the other, spinning the turbine and generating electricity. Some of that electricity is used to run the pumps. What’s left can feed the grid.

At first glance, it looks like a painfully inefficient process; only about 2 to 3 percent of the energy in the seawater is converted to electricity. But the fuel is free and virtually infinite. Output is limited only by how much water you can pump at a time.

“OTEC can be cost-competitive, it’s just no one’s done it yet.” — Benjamin Martin

And there’s the rub. For OTEC to be viable — that is, for it to be competitive with other renewables like wind and solar — the plants need to be huge. To get anywhere near wind’s or solar’s average cost of 0.02–0.06 cents per kilowatt-hour (KWh), an OTEC plant would have to keep the equivalent of four Niagara Falls flowing through its heat exchangers at all times.

A 100–MW OTEC plant (the equivalent of about 500 acres, or 202 hectares, of solar panels) would need a cold-water intake pipe that’s 7–10 meters in diameter to work efficiently. Just to scale up to a modest 1–MW plant, Kumejima expects to spend between $60 million and $80 million on a 1.5–meter pipe.

So far, funding for that kind of leap of faith has proven to be elusive. “OTEC can be cost-competitive,” Martin said. “It’s just no one’s done it yet.”
The Curse of the First

The concept of using warm and cold ocean water to generate electricity is about as old as the generation of electricity itself. French scientist Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval theorized the process in 1881, just as the notion of using a steam engine to rotate coils of copper wire around a magnet was emerging as a source of commercial and industrial power. His student, Georges Claude, a rebellious and hardheaded entrepreneur who got rich selling neon lights, built the first OTEC plant in Cuba in 1930. At first cockily optimistic, he eventually admitted that running it cost about four times more power than it generated.

And Claude had a lot of trouble with the cold-water pipe. He sank a handful of failures in Matanzas Bay, losing $1 million with each attempt. The one that finally worked was destroyed by a hurricane.

The moral of Claude’s story is that when it comes to big, novel machines, failure is expensive. And before Claude had even begun his less-than-convincing demonstration, coal had become ubiquitous as the fuel for large-scale power plants. Unlike two-temperature seawater, coal (and, later, oil and natural gas) was perniciously easy to ship anywhere in the world.

A “closed” OTEC cycle uses warm seawater to evaporate ammonia and cold seawater to condense it again. The vapor moving from higher to lower pressure spins a turbine, generating electricity. Photo credit: Makai Ocean Engineering Inc. / Okinawa Prefecture Industrial Policy Division / EOS

Predictably, global interest in OTEC has followed oil prices. After the crises of the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter signed a bill calling for 10,000 MW of OTEC capacity to be up and running by 1999. Then oil prices stabilized, administrations changed, and other than a few demonstration projects, nothing happened.

OTEC projects began to crop up again after the 2008 financial crisis, coupled with growing concern over climate change. Makai Ocean Engineering, based in Hawaii, was the first to connect an OTEC plant to the US power grid. But like Kumejima’s facility, it was a temporary demonstration, generating only enough electricity to run about 120 homes. The cold-water pipe is still operating, though, allowing a local fishery to grow and sell Maine lobsters.

Plans for a score of small-scale OTEC projects have been announced, including in Bora Bora — where one resort is already using deep-sea water for air-conditioning — China, Martinique, and Puerto Rico. But this time, the meteoric rise of wind and solar power has simply overtaken marginal renewables like OTEC.

The main advantage of wind and solar is their modularity. The technology can be proven at full scale with a single turbine or panel; scaling up is a matter of simply manufacturing more of them. OTEC, on the other hand, requires a huge investment — and the risk that goes with it — before even the first kilowatt is generated.

“The big risk, the big unknown, the big killer for OTEC … is the cold-water pipe.” — George Hagerman, Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography

The potential pitfalls of installing a true commercial OTEC plant can come from unexpected quarters. The Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering plans to install a 1–MW, shore-based plant on Tarawa atoll in Kiribati, smack in the middle of the Pacific. The plant components were successfully tested on a barge off the Korean coast in 2019, generating the largest OTEC current to date — about 338 KW — even in suboptimal conditions. But the project stalled when the COVID-19 pandemic drove up the cost of shipping the components to Kiribati.

George Hagerman, a senior project scientist at Old Dominion University’s Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography, questions whether OTEC itself is quite ready for its moment. The main reason hasn’t changed for nearly a hundred years.

“The big risk, the big unknown, the big killer for OTEC — and it’s what actually destroyed Georges Claude’s plant in Cuba — is the cold-water pipe,” said Hagerman.
The Kilometer-Long Thorn in OTEC’s Side

Most OTEC enthusiasts agree that large, shore-based plants would be too expensive, mostly because the cold-water pipe would have to be too long. Go down about a kilometer pretty much anywhere in the world, and you’ll feel an icy 4 degrees Celsius, but running the pipe from shore adds to that distance and exposes a fixed pipe to the battering of waves and currents.

To keep the pipe shorter and avoid this exposure, the plant could instead be mounted on a barge or platform and parked where a flexible pipe could be suspended straight down to cold water. Power could be run ashore via the same kind of cable currently being used by offshore wind facilities.

There’s still the problem of making the pipe wide enough to efficiently draw massive amounts of water. OTEC believers say that’s mostly a matter of tweaking the designs and materials currently being applied in other industries that move large volumes of water.

But Hagerman, who’s been researching and developing ocean energy technology for 40 years, knows it’s not that easy. Even designs that seem straightforward can run into unexpected and expensive challenges, especially in the chaotic environment of the sea. “When people actually have to build stuff that’s got to survive in the ocean and be insured, costs double. Insurance premiums triple,” he said. “And all of a sudden, what looked good when you announced it, you can’t actually get finance to build.”

The optimal surface-depth temperature differential for OTEC power generation is concentrated in the tropics, especially in the Western Pacific, where most of the ocean falls within the exclusive economic zones of small island nations.

 Photo credit: DOE /NREL / ALLIANCE / EOS

Hagerman thinks it would be better to forgo the suspended intake pipe entirely, replacing it with a tunnel beneath the ocean floor. A tunnel would be easier to design as wide as necessary to make OTEC cost-efficient and could bring cold water ashore to a fixed plant (where it could also feed cost-sharing ventures like aquaculture and air-conditioning) or to a movable barge that could detach from the tunnel and move out to sea in the event of a storm.

“Elon Musk is doing tunnel boring all over the place right now,” said Hagerman, who suggested that OTEC is the perfect project for a climate-conscious billionaire. “You would have basically a permanent cold-water intake conduit on an island or a coastline, and it would be there for the life of the planet.”

According to Hermann Kugeler, Makai’s business development manager, the cold-water pipe is an inherently expensive part of the OTEC system. “We’ve done what we can, but that’s kind of the one cost [for which] we don’t see much more reduction,” he said.

Instead, Makai’s recent focus has been on building cheaper heat exchangers that won’t rust. The relative acidity of deep-sea water is hard on aluminum, which composes most off-the-shelf components, so the second heat exchanger must be made of expensive titanium. Kugeler said that his team has been working out a design that uses much thinner plates to separate the seawater and working fluid and therefore requires less titanium to build. It’s also significantly smaller and lighter, which lowers the cost of mounting it on a platform.

Although a 100–MW plant may still be only theoretically possible, “a commercial scale of 10 MW is probably commercially feasible today using this technology,” said Kugeler.
A Niche Market

That may be enough to sneak OTEC into the commercial space. Dan Grech, the young and exuberant CEO of a UK-based startup called Global OTEC, challenges the idea that an ocean thermal plant has to be enormous to be viable. Instead of making plants bigger, he wants to keep them relatively small and rightsize the market; namely, scattered island nations that don’t need much power but need to spread it over a vast area.

“Our plan is to standardize as much of the OTEC platform as possible so it can be mass-produced for the widest deployment possible,” Grech wrote in an email. He’s worked out that a few dozen small island nations have a combined installed capacity of about 12,000 MW — barely 1 percent of the installed capacity of the United States alone — and most of it is generated by fossil fuels.

“Annually, we spend more than $20 billion a year on oil imports,” said Albert Binger, secretary general of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Sustainable Energy and Climate Resilience Organization (SIDS DOCK), a climate- and energy-focused coalition of 32 developing small island states. More than $6 billion of that collective oil is burned for energy. It’s an expense they can little afford. Binger added that many small island nations still haven’t recovered from the debt they incurred during the oil crisis that began in 1979. That’s partly because oil costs more for tiny, remote places; suppliers see modest orders with astronomical shipping costs and raise prices.

And the volatility of oil prices stunts small island nation economies, Binger said, because businesses can’t rely on consistently affordable electricity to produce their goods. “If we [SIDS] had taken a lot of that money and put [it into] OTEC system[s] previously, we would be in a completely different situation,” said Binger. “We need an energy source that is secure, reliable and has a pretty good price.”

Many of the archipelagos that make up island nations are the exposed peaks of submerged mountain ranges of extinct volcanoes called seamounts. Their shorelines are more like cliffsides, and kilometer-deep water can be found within a few kilometers of shore. This bathymetry makes them ripe for OTEC.

“We have more ocean than the EU [European Union] has land,” said Binger of small island nations; in fact, it’s about 16 times more. So by definition, there’s very little building space for land-based renewables. Most of the V-shaped atoll that comprises Kiribati’s capital, for example, is less than a kilometer wide. “Every megawatt of solar that we put up means about 2 acres of land taken out of something or not available for something,” said Binger.

In 2021, SIDS DOCK signed an agreement with Global OTEC to develop ocean thermal power, starting with a small 1.5–MW barge in São Tomé and Príncipe, off the central African coast. The plan is to use that first barge to prove the model, then scale up to a larger one or more barges over the following few years. Like Kiribati, many islands are also considering shore-based plants —the associated secondary cold-water industries like those on Kumejima could bring much-needed jobs. Open OTEC systems, which desalinate seawater as it’s vaporized, could also yield fresh water on islands where it’s becoming increasingly scarce.

And despite their limited resources, all of the SIDS DOCK countries are signatories to the Paris Agreement. That’s ironic given that many of them are net carbon sinks; their ocean water and tropical biomass absorb more carbon dioxide than their human population emits. But, Binger said, island countries are at the forefront of converting to renewable energy out of self-preservation—some could be swallowed entirely by the rising sea if climate change isn’t slowed.

“If you can’t speak up for yourself when you’re vulnerable, you can’t blame anybody else,” he said.

“A Tipping Point”

Researchers at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UH Mānoa) have been working out the environmental impacts of OTEC should it ever gain a real foothold in the market. One OTEC plant, they found, would have a negligible effect on the physical environment in the ocean around it. But what about thousands of plants all over the world?

On a massive global scale with high plant density, OTEC systems would mix up enough seawater to nullify the thermal gradient that makes the process work. “The core idea is that OTEC is self-limiting,” Gérard Nihous, who recently retired from the University of Hawai‘i, wrote in an email, “and could have, at sufficient scale, unintended and unwelcome consequences.”

The innovation valley of death, or a Catch-22: Investment would almost certainly follow a successful OTEC plant that generates commercial-scale power. But that can’t happen without…investment.

The ocean is vast, however, and there’s room for quite a few OTEC plants. In a 2018 paper, Nihous and two other colleagues from the University of Hawai‘i wrote that as many as 15,000 plants, spaced 30 km apart and within 100 km of land, would avoid any large-scale disruptions (even if they were all plopped down in the ocean at once, which they wouldn’t be). These plants would generate more than 2 terawatts (TW) of electricity, making OTEC a viable way, with other renewables, to help power the world.

Of course, all of that is theoretical. Like Kumejima and every other place looking to take advantage of ocean thermal energy, SIDS DOCK and Global OTEC are still searching for funding to even begin their modest projects. It’s a frustrating Catch-22: Investment would almost certainly follow a successful OTEC plant that generates commercial-scale power, say, 10 MW. A recent report by Ocean Energy Systems, part of the International Energy Agency, suggests that even 2.5 MW would be enough to quell investors’ fears about the cold-water pipe.

But that can’t happen without investment. Entrepreneurs call it the “innovation valley of death.”

There’s a chance OTEC’s ticket out of the valley could be as a complement to its rivals, wind and solar. “As the grid penetration of those increases, there’s going to be a pretty significant need for energy storage or something to provide baseload power, which OTEC does,” said Kugeler. If the cost of storage is factored in, he said, OTEC’s price per kilowatt hour looks competitive.

But it remains to be seen how much global capital will be spared for a technology that not everyone in the world can use.

Tim Ramsey, program manager for marine energy at the Water Power Technologies Office with the US Department of Energy, said that OTEC’s potential may not be realized until it’s free from geographical constraints. That prospect isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem.

“There will just potentially be a tipping point where all of a sudden the economics makes sense and it just blows up and you see it everywhere.”

The same electricity storage technologies being developed to stabilize intermittent renewables like wind and solar could light a fire under OTEC, too. Picture ships shuttling massive charged batteries from remote ocean plants to the mainland; or self-propelled plants (grazing barges) that could hunt out the best temperature gradients and use OTEC power to produce hydrogen fuel, then ship it around the world. That would open up a whole new lane within the energy market, to the benefit especially of developing nations that control the lion’s share of the warm ocean.

Ramsey said that’s part of why OTEC is still on DOE’s radar. “It’s one of those things that there will just potentially be a tipping point where all of a sudden the economics makes sense and it just blows up and you see it everywhere,” he said.

That may be of little comfort to the millions of islanders currently living under the thumb of expensive and destructive diesel power. All the clean energy they need stretches out in every direction, as far as the eye can see. But without investors who are willing to take the plunge, it’s out of reach.

Having watched how seawater has sustained his little island community on Kumejima, Martin feels certain OTEC’s day is coming; people just need to understand it. That’s easy if they can see it work. When local schoolchildren come to tour the 100–KW test plant, he invites them to touch the two intake pipes that snake up from the ocean.

“You feel the cold, you feel the hot,” he said. “It’s simple.”

Opinion | How the West Gets Ukraine Wrong — and Helps Putin As a Result

The extraordinary history and culture of the largest country within Europe needs to be taken more seriously in the Kremlin and everywhere else, too.


Pro-Ukraine activists demonstrate in front of the White House last Sunday.

 | Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Opinion by RORY FINNIN
02/12/2022 
Rory Finnin, associate professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity.

It was just a casual, throwaway description. Last September, the New York Times reported on a series of daring operations by Ukrainian special forces to evacuate civilians from Afghanistan. U.S. troops had left Kabul, and the Taliban had taken complete control. “Enter Ukraine,” the article read, “a small but battle-hardened nation.”

Even today, as Russian troops amass along Ukraine’s borders and threaten a dramatic escalation of their undeclared 8-year war, most Americans would pass over that word: small.

This is a big problem. Ukraine is the largest country by territory within the European continent. Its population is roughly the size of Spain’s. Take even a cursory look at any map — Ukraine is anything but small.

But in the West, our mental maps too often assume otherwise. Ukraine, some argue, is a blip on the radar — it pops up on screens and in newsfeeds roughly once every decade, with the fate of Europe hanging in the balance somewhere over the Dnipro river. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Orange Revolution in 2004. The annexation of Crimea in 2014. And now Russian President Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical hostage-taking in 2021-22, eliciting anxiety of a new World War in the making.

To contest the Kremlin’s cascading aggression, start by revising your mental map. Ukraine is a large country of persistent strategic and intellectual significance, and not only because of its diverse human capital, abundant economic potential or pivotal position between Russia and the European Union. Beyond the questions of what they have and where they are, Ukrainians are important for what they do and what they have done.

The truth is that Ukraine’s political and cultural agency has helped shape and reshape the map of Europe for generations. Indeed, Ukrainians have played an active part in the demise of not one, or two, or three, but four different empires, including Austria-Hungary and the Soviet Union.

This role has not been incidental. It has been hard won, driven by a modern national identity primarily based not on ethnic or religious affiliation, but on an idea: universal democratic freedom.

This idea may strike some as saccharine or strange. After all, the image of Ukraine in the West is often one of rapacious oligarchs and corrupt, feuding politicians — and not without good reason. But look beyond Ukraine’s recent history of government and elite intrigue, and you will see a vibrant, grassroots civil society that embodies the egalitarian agenda of Ukrainian civic nationalism. Especially since 2014, after hundreds of thousands of protesters fought against corruption and bled for freedom and rule of law in what has become known in Ukraine as the Revolution of Dignity, Ukrainian civil society has succeeded in compelling the Ukrainian state to do better.

Putin, meanwhile, has gone to extraordinary lengths to allege that there is no such thing as a freestanding Ukrainian national identity. We need to be wise to the con. One of the many fronts of Russia’s war against Ukraine is informational. Time and again Putin has actively sought to push a narrative about Ukraine and Ukrainians as deeply, historically, spiritually embedded in the so-called Russian world. “Russians and Ukrainians,” he insisted last July, are “one people, a single whole.”

Putin’s assertion vividly illustrates a longstanding practice of refusing to frame Ukrainians as the subjects of their own story, of denying them a distinct historical trajectory and cultural agency of their own. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, of all people, understood this practice. “To ignore the importance of the national question in Ukraine,” he wrote, “means committing a profound and dangerous error.” Lenin spoke of this mistake as a common Russian “sin.”

So what do we see when we take modern Ukrainian nationhood seriously, on its own terms? We see a social and cultural movement with an anticolonial backbone and a suspicion of state institutions led by strongmen. We discover that, in the realm of political values, Ukraine is not Russia’s cousin. It’s Russia’s competitor.

Until the 17th century, nearly all the territory of today’s Ukraine was located within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — that is, in a Polish “sphere of influence.” Prior to this point, for well over three centuries, the peoples we now call Ukrainians and Russians had traveled in different political orbits altogether.

These orbits intersected in the Treaty of Pereiaslav of 1654 — an event that looms large in the Russian version of Ukrainian history. At this time, Ukraine was a name for the land controlled by the Cossack Hetmanate, an autonomous polity carved from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after a bloody Cossack rebellion against Kraków. The Ukrainian Cossacks and the Russian tsar made a pact in Pereiaslav that marked the start of an uneasy relationship. It was a transaction between parties who needed language interpreters and referred to each other with terms like “foreigner.” Today, however, the Kremlin presents the Treaty of Pereiaslav as a “reunion” (vossoedinenie), a term that conceals the reality of Russian imperial expansion.

A half century later, Tsar Peter I refused to honor what the Cossacks understood as terms of mutual defense in their alliance, prompting the Cossack leader or “hetman” Ivan Mazepa to turn his forces against Russian power. Years before, Mazepa had written a prescient poetic lament about “mother Ukraine” in tension with an untrustworthy Moscow. Mazepa’s dramatic defeat at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 inspired new lamentations. Peter’s soldiers leveled the capital of the Hetmanate, but Ukrainian Cossack political autonomy still persisted in fits and starts throughout most of the 18th century. Rich, colorful European maps at the time show “Ukraine, Land of the Cossacks” holding on to borders similar to those we know today. In 1775, however, Russian Empress Catherine II, seeking to subsume neighboring peoples into an ever-larger Russian Empire, razed the remaining Ukrainian Cossack strongholds and ushered in the institution of serfdom in their place. Note the historical arc: slow-burning imperial conquest, not eternal confederation.

As it was being absorbed into Russian imperial space in the 18th and 19th centuries, Ukraine was often referred to as “Little Russia,” a term that may go some way to explain lingering impressions of Ukraine as somehow “small” today. But the origins of the name, coined by the Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople around the turn of the 14th century, when Muscovy was little more than a fledgling principality to the north, likely have less to do with size than with distance. “Rus” was the historical name for both the people and the wide expanse of territory centered in what is today Ukraine and Belarus. For the patriarch in Constantinople, “Little Russia” — or better translated, “Rus Minor” — had a meaning of the Rus close by. It was juxtaposed to “Great Russia” — or better, “Rus Major” — which connoted the Rus farther away, on the periphery. Think of Asia Minor and Asia Major, or even terms like “Greater New York.”

As geopolitical fortunes changed over time, so too did the understanding of these terms. By 1762 Ukrainian writers like Semen Divovych had come to read “little” and “great” as reflections of political power. But Divovych and his compatriots still had no patience for lazy conflations of Ukrainians and Russians as “one people.” Speaking in the voice of “Little Russia” to “Great Russia,” Divovych wrote, “Do not think that you rule over me… You the Great, and I the Little, live in neighboring countries.”

Ukraine depicted as "Ukraine, Land of the Cossacks" in a 1720 map by Johann Homann 

| Wikimedia Commons

Ukrainians like Divovych frequently made clear their differences with Russians, but it took a trail-blazing poet in the mid-19th century to invest these differences with a clear ethical and political significance. This poet was Taras Shevchenko, and his passion for freedom, disgust for tyrants and distrust of structures of political authority became the primary source code of modern Ukrainian nationhood. Without him, today’s Ukraine would not exist.

Shevchenko made sense of the history of Ukrainians by centering their identity on one key value above all others: freedom, volia. All grassroots national movements pursue freedom for their people, but Shevchenko, a former serf with intimate personal knowledge of slavery and bondage cutting across ethnic and religious lines, privileged the idea of universal democratic freedom itself. He sought freedom for all oppressed peoples, especially the Muslim communities in the Caucasus warding off the Russian forces that surrounded them in their day. His anticolonial watchwords “Boritesia, poborete” — “Fight, you will prevail” — echoed on the streets of Kyiv during the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14. They resonate throughout the country now.

For Shevchenko, the idea of “mother Ukraine” was an antipode to aristocracy to the west and autocracy to the east. In his poetry he framed Ukrainian identity not primarily as a matter of ethnicity, religion or political allegiance — he had love neither for hetmans nor for tsars — but as a question of cultural authenticity and ethical behavior in the face of twin systems of serfdom and colonialism, which turned human beings into either chattel or canon fodder. “When will Ukraine have its own [George] Washington,” Shevchenko asked, “with a new and righteous law?”

Shevchenko wrote his nation-consolidating poetry in the Ukrainian vernacular, but he also used Russian in his prose. He did not see language politics as a zero-sum game. “Let the Russians write as they like, and let us write as we like,” he declared. “They are a people with a language, and so are we.”

In his verse, Shevchenko privileged Ukrainian, but in his life he practiced what remains today a prominent Ukrainian bilingualism, in which both the Ukrainian and Russian languages can circulate in everyday life. Americans often misread this easy multilingualism, mistaking Ukraine’s linguistic diversity for linguistic adversity — as “Ukrainian speakers” vs. “Russian speakers.” In fact, most Ukrainians can qualify as both, depending on the context, and language use is no clear indicator of political sentiment in Ukraine today in any case. In fact, according to former President Petro Poroshenko, Russian speakers comprise the majority of the thousands of Ukrainian military personnel killed in the ongoing undeclared war with Russia.

Shevchenko’s liberationist message went viral in the Russian Empire. It also resonated with groups of ethnic Russians, Poles, Jews and Crimean Tatars alike, powering a civic nationalist movement that took advantage of the political opening of 1917 to announce the birth of a country: the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The founding declaration was addressed to the people in four languages — Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.

Lenin’s Bolsheviks defeated the Ukrainian People’s Republic a few years later, but only after conceding that Ukraine was a nation deserving of a form of statehood, a concession that helped make Soviet victory possible along the non-Russian peripheries of the tsar’s former empire. After all, the Soviet Union was formally a union of national republics, and the Ukrainians were a central reason why.

The Soviet Union is now long gone. Today, in corridors of the Kremlin heavy with grievance, Russian chauvinism vis-à-vis Ukraine remains strong. Since 2014 it has led to the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian citizens and to the displacement of hundreds of thousands more.

Now it is making hostages of well over 40 million people. In menacing Ukraine’s borders, Putin is not only betting that the West doesn’t care about Ukraine. He is also betting that the West doesn’t know or even see Ukraine. Our ignorance feeds his aggression.

When we work to study Ukraine on its own terms, when we see Ukraine for what it is — a massive, pivotal, unique country whose people are once again at a front line of democratic freedom — we begin to prove him wrong.

3 decades of turmoil bring Ukraine to perhaps its greatest crisis

By Becky Sullivan
Published February 12, 2022

Genya Savilov
AFP Via Getty Images

Demonstrators wave Ukraine national flags as they gather in central Kyiv on Oct. 6, 2019, to protest broader autonomy for separatist territories, part of a plan to end a war with Russian-backed fighters. Protesters chanted "No to surrender!", with some holding placards critical of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the crowd, which police said had swelled to around 10,000 people.

BLACK AND RED FLAGS ARE OF THE SVOBODA PARTY UKRAINIAN FASCISTS

Ukraine sits surrounded by more than 100,000 Russian troops on its borders, with world leaders flying in and out of Kyiv hoping to reach a solution to the crisis that averts a looming Russian invasion.

The situation is the most high-stakes embodiment of the country's 30-year history of being caught between East and West, wavering between the influences of Moscow and the U.S. with its European allies.

Through scandal, conflict and two major protest movements, Ukraine has emerged with its democracy intact, at times choosing pro-Western leaders and other times choosing those aligned with the Kremlin.

Now, it faces its biggest test as Russia has closed in. Since the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, Ukrainians have turned away from Moscow and toward the West, with popular support on the rise for joining Western alliances like NATO and the European Union.

Read on to understand how Ukraine came to where it is today.

Janek Skarzynski / AFP Via Getty Images
Riot policemen confront radical anti-Communist students on Jan. 27, 1990, in Warsaw in front of Polish United Workers Party (POUP-Communist) headquarters as some 300 youths, mainly activists of the Independent Student Association (NZS) clash with police asking for democracy.


The 1990s: Independence from the Soviet Union

1989 and 1990

Anti-communist protests sweep central and Eastern Europe, starting in Poland and spreading throughout the Soviet bloc. In Ukraine, January 1990 sees more than 400,000 people joining hands in a human chain stretching some 400 miles from the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk to Kyiv in the northern-central part of the country — many waving the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag that had been banned under Soviet rule.

Efrem Lucatsky / AP
Representatives of the Ukrainian Catholic Church protest the visit of Russian Orthodox church Patriarch Alexi II to Kyiv on Oct. 29, 1990.

July 16, 1990

The Rada, the new Ukrainian parliament formed out of the previous Soviet legislature, votes to declare independence from the Soviet Union. Authorities recall Ukrainian soldiers from other parts of the USSR and vote to shut down the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine.

1991

Following a failed coup in Moscow, the Ukrainian parliament declares independence a second time on Aug. 24. The date is celebrated as Ukraine's official Independence Day. The Soviet Union officially dissolves on Dec. 26.

Anatoly Sapronenko / AFP Via Getty Images
Ukrainians demonstrate in front of the Communist Party's central committee headquarters in Kyiv on Aug. 25, 1991, after the Soviet republic declared its independence.

1992

As NATO allies contemplate adding central and Eastern European members for the first time, Ukraine formally establishes relations with the alliance although it does not join. NATO's secretary general visits Kyiv, and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk visits NATO headquarters in Brussels.

December 1994

After the Soviet Union's collapse, Ukraine is left with the world's third-largest nuclear stockpile. In a treaty called the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine agrees to trade away its intercontinental ballistic missiles, warheads and other nuclear infrastructure in exchange for guarantees that the three treaty signatories — the U.S., the U.K. and Russia — would "respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine."

Sergei Supinsky / AFP Via Getty Images
President Bill Clinton (from left), Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk join hands On Jan. 14, 1994, after signing a nuclear disarmament agreement in the Kremlin. Under the agreement Ukraine, the world's third-largest nuclear power, said it would turn all of its strategic nuclear arms over to Russia for destruction.

1994 to 2004

In 10 years as president, Leonid Kuchma helps transition Ukraine from a Soviet republic to a capitalist society, privatizing businesses and working to improve international economic opportunities. But in 2000 his presidency is rocked by scandal over audio recordings that reveal he ordered the death of a journalist. He remains in power four more years.

The 2000s: Wavering between the West and Russia

2004

The presidential election pits Kuchma's incumbent party — led by his hand-picked successor Viktor Yanukovych and supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin — against a popular, pro-democracy opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko.

In the final months of the campaign, Yushchenko falls mysteriously ill, is disfigured and is confirmed by doctors to have been poisoned.

Yanukovych wins the election amid accusations of rigging. Massive protests follow, and public outcry becomes known as the Orange Revolution. After a third vote, Yushchenko prevails.

Maxim Marmur / AFP Via Getty Images
Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-Western hero of the "orange revolution," became the third president of an independent Ukraine.

January 2005

Yushchenko takes office as president, with Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister.

2008

Following efforts by Yushchenko and Tymoshenko to bring Ukraine into NATO, the two formally request in January that Ukraine be granted a "membership action plan," the first step in the process of joining the alliance.

President George W. Bush supports Ukraine's membership, but France and Germany oppose it after Russia voices displeasure.

In April, NATO responds with a compromise: It promises that Ukraine will one day be a member of the alliance, but does not put it on a specific path for how to do so.

Yuri Kadobnov / AFP Via Getty Images
A Russian Gazprom employee works at the central control room of the Gazprom headquarters in Moscow on January 14, 2009. The ministers were in Russia to discuss the situation with gas transit to their countries.

January 2009

On Jan. 1, Gazprom, the state-owned Russian gas company, suddenly stops pumping gas to Ukraine, following months of politically fraught negotiations over gas prices. Because Eastern and central European countries rely on pipelines through Ukraine to receive gas imports from Russia, the gas crisis quickly spreads beyond Ukraine's borders.

Under international pressure to resolve the crisis, Tymoshenko negotiates a new deal with Putin, and gas flows resume on Jan. 20. Much of Europe still relies on Russian gas today.

2010

Yanukovych is elected president in February. He says Ukraine should be a "neutral state," cooperating with both Russia and Western alliances like NATO.

2011

Ukrainian prosecutors open criminal investigations into Tymoshenko, alleging corruption and misuse of government resources. In October, a court finds her guilty of "abuse of power" during the 2009 negotiations with Russia over the gas crisis and sentences her to seven years in prison, prompting concerns in the West that Ukrainian leaders are persecuting political opponents.

Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images
Anti-government protesters guard the perimeter of Independence Square, known as Maidan, on February 19, 2014 in Kyiv, Ukraine. After several weeks of calm, violence has again flared between police and anti-government protesters, who are calling for the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych over corruption and an abandoned trade agreement with the European Union.


2014: The Maidan revolution and Crimea's annexation

November 2013 through February 2014

Just days before it is to be signed, Yanukovych announces that he will refuse to sign an association agreement with the European Union to bring Ukraine into a free trade agreement. He cites pressure from Russia as a reason for his decision.

The announcement sparks huge protests across Ukraine – the largest since the Orange Revolution – calling for Yanukovych to resign. Protesters begin camping out in Kyiv's Maidan Square and occupy government buildings, including Kyiv's city hall and the justice ministry.

In late February, violence between police and protesters leaves more than 100 dead in the single bloodiest week in Ukraine's post-Soviet history.

Ahead of a scheduled impeachment vote on Feb. 22, Yanukovych flees, eventually arriving in Russia. Ukraine's parliament votes unanimously to remove Yanukovych and install an interim government, which announces it will sign the EU agreement and votes to free Tymoshenko from prison.

The new government charges Yanukovych with mass murder of the Maidan protesters and issues a warrant for his arrest.

Russia declares that the change in Ukraine's government is an illegal coup. Almost immediately, armed men appear at checkpoints and facilities in the Crimea peninsula. Putin at first denies they are Russian soldiers, but later admits it.

Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images
Anti-government protesters continue to clash with police in Independence square, despite a truce agreed between the Ukrainian president and opposition leaders on Feb. 20, 2014, in Kyiv.

March

With Russian troops in control of the peninsula, the Crimean parliament votes to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. A public referendum follows, with 97% of residents voting in favor of secession, although the results are disputed.

Putin finalizes the Russian annexation of Crimea in a March 18 announcement to Russia's parliament. In response, the U.S. and allies in Europe impose sanctions on Russia. They have never recognized Russia's annexation. It remains the only time that a European nation's borders have been changed by military force since World War II.

April

With some 40,000 Russian troops gathered on Ukraine's eastern border, violence breaks out in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas – violence that continues to this day. Russian-supported separatist forces storm government buildings in cities in the east. Russia denies that its troops are on Ukrainian soil, but Ukrainian officials insist otherwise.

Dan Kitwood / Getty Images
A man holds a Crimean flag in front of the Crimean parliament building on March 17, 2014, in Simferopol, Ukraine. People in Crimea overwhelmingly voted to secede from Ukraine during a referendum vote on March 16 and the Crimean Parliament declared Independence and formally asked Russia to annex them.

May

The pro-West politician Petro Poroshenko, a former government minister and head of the Council of Ukraine's National Bank, is elected Ukraine's president. He promotes reform, including measures to address corruption and lessen Ukraine's dependence on Russia for energy and financial support.

Sept. 5

Representatives from Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany meet in Belarus to attempt to negotiate an end to the violence in Donbas. They sign the first Minsk agreement, a deal between Ukraine and Russia to quiet the violence under a fragile ceasefire. The ceasefire soon breaks, and fighting continues into the new year.

Andrew Burton / Getty Images
Ukrainian troops train with small arms on March 13, 2015, outside Mariupol, Ukraine. The Minsk ll ceasefire agreement, which has continued to hold despite being violated more than 1,000 times, nears the one-month mark.

2015 through 2020: Russia looms

February 2015

The Minsk group meets again in Belarus to find a more successful agreement to end the fighting, resulting in the Minsk II agreement. It too has been unsuccessful at ending the violence. From 2014 through today, more than 14,000 people have been killed, tens of thousands wounded and more than a million displaced.

Together, the annexation of Crimea and the Russian-backed violence in the east have pushed Ukrainian public sentiment toward the West, strengthening interest in joining NATO and the EU.

2016 and 2017

As fighting in the Donbas continues, Russia repeatedly strikes at Ukraine in a series of cyberattacks, including a 2016 attack on Kyiv's power grid that causes a major blackout. In 2017, a large-scale assault affected key Ukrainian infrastructure, including its national bank and electrical grid. (Cyberattacks from Russia have continued through the present; the latest major attack targeted government websites in January 2022.)

Sergei Supinsky / AFP Via Getty Images
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy greets lawmakers during the solemn opening and first sitting of the new parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in Kyiv on Aug. 29, 2019.

2019

In April, comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy is elected president in a landslide rebuke of the Poroshenko and the status quo, which includes a stagnating economy and the ongoing conflict with Russia.

During his campaign, Zelenskyy vowed to make peace with Russia and end the war in the Donbas.

His early efforts to reach a solution to the violence are slowed by President Trump, who briefly blocks U.S. military aid to Ukraine and suggests to Zelenskyy that he should instead work with Putin to resolve the crisis.

In a phone call with President Trump in July 2019, Zelenskyy requests a visit to the White House to meet with Trump about U.S. backing of Ukraine's efforts to push off Russia. Trump asks Zelenskyy for "a favor": an investigation into energy company Burisma and the Bidens. A White House whistleblower complains, leading to President Trump's first impeachment in Dec. 2019.

Several U.S. officials later testify that Zelenskyy was close to announcing such an investigation, though he ultimately demurs, saying Ukrainians are "tired" of Burisma.

/ AP
Russian troops take part in drills at the Kadamovskiy firing range in the Rostov region in southern Russia on Dec. 14, 2021. Russia on Tuesday carried out military exercises in the Rostov region near its border with Ukraine.


2021: The crisis escalates

April

Russia sends about 100,000 troops to Ukraine's borders, ostensibly for military exercises. Although few analysts believe an invasion is imminent, Zelenskyy urges NATO leadership to put Ukraine on a timeline for membership. Later that month, Russia says it will withdraw the troops, but tens of thousands remain.

August

Two years after his entanglement with former President Trump, Zelenskyy visits the White House to meet with President Biden. Biden emphasizes the U.S. is committed "to Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression" but repeats that Ukraine has not yet met the conditions necessary to join NATO.

November

Russia renews its troop presence near the Ukrainian border, alarming American intelligence officials, who travel to Brussels to brief NATO allies on the situation. "We're not sure exactly what Mr. Putin is up to, but these movements certainly have our attention," says Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

/ AP
Russian troops take part in drills at the Kadamovskiy firing range in the Rostov region in southern Russia on Dec. 14, 2021. Tensions between the two countries rose in recent weeks amid reports of a Russian troop buildup near the border that stoked fears of a possible invasion — allegations Moscow denied and in turn blamed Ukraine for its own military buildup in the east of the country.

December

President Biden, speaking with Putin on a phone call, urges Russia not to invade Ukraine, warning of "real costs" of doing so.

Putin issues a contentious set of security demands. Among them, he asks NATO to permanently bar Ukraine from membership and to withdraw forces stationed in countries that joined the alliance after 1997, including the Balkans and Romania. Putin also demands a written response from the U.S. and NATO.

2022: Fears of war

January

Leaders and diplomats from the U.S., Russia and European countries meet repeatedly to avert a crisis. In early January, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov tells U.S. officials that Russia has no plans to invade Ukraine.

The State Department orders the families of embassy staff to leave Ukraine on Jan. 23. NATO places forces on standby the next day, including the U.S. ordering 8,500 troops in the U.S. to be ready to deploy.

Representatives from the U.S. and NATO deliver their written responses to Putin's demands on Jan. 26. In the responses, officials say they cannot bar Ukraine from joining NATO, but signal a willingness to negotiate over smaller issues like arms control.

/ Sputnik/AFP Via Getty Images
French President Emmanuel Macron (right) meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Feb. 7, 2022, for talks in an effort to find common ground on Ukraine and NATO, at the start of a week of intense diplomacy over fears Russia is preparing an invasion of its pro-Western neighbor.

February

Diplomatic efforts pick up the pace across Europe. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz both travel between Moscow and Kyiv. President Biden orders the movement of 1,000 U.S. troops from Germany to Romania and the deployment of 2,000 additional U.S. troops to Poland and Germany.

Russia and Belarus begin joint military exercises on Feb. 10, with some 30,000 Russian troops stationed in the country along Ukraine's northern border.

The U.S. and the U.K. urge their citizens to leave Ukraine on Feb. 11. President Biden announces the deployment of another 2,000 troops from the U.S. to Poland.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.



Becky Sullivan
Becky Sullivan has reported and produced for NPR since 2011 with a focus on hard news and breaking stories. She has been on the ground to cover natural disasters, disease outbreaks, elections and protests, delivering stories to both broadcast and digital platforms.
See stories by Becky Sullivan