WAR IS ECOCIDE
Russia hits Ukraine fuel supplies, airfields in new attacks
By YURAS KARMANAU, JIM HEINTZ, VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV and ZEKE MILLER

 PHOTO GALLERY 1 of 31

Ukrainian soldiers take positions outside a military facility after an explosion in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022. Russian troops stormed toward Ukraine's capital Saturday, and street fighting broke out as city officials urged residents to take shelter. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)


KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia unleashed a wave of attacks on Ukraine targeting airfields and fuel facilities in what appeared to be the next phase of an invasion that has been slowed by fierce resistance. The U.S. and EU responded with weapons and ammunition for the outnumbered Ukrainians and powerful sanctions intended to further isolate Moscow.

Huge explosions lit up the sky early Sunday south of the capital, Kyiv, where people hunkered down in homes, underground garages and subway stations in anticipation of a full-scale assault by Russian forces.

Flames billowed into the sky before dawn from an oil depot near an air base in Vasylkiv, where there has been intense fighting, according to the town’s mayor. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office said another explosion was at the civilian Zhuliany airport.

Zelenskyy’s office also said Russian forces blew up a gas pipeline in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, prompting the government to warn people to protect themselves from the smoke by covering their windows with damp cloth or gauze.

“We will fight for as long as needed to liberate our country,” Zelenskyy vowed.

Terrified men, women and children sought safety inside and underground, and the government maintained a 39-hour curfew to keep people off the streets. More than 150,000 Ukrainians fled for Poland, Moldova and other neighboring countries, and the United Nations warned the number could grow to 4 million if fighting escalates.

President Vladimir Putin hasn’t disclosed his ultimate plans, but Western officials believe he is determined to overthrow Ukraine’s government and replace it with a regime of his own, redrawing the map of Europe and reviving Moscow’s Cold War-era influence.

To aid Ukraine’s ability to hold out, the U.S. pledged an additional $350 million in military assistance to Ukraine, including anti-tank weapons, body armor and small arms. Germany said it would send missiles and anti-tank weapons to the besieged country and that it would close its airspace to Russian planes.

The U.S., European Union and United Kingdom agreed to block “selected” Russian banks from the SWIFT global financial messaging system, which moves money around more than 11,000 banks and other financial institutions worldwide, part of a new round of sanctions aiming to impose a severe cost on Moscow for the invasion. They also agreed to impose ”restrictive measures” on Russia’s central bank.

It was unclear how much territory Russian forces had seized or to what extent their advance had been stalled. Britain’s Ministry of Defense said “the speed of the Russian advance has temporarily slowed likely as a result of acute logistical difficulties and strong Ukrainian resistance.”

A senior U.S. defense official said more than half the Russian combat power that was massed along Ukraine’s borders had entered the country and Moscow has had to commit more fuel supply and other support units inside Ukraine than originally anticipated. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal U.S. assessments.

The curfew forcing everyone in Kyiv inside was set to last through Monday morning. The relative quiet of the capital was sporadically broken by gunfire.

Fighting on the city’s outskirts suggested that small Russian units were trying to clear a path for the main forces. Small groups of Russian troops were reported inside Kyiv, but Britain and the U.S. said the bulk of the forces were 19 miles (30 kilometers) from the city’s center as of Saturday afternoon.

Russia claims its assault on Ukraine from the north, east and south is aimed only at military targets, but bridges, schools and residential neighborhoods have been hit.

Ukraine’s health minister reported Saturday that 198 people, including three children, had been killed and more than 1,000 others wounded during Europe’s largest land war since World War II. It was unclear whether those figures included both military and civilian casualties.

A missile struck a high-rise apartment building in Kyiv’s southwestern outskirts near one of the city’s two passenger airports, leaving a jagged hole of ravaged apartments over several floors. A rescue worker said six civilians were injured.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Oksana Markarova, said troops in Kyiv were fighting Russian “sabotage groups.” Ukraine says some 200 Russian soldiers have been captured and thousands killed.

Markarova said Ukraine was gathering evidence of shelling of residential areas, kindergartens and hospitals to submit to The Hague as possible crimes against humanity.

Zelenskyy reiterated his openness to talks with Russia in a video message, saying he welcomed an offer from Turkey and Azerbaijan to organize diplomatic efforts, which so far have faltered.

The Kremlin confirmed a phone call between Putin and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev but gave no hint of restarting talks. A day earlier, Zelenskyy offered to negotiate a key Russian demand: abandoning ambitions of joining NATO.

Putin sent troops into Ukraine after denying for weeks that he intended to do so, all the while building up a force of almost 200,000 troops along the countries’ borders. He claims the West has failed to take seriously Russia’s security concerns about NATO, the Western military alliance that Ukraine aspires to join. But he has also expressed scorn about Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent state.

The effort was already coming at great cost to Ukraine, and apparently to Russian forces as well.

Ukrainian artillery fire destroyed a Russian train delivering diesel to troops heading toward Kyiv from the east, said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister.

The country’s Infrastructure Ministry said a Russian missile was shot down early Saturday as it headed for the dam of the sprawling reservoir that serves Kyiv. The government also said a Russian convoy was destroyed. Video images showed soldiers inspecting burned-out vehicles after Ukraine’s 101st brigade reported destroying a column of two light vehicles, two trucks and a tank. The claim could not be verified.

Highways into Kyiv from the east were dotted with checkpoints manned by Ukrainian troops and young men in civilian clothes carrying automatic rifles. Low-flying planes patrolled the skies, though it was unclear if they were Russian or Ukrainian.

In addition to Kyiv, the Russian assault appeared to focus on Ukraine’s economically vital coastal areas, from near the Black Sea port of Odesa in the west to beyond the Azov Sea port of Mariupol in the east.

Ukrainian soldiers in Mariupol guarded bridges and blocked people from the shoreline amid concerns the Russian navy could launch an assault from the sea.

“I don’t care anymore who wins and who doesn’t,” said Ruzanna Zubenko, whose large family was forced from their home outside Mariupol after it was badly damaged by shelling. “The only important thing is for our children to be able to grow up smiling and not crying.”

Fighting also raged in two eastern territories controlled by pro-Russia separatists. Authorities in Donetsk said hot water supplies to the city of about 900,000 were suspended because of damage to the system by Ukrainian shelling.

The U.S. government urged Zelenskyy early Saturday to evacuate Kyiv but he turned down the offer, according to a senior American intelligence official with direct knowledge of the conversation. Zelenskyy issued a defiant video recorded on a downtown street, saying he remained in the city.

“We aren’t going to lay down weapons. We will protect the country,” he said. “Our weapon is our truth, and our truth is that it’s our land, our country, our children. And we will defend all of that.”

Hungary and Poland both opened their borders to Ukrainians.

Refugees arriving in the Hungarian border town of Zahony said men between the ages of 18 and 60 were not being allowed to leave Ukraine.

“My son was not allowed to come. My heart is so sore, I’m shaking,” said Vilma Sugar, 68.

At Poland’s Medyka crossing, some said they had walked for 15 miles (35 kilometers) to reach the border.

“They didn’t have food, no tea, they were standing in the middle of a field, on the road, kids were freezing,” Iryna Wiklenko said as she waited on the Polish side for her grandchildren and daughter-in-law to make it across.

Officials in Kyiv urged residents to stay away from windows to avoid debris or bullets.

Shelves were sparsely stocked at grocery stores and pharmacies, and people worried how long food and medicine supplies might last.

The U.S. and its allies have beefed up forces on NATO’s eastern flank but so far have ruled out deploying troops to fight Russia. Instead, the U.S., the European Union and other countries have slapped wide-ranging sanctions on Russia, freezing the assets of businesses and individuals including Putin and his foreign minister.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, warned that Moscow could react by opting out of the last remaining nuclear arms pact, freezing Western assets and cutting diplomatic ties.

“There is no particular need in maintaining diplomatic relations,” Medvedev said. “We may look at each other in binoculars and gunsights.”

___

Isachenkov reported from Moscow, and Miller from Washington. Francesca Ebel, Josef Federman and Andrew Drake in Kyiv; Mstyslav Chernov and Nic Dumitrache in Mariupol, Ukraine; and other AP journalists from around the world contributed to this report.

__

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Belarus holds constitutional vote as crisis in Ukraine rages
By YURAS KARMANAU

1 of 7

People walk past a poster which reads "Referendum on constitutional amendments" in Minsk, Belarus, Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. Belarusians vote at a referendum on constitutional amendments that could allow country's strongman Alexander Lukashenko to further cement his grip on power until 2035. 

(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr)


KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Belarusians cast ballots Sunday in a constitutional referendum that the country’s authoritarian leader called to cement his 27-year old grip on power, even as he offers the country’s territory to his ally Russia to invade Ukraine.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has edged even closer to Russia amid crippling Western sanctions over his crackdown on domestic protests, said he was confident that Belarusians will support a set of constitutional amendments that would allow him to stay in power until 2035.

The revised main law also sheds Belarus’ neutral status, opening the way for stronger military cooperation with Russia, which deployed forces to Belarusian territory under the pretext of military drills and then sent them rolling into Ukraine as part of the invasion that began Thursday.

Some of those forces quickly closed in on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, located just 75 kilometers (less than 50 miles) south of the border.

In a video message Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rebuked Belarusians for allowing their country to be used as a staging ground for the Russian invasion, adding that Ukrainian cities are facing an attack on a scale unseen since World War II when Belarus and Ukraine faced a Nazi invasion as parts of the Soviet Union.

“But you aren’t on the same side with us in the war that is going on now,” Zelenskyy said in Russian, which is widely spoken in Belarus. “The Russian military is launching missiles at Ukraine from your territory. From your territory they are kiling our children, they are destroying our homes and trying to blow up everything that has been built for decades.”

In an emotional speech, the Ukrainian leader questioned how Belarusians will be able “to look into the eyes of your children, into the eyes of each other.”

“We are your neighbors. Be Belarus, not Russia!” he said.

 H&M IN MINSK

The Belarusian leader quickly shot back, denigrating the Ukrainian president as an American puppet and charging that the Russian attack resulted from Zelenskyy’s failure to accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand for Ukraine to renounce its bid to join NATO.

The West responded to Belarus hosting Russian troops for the invasion by slamming it with new tough sanctions along with Russia.

Lukashenko ominously warned Sunday that more sanctions from the West are “pushing the world to the brink of World War III.”

The Belarusian leader, who said previously that his country could host Russian nuclear weapons, said that he warned French President Emmanuel Macron in a call Saturday that he was ready to make the move if the U.S. and its allies deploy nuclear weapons to NATO members Poland and Lithuania, which border Belarus.

“We have developed plans to protect Belarus and agreed with Putin to deploy such weapons here that will make Poles and Lithuanians lose any desire to go to war,” he said.

The constitutional amendments bring back limits on presidential terms that had been abolished during Lukashenko’s tenure, allowing a president only two five-year terms in office. However, the restriction will only take effect once a “newly elected president” assumes office, which gives Lukashenko an opportunity to run for two more terms after his current one expires in 2025.

“This pseudo referendum is being held under the Russian gun barrels and under effective control of the Russian military which has come to stay in Belarus for a long time,” Belarus’ first post-Soviet leader, Stanislav Sushkevich, told The Associated Press.

“The absurdity that is going on now directly contradicts the existing main law that envisages Belarus’ neutral status.”

Shushkevich warned that “Lukashenko is depriving Belarus of its future and turning the country into a staging ground for Putin’s mad games,” adding that “the Belarusian leader has no choice, he also is a pariah.”

In 2020, Lukashenko relied on Moscow’s support to survive the largest and the most sustained wave of mass protests in the country’s history. Demonstrations, the biggest of which drew up to 200,000 people, were triggered by him winning a sixth term in office in a presidential election in August 2020 that the opposition and the West denounced as rigged.

Protesters demanding a new election and Lukashenko’s ouster faced a brutal crackdown from the authorities, with more than 35,000 arrested and thousands brutally beaten. Key opposition figures, including Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenko’s main contender in the election, left the country amid the clampdown, along with thousands of ordinary Belarusians.

The opposition denounced the vote as “farce” and said it wouldn’t recognize its results.

“The Belarusians are again being offered a choice between Lukashenko and Lukashenko,” Tsikhanouskaya told the AP. “Belarusians want change, but harsh large-scale repressions forced many to remain silent.”

She said that Belarusians widely oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Belarusians’ hearts hurt as it’s not just the fate of Ukraine but also our fate that is decided now,” Tsilhanouskaya told The Associated Press. “We realize that Belarus’ independence is closely connected with Ukraine’s independence.”

___

Vladimir Isachenkov contributed to this report from Moscow.

EXPLAINER: How is Russia-Ukraine war linked to religion?
By PETER SMITH2 hours ago


 People pray next to the body of Ukrainian Army captain Anton Sydorov, 35, killed in eastern Ukraine, during his funeral in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti, File)


Ukraine’s tangled political history with Russia has its counterpart in the religious landscape, with Ukraine’s majority Orthodox Christian population divided between an independent-minded group based in Kyiv and another loyal to its patriarch in Moscow.

But while there have been appeals to religious nationalism in both Russia and Ukraine, religious loyalty doesn’t mirror political fealty amid Ukraine’s fight for survival.

Even though Russian President Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine in part as a defense of the Moscow-oriented Orthodox church, leaders of both Ukrainian Orthodox factions are fiercely denouncing the Russian invasion, as is Ukraine’s significant Catholic minority.

“With prayer on our lips, with love for God, for Ukraine, for our neighbors, we fight against evil - and we will see victory,” vowed Metropolitan Epifany, head of the Kyiv-based Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

“Forget mutual quarrels and misunderstandings and ... unite with love for God and our Motherland,” said Metropolitan Onufry, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is under the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow but has broad autonomy.

Even that seemingly united front is complicated. A day after posting Onufry’s message on Thursday, his church’s website began publishing reports claiming its churches and people are being attacked, blaming one attack on the representatives of the rival church.

The division between Ukraine’s Orthodox bodies has reverberated worldwide in recent years as Orthodox churches have struggled with how and whether to take sides. Some U.S. Orthodox hope they can put such conflicts aside and unite to try to end the war, while also fearing the war could exacerbate the split.

WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE OF UKRAINE?

Surveys estimate a large majority of Ukraine’s population is Orthodox, with a significant minority of Ukrainian Catholics who worship with a Byzantine liturgy similar to that of the Orthodox but are loyal to the pope. The population includes smaller percentages of Protestants, Jews and Muslims.

Ukraine and Russia are divided by a common history, both religiously and politically.

They trace their ancestry to the medieval kingdom of Kievan Rus, whose 10th century Prince Vladimir (Volodymyr in Ukrainian) rejected paganism, was baptized in Crimea and adopted Orthodoxy as the official religion.

In 2014, Putin cited that history in justifying his seizure of Crimea, a land he called “sacred” to Russia.

While Putin says Russia is the true heir to Rus, Ukrainians say their modern state has a distinct pedigree and that Moscow didn’t emerge as a power until centuries later.

That tension persists in Orthodox relations.

Orthodox churches have historically been organized along national lines, with patriarchs having autonomy in their territories while bound by a common faith. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is considered first among equals but, unlike a Catholic pope, doesn’t have universal jurisdiction.

WHO GOVERNS UKRAINE’S ORTHODOX CHURCHES TODAY?

That depends how to interpret events of more than 300 years ago.

With Russia growing in strength and the Constantinople church weakened under Ottoman rule, the Ecumenical Patriarch in 1686 delegated to the Patriarch of Moscow the authority to ordain the metropolitan (top bishop) of Kyiv.

The Russian Orthodox Church says that was a permanent transfer. The Ecumenical Patriarch says it was temporary.

For the past century, independent-minded Ukrainian Orthodox have formed separate churches which lacked formal recognition until 2019, when current Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew recognized the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as independent of the Moscow patriarch — who fiercely protested the move as illegitimate.

The situation in Ukraine was murkier on the ground.

Many monasteries and parishes remain under Moscow’s patriarch, though exact statistics are difficult to find, said John Burgess, author of “Holy Rus’: The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in the New Russia.” On the village level, many people may not even know about their parish’s alignment, Burgess said.

DOES THIS SCHISM REFLECT THE POLITICAL SPLIT BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES?

Yes, though it’s complicated.

Ukraine’s former president, Petro Poroshenko, drew a direct link: “The independence of our church is part of our pro-European and pro-Ukrainian policies,” he said in 2018.

But current President Vladimir Zelinskyy, who is Jewish, has not put the same emphasis on religious nationalism. On Saturday, he said he had spoken to both Orthodox leaders as well as top Catholic, Muslim and Jewish representatives. “All leaders pray for the souls of the defenders who gave their lives for Ukraine and for our unity and victory. And that’s very important,” he said.

Putin has tried to capitalize on the issue.

In his Feb. 21 speech seeking to justify the imminent invasion of Ukraine with a distorted historical narrative, Putin claimed without proof that Kyiv was preparing for the “destruction” of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

But the reaction of the Metropolitan Onufry, who compared the war to the “sin of Cain,” the biblical character who murdered his brother, indicates that even the Moscow-oriented church has a strong sense of Ukrainian national identity.

By comparison, Moscow Patriarch Kirill has called for peace but has not laid blame for the invasion.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate has long had extensive autonomy. Plus, it’s increasingly Ukrainian in character.

“Regardless of church affiliation ... you have a lot of new clergy who grew up in independent Ukraine,” said Alexei Krindatch, national coordinator of the U.S. Census of Orthodox Christian Churches. “Their political preferences are not necessarily correlated with the formal jurisdictions of their parishes,” said Krindatch, who grew up in the former Soviet Union.

WHERE DO THE CATHOLICS FIT IN?

Ukrainian Catholics are based mainly in western Ukraine.

They emerged in 1596 when some Orthodox Ukrainians, then under the rule of the Catholic-dominated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, submitted to the authority of the pope under an agreement that allowed them to keep distinctive practices such as their Byzantine liturgy and married priests.

Orthodox leaders have long denounced such agreements as Catholic and foreign encroachment on their flocks.

Ukrainian Catholics have an especially strong history of resistance to persecution under czars and communists.

“Every time Russia takes over Ukraine, (the) Ukrainian Catholic Church is destroyed,” said Mariana Karapinka, head of communications for the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia.

Ukrainian Catholics were severely repressed by the Soviets, with several leaders martyred. Many Ukrainian Catholics continued to worship underground, and the church has rebounded strongly since the end of communism.

With that kind of history, Ukrainian Catholics may have a strong reason to resist another takeover by Moscow. But they’re not alone, Karapinka said. “Ukrainian Catholics were not the only group persecuted by the Soviets,” she said. “So many groups have reason to resist.”

Recent popes have tried to thaw relations with the Russian Orthodox Church even while defending the rights of Ukrainian and other Eastern Rite Catholics.

But after the Russian invasion, Pope Francis visited the Russian Embassy on Friday to personally “express his concern about the war,” the Vatican said, in an extraordinary papal gesture that has no recent precedent.

HOW HAS THE ORTHODOX SCHISM REVERBERATED BEYOND UKRAINE?

The Russian Orthodox Church decided to “break the Eucharistic communion” with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in 2018 as he moved to recognize an independent church in Ukraine. That means members of Moscow- and Constantinople-affiliated churches can’t take communion at the other’s churches.

The disputes have spread to Eastern Orthodox churches in Africa, where the Russian Orthodox have recognized a separate set of churches after Africa’s patriarch recognized the Ukraine church’s independence.

But many other churches have sought to avoid the fray. In the U.S., with multiple Orthodox jurisdictions, most groups still cooperate and worship with each other.

The war may provide a point of unity among U.S. churches but may further test relations, said the Very Rev. Alexander Rentel, chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America, which has Russian roots but is now independent of Moscow.

“This split that took place in world Orthodoxy was a difficult event for the Orthodox Church to process,” he said. “Now it’s only going to become more difficult because of this war.”

___

Associated Press reporters Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv and Luis Andres Henao in Princeton, New Jersey, contributed to this report.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Russians hold anti-war rallies amid ominous threats by Putin

By DASHA LITVINOVA TODAY

1 of 9
Police detain a demonstrator during an action against Russia's attack on Ukraine in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022. Protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine resumed on Sunday, with people taking to the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg and other Russian towns for the third straight day despite mass arrests. 

(AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)


MOSCOW (AP) — From Moscow to Siberia, Russian anti-war activists took to the streets again Sunday to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite the arrests of hundreds of protesters each day by police.

Demonstrators held pickets and marched in city centers, chanting “No to war!” as President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian nuclear deterrent to be put on high alert, upping the ante in the Kremlin’s standoff with the West and stoking fears of a nuclear war.

“I have two sons and I don’t want to give them to that bloody monster. War is a tragedy for all of us,” 48-year-old Dmitry Maltsev, who joined the rally in St. Petersburg, told The Associated Press.

Protests against the invasion started Thursday in Russia and have continued daily ever since, even as Russian police have moved swiftly to crack down on the rallies and detain protesters. The Kremlin has sought to downplay the protests, insisting that a much broader share of Russians support the assault on Ukraine.

In St. Petersburg, where several hundred gathered in the city center, police in full riot gear were grabbing one protester after another and dragging some into police vans, even though the demonstration was peaceful. Footage from Moscow showed police throwing several female protesters on the ground before dragging them away.

According to the OVD-Info rights group that tracks political arrests, by Sunday evening police detained at least 1,474 Russians in 45 cities over anti-war demonstrations that day.

Police detain a demonstrator with a poster which reads "The war with Ukraine is a shame and a crime" during an action against Russia's attack on Ukraine in Omsk, Russia, Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022. Protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine resumed on Sunday, with people taking to the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg and other Russian towns for the third straight day despite mass arrests. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Sofiychuk)

Four days into the the fighting that has killed scores, Putin raised the stakes dramatically on Sunday, ordering the military Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert, citing Western countries “taking unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere” and “top officials from leading NATO members made aggressive statements regarding our country.”

The day before, the U.S. and its European allies have warned that the coming round of sanctions could include freezing hard currency reserves of Russia’s Central Bank and cutting Russia off SWIFT international payment system. The unprecedented move could quickly plunge the Russian economy into chaos.

Ordinary Russians fear that stiff sanctions will deliver a crippling blow to the country’s economy. Since Thursday, Russians have been flocking to banks and ATMs to withdraw cash, creating long lines and reporting on social media about ATM machines running out of bills.

According to Russia’s Central Bank, on Thursday alone Russians withdrew 111 billion rubles (about $1.3 billion) in cash.

The anti-war protests on Sunday appeared smaller and more scattered than the ones that took place on the first day of Russia’s attack in Ukraine, when thousands of people rallied in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but their true scale was hard to assess and they seemed to pick up speed as the day went on.

“It is a crime both against Ukraine and Russia. I think it is killing both Ukraine and Russia. I am outraged, I haven’t slept for three nights, and I think we must now declare very loudly that we don’t want to be killed and don’t want Ukraine to be killed,” said Olga Mikheeva, who protested in the Siberian city of Irkutsk.

___

Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow and Irina Titova in St. Petersburg contributed reporting.

___

Follow all AP stories on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

Anti-war sentiment grows in Russia despite govt crackdown

By DASHA LITVINOVA and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV

1 of 12

Police officers detain a woman in St. Petersburg, Russia, Friday, Feb. 25, 2022. Shocked Russians turned out by the thousands Thursday to decry their country's invasion of Ukraine as emotional calls for protests grew on social media. Some 1,745 people in 54 Russian cities were detained, at least 957 of them in Moscow. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)


MOSCOW (AP) — As Russian troops were closing in on the Ukrainian capital, more and more Russians spoke out Saturday against the invasion, even as the government’s official rhetoric grew increasingly harsher.

Street protests, albeit small, resumed in the Russian capital of Moscow, the second-largest city of St. Petersburg and other Russian cities for the third straight day, with people taking to the streets despite mass detentions on Thursday and Friday. According to OVD-Info, rights group that tracks political arrests, at least 460 people in 34 cities were detained over anti-war protests on Saturday, including over 200 in Moscow.

Open letters condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine kept pouring, too. More than 6,000 medical workers put their names under one on Saturday; over 3,400 architects and engineers endorsed another while 500 teachers signed a third one. Similar letters by journalists, municipal council members, cultural figures and other professional groups have been making the rounds since Thursday.

A prominent contemporary art museum in Moscow called Garage announced Saturday it was halting its work on exhibitions and postponing them “until the human and political tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine has ceased.”

“We cannot support the illusion of normality when such events are taking place,” the statement by the museum read. “We see ourselves as part of a wider world that is not divided by war.”

An online petition to stop the attack on Ukraine, launched shortly after it started on Thursday morning, garnered over 780,000 signatures by Saturday evening, making it one of the most supported online petitions in Russia in recent years.

Statements decrying the invasion even came from some parliament members, who earlier this week voted to recognize the independence of two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, a move that preceded the Russian assault. Two lawmakers from the Communist Party, which usually toes the Kremlin’s line, spoke out against the hostilities on social media.

Oleg Smolin said he “was shocked” when the attack started and “was convinced that military force should be used in politics only as a last resort.” His fellow lawmaker Mikhail Matveyev said “the war must be immediately stopped” and that he voted for “Russia becoming a shield against the bombing of Donbas, not for the bombing of Kyiv.”

Russian authorities, meanwhile, took a harsher stance towards those denouncing the invasion, both at home and abroad.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin, said Moscow may respond to Western sanctions by opting out of the last nuclear arms deal with the U.S., cutting diplomatic ties with Western nations and freezing their assets

He also warned that Moscow could restore the death penalty after Russia was removed from Europe’s top rights group — a chilling statement that shocked human rights activists in a country that has had a moratorium on capital punishment since August 1996.

Demonstrators shout slogans in St. Petersburg, Russia, Friday, Feb. 25, 2022. Shocked Russians turned out by the thousands Thursday to decry their country's invasion of Ukraine as emotional calls for protests grew on social media. Some 1,745 people in 54 Russian cities were detained, at least 957 of them in Moscow. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Eva Merkacheva, a member of the Kremlin human rights council, deplored it as a “catastrophe” and a “return to the Middle Ages.”

The Western sanctions imposed new tight restrictions on Russian financial operations, a draconian ban on technology exports to Russia and froze the assets of Putin and his foreign minister. Russian membership in the Council of Europe was also suspended.

Washington and its allies say even tougher sanctions are possible, including kicking Russia out of SWIFT, the dominant system for global financial transactions.

Medvedev was a placeholder president in 2008-2012 when Putin had to shift into the prime minister’s seat because of term limits. He then let Putin reclaim the presidency and served as his prime minister for eight years.

During his tenure as president, Medvedev was widely seen as more liberal compared with Putin, but on Saturday he made a series of threats that even the most hawkish Kremlin figures haven’t mentioned to date.

Medvedev noted that the sanctions offer the Kremlin a pretext to completely review its ties with the West, suggesting that Russia could opt out of the New START nuclear arms control treaty that limits the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.

The treaty, which Medvedev signed in 2010 with then-U.S. President Barack Obama, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, and envisages sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance. The pact, the last remaining U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreement, had been set to expire in February 2021 but Moscow and Washington extended it for another five years.

If Russia opts out of the agreement now, it will remove any checks on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces and raise new threats to global security.

Medvedev also raised the prospect of cutting diplomatic ties with Western countries, charging that “there is no particular need in maintaining diplomatic relations.” Referring to Western threats to freeze the assets of Russian companies and individuals, Medvedev warned that Moscow wouldn’t hesitate to do the same.

Cracking down on critics at home, Russian authorities demanded that top independent news outlets take down stories about the fighting in Ukraine that deviated from the official government line.

Russia’s state communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, charged that reports about “Russian armed forces firing at Ukrainian cities and the death of civilians in Ukraine as a result of the actions of the Russian army, as well as materials in which the ongoing operation is called ‘an attack,’ ‘an invasion,’ or ‘a declaration of war’” were untrue and demanded that the outlets take them down or face steep fines and restrictions.

On Friday, the watchdog also announced “partial restrictions” on access to Facebook in response to the platform limiting the accounts of several Kremlin-backed media.

On Saturday, Russian internet users reported problems with accessing Facebook and Twitter, both of which have played a major role in amplifying dissent in Russia in recent years.

___

Follow all AP stories on tensions and fighting over Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

On cusp of Biden speech, a state of disunity, funk and peril

By CALVIN WOODWARD and ZEKE MILLER

President Joe Biden speaks about Russia's invasion of Ukraine on a television at Shaws Tavern in Washington, Feb. 24, 2022. Biden will deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, March 1. 

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)


WASHINGTON (AP) — In good times or bad, American presidents come to Congress with a diagnosis that hardly differs over the decades. In their State of the Union speeches, they declare “the state of our union is strong,” or words very much like it.

President Joe Biden’s fellow Americans, though, have other ideas about the state they’re in and little hope his State of the Union address Tuesday night can turn anything around.

America’s strength is being sharply tested from within — and now from afar — as fate, overnight, made Biden a wartime president in someone else’s conflict, leading the West’s response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine that makes all the other problems worse.

The state of the union is disunity and division. It’s a state of exhaustion from the pandemic. It’s about feeling gouged at the grocery store and gas pump. It’s so low that some Americans, including prominent ones, are exalting Russian President Vladimir Putin in his attack on a democracy.

Measures of happiness have hit a bottom, with fewer Americans saying they are very happy in the 2021 General Social Survey than ever before in five decades of asking them.

This what a grand funk looks like.

Biden will step up to the House speaker’s rostrum to address a nation in conflict with itself. The country is litigating how to keep kids safe and what to teach them, weary over orders to wear masks, bruised over an ignominious end to one war, in Afghanistan, and suddenly plenty worried about Russian expansionism. A speech designed to discuss the commonweal will be delivered to a nation that is having increasing difficulty finding much of anything in common.

Even now, a large segment of the country still clings to the lie that the last election was stolen.

THAT ‘M’ WORD

Four decades ago, President Jimmy Carter confronted a national “crisis of confidence” in a speech describing a national malaise without using that word. But Vice President Kamala Harris did when she told an interviewer last month “there is a level of malaise” in this country.

Today’s national psyche is one of fatigue and frustration — synonyms for the malaise of the 1970s. But the divides run deeper and solutions may be more elusive than the energy crisis, inflation and sense of drift of that time.

Take today’s climate of discourse. It’s “so cold,” said Rachel Hoopes, a charity executive in Des Moines, Iowa, who voted for Biden. “It’s hard to see how him talking to us can break through when so many people can’t talk to each other.”

It’s as if Americans need group therapy more than a set-piece speech to Congress.

“We have to feel good about ourselves before we can move forward,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show.”

Yet in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s attack last week, a long-absent reflex kicked back in as members of Congress projected unity behind the president, at least for the moment, in the confrontation with Moscow. “We’re all together at this point,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said, “and we need to be together about what should be done.”

Politics didn’t stop at the water’s edge but it paused. Though not at Mar-a-Lago’s ocean edge in Florida, where Donald Trump praised Putin’s “savvy,” “genius” move against the country that entangled the defeated American president in his first impeachment trial.

PICK YOUR POISON

White House officials acknowledge that the mood of the country is “sour,” but say they are also encouraged by data showing people’s lives are better off than a year ago. They say the national psyche is a “trailing indicator” and will improve with time.

Biden, in his speech, will highlight the improvements from a year ago — particularly on COVID and the economy — but also acknowledge that the job is not yet done, in recognition of the fact that many Americans don’t believe it.

A year into Biden’s presidency, polling indeed finds that he faces a critical and pessimistic public. Only 29% of Americans think the nation is on the right track, according to the February poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

In December’s AP-NORC poll, most said economic conditions are poor and inflation has hit them on food and gas. After two years of a pandemic that has killed more than 920,000 in the U.S., majorities put masks back on and avoided travel and crowds in January in the sweep of the omicron variant. Now, finally, a sustained drop in infections appears to be underway.

Most Americans are vaccinated against COVID-19, but debates over masks and mandates have torn apart communities and families.

With Biden so hemmed in by hardened politics, it’s difficult to imagine a single speech altering the public’s perception, said Julia Helm, 52, a Republican county auditor from the suburbs west of Des Moines.

“He’s got a lot of stuff on his plate,” she said. “You know what could change how people feel? And pretty fast? What they pay at the pump. I hate to say it. But gas prices really are the barometer.”

Biden suggested last summer that high inflation was a temporary inconvenience. But it’s snowballed in recent months to a defining challenge of his presidency, alongside, now, the threat of geopolitical instability from Russia’s attack on its neighbor.

Consumer prices over the past 12 months jumped 7.5%, the highest since 1982, as many pay raises were swallowed up and dreams of home ownership or even a used car became prohibitively expensive.

Inflation was a side effect of an economy running hot after the economically devastating first chapters of the pandemic, when Biden achieved the kind of growth that Presidents Barack Obama and Trump could not deliver.

The prime engine for both the gains and the inflation appears to be Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which pushed down the unemployment rate to a healthy 4% while boosting economic growth to 5.7% last year — the best performance since 1984.

SINKING POLLS

Still, voters have largely overlooked those gains as inflation bit. The February AP-NORC poll found that more people disapproved than approved of how Biden is handling his job as president, 55% to 44%.

That was a reversal from early in his presidency. As recently as July 2020, about 60% said they approved of Biden in AP-NORC polls.

After four years of Trump’s provocations from the White House, Hoopes, 38, the Des Moines charity executive, finds Biden to be a “nonthreatening” leader, a “decent person, someone it seems you could talk to.”

“He seems to be a quiet decision-maker,” she said. “But I don’t know if that’s good or bad for him or the country right now.”

The most she could say about Biden’s State of the Union speech is that “it can’t hurt.”

That’s about the most that historians say about it, too.

THE SPEECH

If State of the Union addresses are remembered at all, it’s generally because feathers were ruffled on a night of tradition and forced comity: Obama admonishing the Supreme Court justices seated in front of him for their ruling on campaign finance laws in 2010; Justice Samuel Alito mouthing “not true in response,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., ripping up Trump’s speech in disgust in 2020.

In 2009, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., was reprimanded by fellow Republicans and lacerated by Democats for shouting “you lie” at Obama when he spoke to Congress about his health care plan.

“Inaugural addresses sometimes do have an impact because they are big picture, far horizon speeches,” said political scientist Cal Jillson of Southern Methodist University. “State of the Unions rarely do because they tend to be listy rather than thematic.”

Among presidents of the last half century, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Trump repeatedly declared “the state of our union is strong” while Bush’s father took a pass and Gerald Ford confessed: “I must say to you that the state of the union is not good.”

Trump being Trump and Clinton being Clinton, both additionally claimed that the state of the union had never been stronger than on the nights they said it.

Whatever diagnostic phrase Biden chooses, his task is to promote an agenda and plausibly claim credit for positive developments over the last year “without a mission accomplished moment,” Jillson said. “That’s delicate. It’s delicate to claim credit for the economic recovery ... and still acknowledge people’s pains and fears.”

Biden comes to Congress with some missions actually accomplished, like his historic infrastructure package, as well big dreams deferred.

He still wants to “Build Back Better.” In the funk of these times, Americans just seem to want someone to wake them up when it’s all over.

___

Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Emily Swanson and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington and Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

Biden’s Russia sanctions may let Moscow profit from oil, gas,STEEL AND ALUMINUM

By JOSH BOAK

The tanker Sun Arrows loads its cargo of liquefied natural gas from the Sakhalin-2 project in the port of Prigorodnoye, Russia, Oct. 29, 2021. There is a glaring carve-out in President Joe Biden's sanctions against Russia: Oil and natural gas from that country will continue to flow freely to the rest of the world and money will keep flowing into Russia. (AP Photo, File)

There is a glaring carve-out in President Joe Biden’s sanctions against Russia: Oil and natural gas from that country will continue to flow freely to the rest of the world and money will keep flowing into Russia.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden defended his decision to preserve access to Russian energy in order “to limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump.” But some academics, lawmakers and other analysts say that excluding an industry at the heart of the Russian economy essentially limits the sanctions and could embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Energy exports are the whole game,” said Columbia University historian Adam Tooze, an expert on finance and European politics. Politicians in the United States and Europe chose to “carve out the one sector that might truly be decisive. I don’t think Russia is blind to what is going on and it must indicate to them that the West does not really have the stomach for a painful fight over Ukraine.”

As part of a broader international push, Biden announced sanctions on Thursday that target Russian banks and the country’s elites, and restrict the export of vital technologies that are key for the military and economic development. The U.S. and its European allies intensified the sanctions on Saturday by announcing plans to freeze the reserves of Russia’s central bank and block certain financial institutions from the SWIFT messaging system for international payments.

But the rules issued by the Treasury Department allow Russian energy transactions to keep going through nonsanctioned banks that are not based in the U.S. And administration officials stress that the sanctions are designed to minimize any disruptions to the global energy markets.

U.S. crude oil prices closed Friday just below $92 a barrel, right where they were in the days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Still, gasoline prices at the pump are up more than 33% from a year ago to a national average of $3.57 a gallon, according to AAA.

Inflation, at a 40-year peak and fueled in large part by gas prices, has hurt Biden politically with voters heading into the November elections.

The sanctions created a possible trade-off for the president between his political interests at home and abroad. By invading Ukraine, Russia has potentially fed into the supply chain problems and inflation that have been a crucial weakness for Biden, who now is trying to strike a balance between penalizing Putin and sparing American voters.

Biden specifically highlighted the Russian energy carve-outs as a virtue because they would help to protect U.S. families and businesses from higher prices.

“Our sanctions package we specifically designed to allow energy payments to continue,” he said.

Those domestic politics — which also apply to many European leaders — produced a set of sanctions that Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., on Thursday said he fears “will be inadequate to deter Putin from further aggression.”

“The administration is intentionally leaving the biggest industry in Russia’s economy virtually untouched,” Toomey said. “The sanctions imposed on Russian banks, while welcome, may not isolate the Russian financial system from international activity. That’s why the U.S. should impose crippling sanctions on Russia’s oil and gas sector.”

But Biden also needs to consider the needs of his European allies. Natural gas from Russia accounts for one-third of Europe’s consumption of the fossil fuel. Restricting the world’s largest exporter of natural gas and second-largest exporter of oil, after Saudi Arabia, could hurt the unity that U.S. officials say is key to confronting Putin.

This dependence on Russia could limit the potential devastation of sanctions.

“It would definitely be more damaging to Russia if the energy sector was included in the sanctions package,” Mark Finley, a fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, said in an emailed statement. “Oil royalties & taxes generally account for about 40% of Russian federal government revenues.”

Finley noted that Russia has relied on oil and natural gas revenues in recent years to build its stockpile of foreign reserves above $600 billion, specifically so it could insulate itself from financial sanctions. But that financial cushion may ultimately be at risk from the added U.S. and European sanctions.

Should there be a loss of oil and natural gas from Russia, the U.S. appears unable to quickly increase production of oil and natural gas, while OPEC-plus countries have yet to publicly commit to substantially more production.

Domestic oil and gas companies are dealing with tight supplies of rigs, sand, truckers and laborers needed to drill for oil and gas, said Jen Snyder, managing director at Enverus, an energy analytics firm. She noted that one supplier said its most modern and efficient rigs are all contracted out through the end of the year.

“All these constraints can be bridged, but it takes time,” Snyder added.

Natural gas supplies in Europe have been extremely tight. But gas producers in the U.S. cannot quickly export more gas into the global market. That’s because to ship natural gas overseas, it has to be cooled and converted into liquefied natural gas at LNG export facilities, and in the U.S. those facilities are operating at capacity.

In the face of sanctions over Putin’s 2014 invasion of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine, the country’s elites and insider corporations learned to adapt, often transferring their assets into newly created shell entities with a clean record. Those strategies are now being put to the test, though access to oil has been a consistent loophole that other countries in a similar predicament exploited in the past with Russia’s help.

Putin’s government has helped tutor other U.S. adversaries such as Iran and Venezuela on how to circumvent Washington’s controls, said Marshall Billingslea, who helped set sanctions policy for the Trump administration.

“Sanctions enforcement is inherently a cat and mouse game and they’ve had eight years, ever since Crimea, to set up alternative mechanisms to keep hard currency flowing to the regime,” Billingslea said.

___

Associated Press writers Joshua Goodman in Miami and Cathy Bussewitz in New York contributed to this report.

Ukraine invasion spotlights the delicate state of democracy

By TED ANTHONY

1 of 4

Protesters hold a placard reading "Stop Putin" during a demonstration at Odeonsplatz against Russia's attack on Ukraine, Munich, Germany, Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022.(Tobias Hase/dpa via AP)


The secretary-general of the United Nations opened the most recent annual meeting of Earth’s leaders with a bleak assessment of the planet’s state of affairs. Humanity, he said, faced “a moment of truth.”

“Peace. Human rights. Dignity for all. Equality. Justice. Solidarity. Like never before, core values are in the crosshairs,” Antonio Guterres said. “A sense of impunity is taking hold.”

Guterres’ message to the U.N. General Assembly takes on even more relevance with the Russian military’s invasion of Ukraine. Those things he outlined? They are bedrock principles of democracy — a once-on-the-upswing method of human governance that in recent years has been taking body blows across the world.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion advances the anti-democratic trend – one that has seen strongmen, some elected, prod their nations toward dictatorship and ignore once-solid democratic norms. In doing so, they are collectively pounding at the door of democracy’s always-delicate house.

The invasion is “surely a watershed moment for the future of global democracy,” says Stephen E. Hanson, a professor of government at William & Mary College in Virginia and author of “Post-Imperial Democracies,” which in part examines Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved.

In recent years, the ascent of a group of what some consider dictators within democracies — Putin, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Narendra Modi of India, Viktor Orbán of Hungary — has gradually chipped away at the outer boundaries of democratic systems while still talking the talk of democratic principles. Appearing democratic, it seems, is the new democracy.

In the United States, Donald Trump has produced similar concerns, stoked by his ongoing claims of a stolen election. That has helped inspire efforts to change state laws to limit access to polls, and to stock election administration roles with allies, stoking fears that a free and fair vote may be overturned in a nation that was, until recently, a beacon for the world’s democracies.

The rub: Each of these leaders has been chosen by their people — or, at least, by democratic-style systems. “Globally, populists that undermine democratic norms have gained more traction in elections over the past 20 years,” says Douglas Page, a political scientist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.

This gradual rebranding of democracy for the 21st century has been exacerbated by leaders of more traditionally authoritarian governments who call their systems democratic, too. Even China’s Xi Jinping, never a democrat, has maneuvered his nation’s hybrid of communist tenets and market economy into a personality-driven rule that is presented as a form of democracy.

So when Putin orders the invasion of Ukraine in a manner that tacitly invokes democratic principles even as he circumvents them, he offers up a face of democracy as viewed through a glass, darkly. Experts say this is designed to give him cover as a democratic leader at home while allowing him to do pretty much what he wants elsewhere.

“The space he holds on the democratic scale, he is not a full-blown authoritarian leader. He doesn’t have the same means available to oppress his people. He still has democratic elements, even though they’re vanishing,” says Stefanie Kasparek, an assistant professor of government at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania who studies international political institutions.

Not that Putin has worried excessively about appearing democratic. At home, he has spent years harshly stamping out both public dissent and political opposition, targeting rivals and jailing opposition party leader Alexei Navalny, whom the Kremlin declared a terrorist last month. Nevertheless, says Kasparek, “There are democratic elements that he can’t fully ignore.”

That was illustrated Tuesday when Russia’s upper legislative house, the Federation Council, voted unanimously to allow Putin to use military force outside the country. Yet the ask — largely pro forma, given Putin’s level of authority — gave him cover to say that his actions were endorsed by democratic systems within his own nation.

“Democracy led to Putin being in power in the first place and has served him considerably as a tool to keep power,” Crystal Brown, a political and social scientist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts who studies the effect of institutions on global political systems, said in an email.

Why is the appearance of democracy — or, at least, the surface reliance on it even when a leader’s actions seem undemocratic — so important? It’s a complex question.

In Putin’s case, while his through-line may be a glorious re-aggregation of the Soviet Union, he is playing to a domestic audience that includes many who turned their back on that same communist-era collection of republics — and in some cases did so using democracy as a North Star. To them, the principle is important.

So Putin deploys raw power externally, in everything from his approach in Crimea to the online attacks on U.S. elections — and thus is able to flout the West, which holds itself up as democracy’s standard-bearer. Internally, he is constrained by the support he needs from those inside Russia wary of dictatorial authority being used against them.

This two-pronged approach to democracy — making a show of upholding the very tenets one is violating — is hardly limited to Putin. It has played out in other nations, with sometimes chaotic outcomes.

In the United States, for example, Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 election won by Joe Biden — an attempt to wipe away a democratic process — helped fuel the rage that produced the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters trying to overturn the outcome. Through it, Trump insisted he was the champion of democracy, not the one getting in its way.

“Everywhere these men make the same basic argument: The `neoliberal’ order merely pretends to be democratic, when in fact it is run by representatives of the `deep state’ who conspire to steal from ordinary people and undermine social order through the destruction of traditional moral values,” Hanson says.

“They portray themselves as the unique saviors of the traditional nation, and demand unconditional personal loyalty from all who serve them,” he said in an email. “That such a recipe for the destruction of democratic institutions has proven to be so potent around the world is one of the most remarkable developments of the early 21st century.”

What, then, might the unfolding of the Ukraine saga mean for democracy writ large? Biden insists the outcome is certain: “In the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake: Freedom will prevail,” Biden said in an address Thursday.

He made it sound obvious. But given recent years’ events — including those leading up to his inauguration — reality is less definitive. Democracy doesn’t always prevail. And even when it does take hold, its permanence isn’t guaranteed — a lesson that, just like during the Cold War, goes far beyond what’s happening in eastern Europe right now.

“The world does not want to enter into a large-scale conflict. That gives a lot of leeway for leaders to push those boundaries of democratic appearance without actually being democratic,” Kasparek says. “It’s effectively a game of chicken.”

In that metaphor, democracy itself is the car. But the problem with a game of chicken quickly becomes obvious: Eventually, inevitably, you crash.

___

Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has written about international affairs since 1995. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted

ANOTHER NAME FOR SEGREGATION

School choice movement gains momentum amid pandemic discontent

Mike Bebernes

·Senior Editor

Fri, February 25, 2022, 9:34 AM·7 min read

“The 360” shows you diverse perspectives on the day’s top stories and debates.

What’s happening

School choice, a movement seeking to give parents alternatives to public schools for their children, has made major gains across the United States amid widespread frustration with how schools have responded to the coronavirus pandemic.

Last year alone, seven states established new school choice programs, and 15 expanded their existing programs, according to the advocacy group EdChoice. Several more states may soon follow. School choice takes a variety of forms, but it broadly refers to any system that allows parents to take tax dollars designated for the public education of their child and spend the funds on some other form of schooling.

The most well-known form of school choice is vouchers, which are direct payments sent to families to cover tuition at a private school or other nonpublic alternative. Other systems provide the money to parents through tax credits or deposits in what are known as Education Savings Accounts. There were roughly 600,000 students in the U.S. taking part in school choice programs in the 2020-21 school year, according to EdChoice. One recent analysis found that new laws passed last year could mean an additional 1.6 million students participating in school choice nationwide. Even with its remarkable expansion, school choice still represents a small sliver of the country’s K-12 education system — which includes an estimated 50 million students attending public schools.

While both Democrats and Republicans have promoted alternatives to traditional public schooling, school choice has become increasingly partisan in recent years. Former President Donald Trump called school choice “the civil rights statement of the year,” and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was a strong proponent. Last year’s expansion of school choice happened almost exclusively in Republican-controlled areas of the country.

Why there’s debate

Advocates for school choice say that children should not have the quality of their schooling determined by their ZIP code. They argue that redirecting money from failing public schools will allow disadvantaged children to access a high-quality education that is currently available to only the rich — a change they say will disproportionately benefit students of color. “Funding students, not systems” is a common slogan used by proponents of school choice.

Others make an ethical-focused case, based on the principle that parents, not government bureaucrats, should decide what form of education works best for their kids. Some add that freeing families to choose their own educational models could help calm some of the intense fights over COVID rules and curriculum content that result from forcing people with disparate views to share a single school model.

Critics argue that school choice, at its core, is just a thinly veiled attack on the very institution of public education. They argue that siphoning money from already cash-strapped public schools represents “an existential threat” to the country’s ability to provide free education to every child. Increasing investment in public schools, they say, is the only true solution to educational inequities.

Others argue that rather than reducing segregation, school choice models make it more pronounced by empowering white students to abandon public schools. There are also deep concerns about having more students attend schools that exist outside the realm of government oversight. An investigation of private schools in Florida, for example, found that the state pumped nearly $1 billion into a private school system that was “so weakly regulated that some schools hire teachers without college degrees, hold classes in aging strip malls and falsify fire-safety and health records.” Other reports have tracked government funds going to schools that aggressively discriminate against LGBTQ students.

What’s next

The legal framework around school policies could be due for a major shift in the near future. The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in a case centering on the question of whether states are obligated to include religious schools — including ones with openly discriminatory views — in their voucher programs. A ruling in that case is expected this summer.

Perspectives

Supporters

School choice allows kids to escape broken schools that will stifle their potential

“The benefit will flow to thousands of students and families looking to escape the prison of low-performing public schools.” — Editorial, Wall Street Journal

Children should not be condemned to a poor education based on where they live

“Moving to a nearby school district is rarely an option considering the average home price in neighboring, better-performing suburban districts. Economically disadvantaged parents and guardians are then subject to de facto education ‘redlining,’ with the quality of a child’s school determined by his or her ZIP code. Families that want a different or better option but cannot afford one are out of luck.” — Paul Vallas, Chicago Tribune

Every family deserves the chance to seek out the education that fits them best

“Educators know that every child learns differently and not every learning environment is best suited for every student. In order to best serve students, we need to ensure that they have the ability to access an education that will help them reach their full potential.” — Noelani Kahapea, Washington Examiner

School choice can help calm the intense fights that are tearing apart the U.S. school system

“At a time when so many trends in American life have been bleak, this embrace of school choice is something to cheer. The more liberty parents have to choose how, where, and what their children learn, the more tolerant and peaceful America’s educational landscape will become.” — Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe

Throwing money at low-performing schools is not the solution

“Unlike investing more in the same underperforming public schools — which research shows does not correlate with improved student outcomes — school choice programs have improved student academic outcomes, empowering students to choose an education provider that works best for them.” — Cooper Conway, Orange County Register

School choice gives all students opportunities that are currently available to only the rich

“The greatest contributing factor to segregation today is that kids without choice are trapped in schools based on a zip code. … We need school choice for everyone, not just rich people.” — Reason editor Billy Binion

Critics

It’s dangerous to entrust unaccountable private schools with educating our children

“Our leaders hand public money to parents who hand it to private and parochial schools. … There is no real accountability for how the money is spent, not even a requirement that kids actually learn something.” — Laurie Roberts, Arizona Republic

School choice makes inequality in education even more severe

“Vouchers defund public schools. No matter how this reality is distorted or packaged, funding for schools is tied to enrollment. If students leave, funding decreases. Private schools exacerbate racial segregation — namely through white students leaving diverse public schools.” — T. Jameson Brewer, Atlanta Journal Constitution

The goal of many school choice advocates is eliminating the public school system entirely

“The end game is really to have an education system that the public doesn’t pay for. … It will be a stratified system, where wealthy kids receive the absolute best education; kids in the middle will probably receive a decent education; and kids that are poor and disadvantaged will sit in a big room in front of computers with someone standing at the door keeping them in.”⁠ — Carol Corbett Burris, public education advocate, to New Republic

The public deserves to have a say over what kind of education its tax dollars are funding

“Often, [parents] look for schools that already affirm their particular worldview or personal wishes for their child. This strips our communities of deliberation about what we want from our schools and what we desire for children collectively. The public loses the opportunity for voice and influence over how it spends public dollars. Communities lose the ability to determine what content schools should teach, which skills are necessary for our workforce, and the best ways to develop active citizens” — Sarah M. Stitzlein, Washington Post

Fixing education requires investing in public schools, not diverting funding from them

“If we truly want to ensure equitable education, [struggling] schools should be targeted for true reform, meaning investments in faculty development, leadership development, social and emotional learning, wraparound services, and other supports that would strengthen those schools and make them safe, welcoming, high-quality learning environments.” — Raymond Pierce, Forbes

Parents can influence their children’s education within the public school system

“Parents already have ‘choice’ about their public schools: They elect their local school board officials and have opportunities to speak out through a myriad of civic and advocacy organizations. … They can educate themselves about how our schools are funded and seek change through their elected representatives.” — Susan Burk and Denise Murden, Virginian-Pilot