Fleeing Sanctions, Oligarchs Seek Safe Ports for Superyachts

WASHINGTON — 

The superyacht Dilbar stretches nearly 140 meters in length. It has two helipads, berths for more than 130 people and a 25-meter swimming pool that itself can accommodate another superyacht.

Dilbar was launched in 2016 at a reported cost of more than $648 million. Five years later, its purported owner, the Kremlin-aligned Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, was already dissatisfied. He sent the vessel to a German shipyard last fall for a retrofit reportedly costing several hundred million dollars.

Dilbar was in drydock on Thursday when the United States and European Union announced economic sanctions against Usmanov — a metals magnate and early investor in Facebook — over his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and in retaliation for the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets,” President Joe Biden said during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, addressing Russian oligarchs. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”

Seizing the behemoth boats could prove challenging. Russian billionaires have had decades to shield their money and assets in the West from governments that might try to tax or seize them.

Several media outlets reported last week that German authorities had impounded the Dilbar. But a spokesperson for Hamburg state’s economy ministry told The Associated Press no such action had yet been taken because it had been unable to establish ownership of the yacht.

Dilbar is flagged in the Cayman Islands and registered to a holding company in Malta, banking havens where the global ultra-rich often park their wealth.

The Stella Maris yacht belonging to Rashid Sardarov is docked in Nice, France, Tuesday, March 1, 2022.

Working with the U.K.-based yacht valuation firm VesselsValue, the AP compiled a list of 56 superyachts — generally defined as luxury vessels exceeding 24 meters in length — believed to be owned by a few dozen Kremlin-aligned oligarchs. The yachts have a combined market value estimated at more than $5.4 billion.

The AP then used two online services — VesselFinder and MarineTraffic — to plot the last known locations of the yachts as relayed by their onboard tracking beacons.

Many are anchored in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. But more than a dozen were underway or had already arrived in remote ports in small nations such as the Maldives and Montenegro, potentially beyond the reach of Western sanctions. Three had gone dark, their transponders last pinging just outside the Bosporus in Turkey — gateway to the Black Sea and the southern Russian ports of Sochi and Novorossiysk.

Graceful, a German-built Russian-flagged superyacht believed to belong to Putin, left a repair yard in Hamburg, Germany, on Feb. 7, two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. It is now moored in the Russian Baltic port of Kaliningrad, beyond the reach of Western sanctions imposed against him this past week.

French authorities seized the superyacht Amore Vero on Thursday in the Mediterranean resort town of La Ciotat. The boat is believed to belong to Igor Sechin, a Putin ally who runs Russian oil giant Rosneft, which has been on the U.S. sanctions list since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

The French Finance Ministry said in a statement that customs authorities boarded the 88-meter Amore Vero and discovered its crew was preparing for an urgent departure, even though planned repair work wasn’t finished.

The 65-meter Lady M was seized by Italian authorities Friday while moored in the Riveria port town of Imperia. In a tweet announcing the seizure, a spokesman for Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said the yacht was the property of sanctioned steel baron Alexei Mordashov, listed as Russia’s wealthiest man with a fortune of about $30 billion.

But Mordashov’s larger superyacht, the 141-meter Nord, was safely at anchor on Friday in the Seychelles, a tropical island chain in the Indian Ocean not under the jurisdiction of U.S. or EU sanctions. Among the world’s biggest superyachts, Nord has a market value of $500 million.

“No, no self-respecting Russian oligarch would be without a superyacht,” said William Browder, a U.S.-born and now London-based financier who worked in Moscow for years before becoming one of the Putin regime’s most vocal foreign critics.

The yacht Amore Vero is docked in the Mediterranean resort of La Ciotat, France, March 3, 2022.

Russian metals and petroleum magnate Roman Abramovich is believed to have bought or built at least seven of the world’s largest yachts, some of which he has since sold off to other oligarchs.

Dennis Cauiser, a superyacht analyst with VesselsFinder, said the escalating U.S. and EU sanctions on Putin-aligned oligarchs and Russian banks have sent a chill through the industry, with boatbuilders and staff worried they won’t be paid. It can cost upwards of $50 million a year to crew, fuel and maintain a superyacht.

Most of the Russians on the annual Forbes list of billionaires have not yet been sanctioned by the United States and its allies, and their superyachts are still crushing the world’s oceans. The 72-meter-long Stella Maris, which was seen by an AP journalist docked this past week in Nice, France, is believed to be owned by Rashid Sardarov, a Russian billionaire oil and gas magnate.

The crash of the ruble and the tanking of Moscow stock market have depleted the fortunes of Russia’s elite. Cauiser said he expects some oligarch superyachts will soon quietly be listed by brokers at fire-sale prices.

On Thursday, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a new round of sanctions that included news release citing Usmanov’s close ties to Putin and photos of Dilbar and the oligarch’s private jet, a custom-built 64-meter Airbus A340-300 passenger liner.

“I believe that such a decision is unfair and the reasons employed to justify the sanctions are a set of false and defamatory allegations damaging my honor, dignity and business reputation,” Usmanov said in a statement issued through the website of the International Fencing Federation, of which he has served as president since 2008.

Abramovich has not yet been sanctioned. Members of the British Parliament have criticized Prime Minister Boris Johnson for not going after Abramovich’s U.K.-based assets, which include the professional soccer club Chelsea. Under mounting pressure, the oligarch announced this past week he would sell the $2.5 billion team and give the net proceeds “for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, location transponders showed the 162-meter Solaris — launched by Abramovich in 2010 with an undersea bay that reportedly holds a mini-sub – was moored in Barcelona, Spain, on Saturday. Abramovich’s $600 million Eclipse, eight stories tall and on the water since last year, set sail from St. Maarten late Thursday and is under way in the Caribbean Sea, destination undisclosed.

Harvard Senior's Disney-Inspired Korean Musical a Hit Online

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSSETTS — 

Disney has done the frozen Nordic princess, the Chinese warrior princess and many others in between. But a Korean princess? Not so much.

Harvard University student Julia Riew has set out to fix that. The 22-year-old Korean American senior wrote “Shimcheong: A Folktale” — a full-length musical inspired by a Korean folktale with a decidedly Disney movie vibe — as her senior thesis.

She’s been releasing snippets of it on TikTok since January, and has quickly amassed a passionate following with the short videos that show her transforming into an animated Disney princess as she belts out her songs.

Riew has even sparked interest from Hollywood and theater producers, while supporters have taken to creating visuals and animations to help bring her story to life.

“It honestly still feels like I’m dreaming,” she said recently. “It’s been heartwarming to see the reaction, especially among the Korean American community.”

Riew, who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, before her family moved to New York City and then Connecticut, hopes the musical follows the same trajectory of others successfully workshopped and crowdsourced on TikTok in recent years.

“Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical” debuted in 2020 as a benefit concert featuring Adam Lambert, Wayne Brady and other stars after the idea percolated for months on the social media platform among musical theater fans and out-of-work performers.

Last year, the female duo known as Barlow & Bear went viral on TikTok with a song inspired by the soapy Netflix period drama “Bridgerton.” That led to “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical,” a 15-song album now up for a Grammy — a first for a TikTok collaboration.

Riew’s musical draws on the Korean folktale “The Blind Man’s Daughter,” about a young woman who tries to restore her blind father’s sight but ends up in the faraway Dragon Kingdom.

In Riew’s version, the young Shimcheong spends years growing up in the magical realm before setting out on an epic journey home. Along the way, truths are revealed, obstacles are overcome and there’s no shortage of laughs and catchy songs.

Julia Riew poses outside Lowell House, on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 16, 2022.

If that sounds like the plot for many of Disney’s most beloved works, that’s the point, says Riew, who grew up on a steady diet of Disney and Broadway soundtracks and began writing her own songs and musicals at a young age.

“What stood out to me is that it’s a story about a young woman who goes on an adventure,” she explains. “There aren’t too many stories in Korean folklore about women, especially ones where they go on adventures.”

Disney has historically struggled to reflect the diversity of its audience, falling back on stories featuring predominantly white characters and stereotypical depictions of non-white cultures, says Jana Thomas, a media and communications professor at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, who researches social media and has also written about representation in Disney films.

But the entertainment giant has responded to calls for more representative works and found success, from 2016’s Moana to Coco, Soul, Raya and the Last Dragon, and last year’s hit Encanto, she said. Turning Red, an animated film Disney’s Pixar studios is set to release next week, features a teenage Chinese-Canadian protagonist.

“Julia’s use of TikTok to build a fanbase and attract the attention of Disney was a well-executed move,” Thomas adds. “She used a social media platform preferred by a user demographic that support her goal to increase representation within media and entertainment. I’d love to see Julia’s story be an example for others who want to maximize the proactive and positive power of social media.”

Spokespeople for Disney didn’t respond to an email seeking comment this week. But even if the film studio doesn’t come calling, Riew is optimistic Shimcheong will live on after she graduates and embarks on a career as a musical composer and lyricist. She’s already hired an agent to help navigate some of the early discussions.

“It seems at this point the project will be moving forward,” she said. “Not sure yet if that means as a stage production, as an indie film or something else, but there definitely has been some interest.”

Riew says she’s long toyed with the idea of a musical drawing from her Korean heritage but only seriously started working on it after the coronavirus pandemic hit and she ended up moving back home because campus was shuttered.

Riew admits she struggled at times to write the story and questioned if it was appropriate for her, as a third generation Korean American, to tell it.

“There were moments where I tried to quit, when I felt like I was a fake Korean,” she said. “But I realized over the process that we can only really represent our own story, and that’s totally okay. There’s no such thing as one way to be Korean.”

Putting the videos up on TikTok hasn’t just helped generate buzz for the project — it’s also helped her refine it.

Riew says she changed the character of Lotus, Shimcheong’s sidekick and the story’s comic relief, from a dragon to a gumiho — a mythical nine-tail fox in Korean folklore — based on feedback from supporters.

“It’s been reinvigorating,” she said of putting out her work to the sometimes critical eye of social media. “It’s been eye-opening to realize how many people would love to see this come to fruition.”

Ukrainian Woman Weds Chicago Fiancé Ahead Of Return Home

CHICAGO — 

When Russia invaded her home country of Ukraine, Maria decided she had to get there and help defend it — even if it meant leaving her fiancé behind in Chicago days after getting married.

Maria and her fiancé, David, married Saturday before about 20 people in the backyard of an Oak Park home — the venue offered last minute after Maria asked for advice in a neighborhood Facebook group. The couple met last year and got engaged in October.

On Monday, she plans to fly to Poland, then make her way to the Ukrainian border, ultimately aiming to volunteer to fight for her home country.

“People are running out of there and she is running in,” said a friend at the wedding, Pamela Chinchilla of Lombard.

Seven guests at the wedding brought medical supplies, masks and other items for Maria to take to Ukraine. People hugged each other, and Maria at one point spoke with family members in Odesa.

Maria, who asked that her last name not be published because she fears for her family’s safety in Ukraine and the U.S., said she lived with her parents in Kyiv until 1991 when the family moved to Poland.

For Maria, a previous marriage ended in divorce. She met her ex-husband while studying music in Austria and more than 20 years ago they moved to his hometown of Chicago — which has the second-largest Ukrainian-born population among U.S. cities.

Since the war began, she used messages and calls through Facebook to keep in touch with her parents, who have been sheltering in a parking garage during attacks on Ukraine’s largest port city of Odesa. But she said she has been unable to reach cousins in Kyiv in recent days.

Pamela Chinchilla looks through donations before Maria and David get married at a home, March 5, 2022, in Oak Park, Ill.

Three days into the invasion, Maria made up her mind to return to Ukraine, determined to find some way to be useful. She said she doesn’t have medical or military training but worries that a Russian takeover of Ukraine will embolden the country to threaten more places around the world.

“I have to go,” Maria, 44, said. “I can’t do protests or fundraising or wave flags. We’ve done this since 2015, Ukrainians, and I just can’t do it anymore.”

Her fiancé refused to stay behind despite Maria’s resistance to him accompanying her. But since David first needs to apply for a passport, she plans to leave Monday and wait in Poland before crossing the border.

“He knows how stubborn I am and knew he’d have no chance to convince me otherwise,” Maria said.

David, 42, said he feels a responsibility to do what he can to keep her safe.

“Because complacency and compliance are pretty much the same thing,” he said. “And you can only turn a blind eye to people being bullied for so long. And if it happens to them, it might be you next.”

He also asked that his last name not be published to avoid endangering Maria’s family.

Ukraine’s forces are outnumbered and outgunned, but their resistance did prevent a swift Russian victory. Ukrainian leaders called on citizens to join in guerrilla war this week as Russian forces gained ground on the coast and took over one major port city.

Associated Press reporters at the border checkpoint in Medyka in southeastern Poland found Ukrainians lining up to return from other countries in Europe in recent days in response to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s call for volunteers to come assist the country’s military.

The White House has since urged Americans not to travel to Ukraine, but Maria and David said that didn’t change their plans.

Newlywed Maria toasts with friends during her wedding ceremony at a home, March 5, 2022, in Oak Park, Ill.

The couple had planned to be married at a courthouse on March 5, a nod to Maria’s grandmother’s birthday.

After deciding they would try to reach Ukraine, they accepted the offer to hold a backyard celebration. They also asked people to purchase items needed by Ukrainian troops through an Amazon list that includes rain ponchos, medical supplies and boots rather than wedding gifts.

Maria said she’s not certain what she will have to do after arriving at the Polish border with Ukraine; friends who live near border crossings have told her it’s taking days to get through. Her parents also questioned her decision to volunteer, she said, because they don’t want to be worried about her safety on top of their own.

“If the army doesn’t take us, we’ll be as close as possible,” Maria said Wednesday. “There’s always a need for volunteers. I’m pretty strong, I’m not afraid of blood, I’m good under pressure.”

Natalia Blauvelt, a Chicago immigration attorney who has assisted dozens of clients trying to help family leave Ukraine and Russia in recent weeks, said she hasn’t heard of others seeking to get into Ukraine in order to join the country’s defense.

But she advised that anyone considering it contact the Ukrainian Embassy in the U.S. and speak with an immigration attorney to talk through plans for returning to the U.S.

War in Ukraine Complicates Path Home for American Detainees

Washington — 

The already challenging path to bringing home Americans jailed in Russia and Ukraine is likely even more complicated now with a war overwhelming the region and increasingly hostile relations between the United States and the Kremlin.

Marine veteran Trevor Reed and corporate security executive Paul Whelan are each serving lengthy prison sentences in Russia, but their families have long held out hope for some sort of deal — including a possible prisoner exchange — that could get their loved ones home.

Now, though, that seems a much harder ask.

“I can’t help but think that this is not going to help Trevor get released sooner, obviously,” Reed’s mother, Paula Reed, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The war with Ukraine has not only occupied global attention, but it has also led to punishing economic sanctions by the U.S. and escalating Russian aggression in the face of international condemnation over its invasion. Though the conflict has not closed off avenues for bringing home Reed and Whelan, the prospect of concessions by either side anytime soon is eclipsed by the likelihood of continued antagonism by Russia.

“If this becomes long and drawn out, and they take over Ukraine, then the Western countries and the United States are going to be at odds with Russia for a long time,” said Reed’s father, Joey Reed. “That could lead to additional charges against our son, if he lives, and keep him there indefinitely, which is not uncommon in Russia.”

He said he was particularly concerned about a loss of communications between the two superpowers that could foreclose any possibility of the U.S. government getting him home.

“We’ve been told that even during the Cold War, they kept channels open. Even Kennedy was able to talk to Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis,” Reed said. “Anyone that’s advocating for closing embassies and cutting them off, that’s a gigantic mistake when two major nuclear powers are not speaking and are at odds with each other.”

State Department principal deputy press spokeswoman Jalina Porter, asked by the AP Thursday about how the war affected the cases of all three men, said only that the administration’s top priority is the “safety and security of all Americans,” including Reed and Whelan.

“This is something that the secretary works on day in and day out,” she said.

FILE – Joey and Paula Reed pose for a photo with a portrait of their son Marine veteran and Russian prisoner Trevor Reed at their home in Fort Worth, Texas, Feb. 15, 2022.

Reed, who is from Texas, was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2020 on charges that he assaulted police officers who were driving him to a police station after picking him up following a night of heavy drinking at a party. He has struggled with health issues behind bars, most recently coughing up blood this week, his father said.

He is regarded by the U.S. government as a wrongful detainee, as is Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison on espionage-related charges that his family says are entirely bogus.

Whelan’s sister, Elizabeth, said she’s been “doom-scrolling” news about the war on Twitter like everyone else, concerned about the impact of the war on her brother and the possibility of another “Iron Curtain” falling in the region.

She said the U.S. could use the conflict as a fresh opportunity to press for the release of Reed and Whelan by making it a condition of any lifting of the sanctions against Russia, though it is not clear that that would happen.

“I can’t imagine that all of these oligarchs whose families are now being affected, whose assets and goods are now being affected, wouldn’t consider the release of Paul and Trevor a very small price to pay in order to get some relief themselves,” Whelan said.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is holding North Dakota farmer Kurt Groszhans, accused in a plot to assassinate a current member of the country’s political cabinet. His family and supporters say the charges are trumped up, and were designed to silence Groszhan’s own allegations of government corruption in Ukraine.

Kristi Magnusson, Groszhan’s sister, said in a statement provided to AP that she was concerned that the State Department was not “advocating for his release because it would be inferring that Ukraine is engaged in corrupt activities right at a time when State is focused on being as supportive as possible of Ukraine against the Russians.

“We support the Ukrainian people against Russia as well, but our brother is a sitting duck in that prison and we need him to be released so at least he can try to survive on his own,” she added.

Unlike Reed and Whelan, the U.S. has not designated Groszhans as a wrongful detainee.

Mastercard, Visa Suspend Operations in Russia After Invasion

NEW YORK — 

Mastercard and Visa are suspending their operations in Russia, the companies said Saturday, in the latest blow to the country’s financial system after its invasion of Ukraine.

Mastercard said cards issued by Russian banks will no longer be supported by its network and any Mastercard issued outside the country will not work at Russian stores or ATMs.

“We don’t take this decision lightly,” Mastercard said in a statement, adding that it made the move after discussions with customers, partners and governments.

Visa said it’s working with clients and partners in Russia to cease all Visa transactions over the coming days.

“We are compelled to act following Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and the unacceptable events that we have witnessed,” Visa Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Al Kelly said in a statement.

The twin suspensions were announced within 16 minutes of each other, and they followed a private video call earlier in the day between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and U.S. lawmakers. During that conversation, Zelenskyy “asked us to turn off MasterCard and Visa for Russia,” Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat from California, tweeted. “I agree,” he added, before Mastercard and Visa made their announcements.

Earlier in the week, Visa and Mastercard had announced more limited moves to block financial institutions from the networks that serve as arteries for the payments system. Russian people have already been hit hard by heavy sanctions and financial penalties imposed by the U.S. government and others.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, the value of the Russian currency, the ruble, has plunged by more than a third to a record low. That’s pushing up inflation for Russian households, and all the fear has helped cause long lines at ATMs.

Many other companies around the world have also made moves to increase the financial pressure on Russia and its people because of its attack on Ukraine. Some are selling their stakes in Russian companies, such as energy giant BP, while others like Harley-Davidson halted product shipments to the country.

“This war and the ongoing threat to peace and stability demand we respond in line with our values,” Visa’s Kelly said.

The moves by Mastercard and Visa could make real differences to their bottom lines. Russia accounted for 4% of all of Visa’s net revenue in its last fiscal year, including money made from domestic and cross-border activities. Ukraine accounted for about 1%, Visa said in a filing with U.S. securities regulators this week.

Mastercard said in its own filing that about 4% of its net revenues during 2021 came from business conducted within, into and out of Russia. Another roughly 2% was related to Ukraine.

Biden, Zelenskyy Discuss Raising Cost of War for Russia

U.S. President Joe Biden spoke Saturday night with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They talked about the work the United States, its allies, partners and private industry are doing to raise the cost of the war for Russia.

Biden said his administration is ramping up security, economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and is working with Congress for more funding.

Zelenskyy himself met virtually earlier Saturday with more than 300 people, including senators, some House members and aides, delivering a “desperate plea” to send more planes to help the country fight the Russian invasion, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken conferred Saturday with Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau in Rzeszow, on the border with Ukraine.

Blinken crossed into Ukraine briefly to meet Foreign Minister Dymtro Kuleba, who asked for more military assistance to defeat Russia.

After the meeting with his Polish counterpart, Blinken reiterated at a news conference that the United States “will defend every inch of NATO territory” and announced the Biden administration is preparing to allocate an additional $2.75 billion in humanitarian aid for Ukrainian refugees.

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a video address announcing the start of the military operation in eastern Ukraine, in Moscow, in a still image taken from video footage released Feb. 24, 2022.

Blinken also praised Poland for assisting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have fled their home country, saying, “The people of Poland know how important it is to defend freedom.”

Rau said, “Poland will never recognize territorial changes brought about by unprovoked, unlawful aggression.”

While Zelenskyy has criticized NATO for not imposing a no-fly zone, Putin said during a meeting Saturday with Aeroflot workers that such a zone would have “colossal and catastrophic consequences not only for Europe but also for the whole world.”

Additionally, Putin said he currently has no plans to declare martial law in Russia because “martial law should be only introduced in cases where there is external aggression,” adding, “we are not experiencing that at the moment, and I hope we won’t.”

Ukrainian civilians receive weapons training in Lviv, Ukraine, March 5, 2022.

Blinken flew on to Moldova Saturday night to show support to the small country, which has its own breakaway region, as it takes in tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine.

On the ground

The Russians are dropping large bombs on the city of Chernihiv, north of the capital, Kyiv, a regional official said.

“Usually, this weapon is used against military-industrial facilities and fortified structures,” regional head Vyacheslav Chaus told The Associated Press. “But in Chernihiv, against residential areas.”

He posted a photo of what he said was an undetonated, a Soviet-designed 500-kilogram bomb.

Aid to Ukraine

Ukraine says Russian forces are shelling evacuation routes from Mariupol, as well as the city itself, breaking a cease-fire that was to have gone into effect Saturday at 7 a.m. UTC, as the southern coastal city continued to endure days of relentless aerial attacks.

“We are simply being destroyed,” Mayor Vadym Boichenko said of his city of nearly 450,000 people on his Telegram channel.

Volnovakha, a southern city of about 21,000, also was targeted with Russian “heavy artillery” attacks during the temporary cease-fire, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Saturday in a broadcast video.

Russia’s Defense Ministry, however, accused Ukrainian “nationalists” of preventing civilians from fleeing Mariupol, according to RIA, Russia’s state-owned news agency. It cited no evidence to substantiate these claims.

Despite its heavy shelling of Mariupol and Volnovakha, there were fewer Russian aerial and artillery attacks in Ukraine over the past 24 hours compared with previous days, the British Defense Ministry tweeted Saturday on day 10 of Russia’s attack on its western neighbor.

Ukraine-Donetsk-Luhansk-Crimea-map

The ministry said Ukraine continued to control the northern cities of Kharkiv and Chernihiv, as well as Mariupol in the southeast. The ministry cited reports of street fighting in the northeastern city of Sumy and said “it is highly likely that all four cities are encircled by Russian forces” as they advance toward the southwestern city of Odesa.

A shipment of satellite-internet equipment arrived Saturday in Kyiv, from Starlink. Mayor Vitali Klitschko showed off the equipment, which will help Ukrainian cities whose internet has been knocked out by Russian shelling.

The number of Ukrainians seeking refuge in other countries could reach 1.5 million by the end of the weekend, the head of the U.N. Refugee Agency said Saturday, an increase from the 1.3 million who have fled.

A Polish border guard guides people at the Ukrainian-Polish border crossing in Korczowa, Poland, March 5, 2022.

Amin Awad, U.N. crisis coordinator for Ukraine, who is meeting in Ukraine with local and international officials, said in a statement Saturday that efforts are underway “to urgently find operational modalities to scale up operations across lines and from outside into areas impacted by the conflict.”

VOA State Department Bureau chief Nike Ching, National Security correspondent Jeff Seldin, Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb, Istanbul foreign correspondent Heather Murdock, White House correspondent Anita Powell, and senior diplomatic correspondent Cindy Saine contributed to this report.

Some information for this report came from The Associate Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.

American Basketball Star Brittney Griner Arrested in Russia on Drug Charges

WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner was arrested last month at a Moscow airport after Russian authorities said a search of her luggage revealed vape cartridges.

The Russian Customs Service said Saturday that the cartridges were identified as containing oil derived from cannabis, which could carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. The customs service identified the person arrested as a player for the U.S. women’s team and did not specify the date of her arrest. Russian media reported the player was Griner, and her agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, did not dispute those reports.

“We are aware of the situation with Brittney Griner in Russia and are in close contact with her, her legal representation in Russia, her family, her teams, and the WNBA and NBA,” Kagawa Colas said Saturday. “As this is an ongoing legal matter, we are not able to comment further on the specifics of her case but can confirm that as we work to get her home, her mental and physical health remain our primary concern.”

On Saturday, the State Department issued a “do not travel” advisory for Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine and urged all U.S. citizens to depart immediately, citing factors including “the potential for harassment against U.S. citizens by Russian government security officials” and “the Embassy’s limited ability to assist” Americans in Russia.

Griner, who plays for the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, has played in Russia for the last seven years in the winter, earning over $1 million per season — more than quadruple her WNBA salary. She last played for her Russian team UMMC Ekaterinburg on Jan. 29 before the league took a two-week break in early February for the FIBA World Cup qualifying tournaments.

More than a dozen WNBA players were playing in Russia and Ukraine this winter, including league MVP Jonquel Jones and Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigley of the champion Chicago Sky. The WNBA confirmed Saturday that all players besides Griner had left both countries.

The 31-year-old Griner has won two Olympic gold medals with the U.S., a WNBA championship with the Mercury and a national championship at Baylor. She is a seven-time All-Star.

“Brittney Griner has the WNBA’s full support and our main priority is her swift and safe return to the United States,” the league said in a statement.

Blinken Hears Harrowing Tales From Refugees Fleeing Ukraine

Korczowa, Poland — 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Saturday visited a welcome center set up by Polish authorities in what once was a shopping mall in Korczowa, close to the border with Ukraine, where roughly 3,000 refugees are taking shelter after the Russian invasion of their homeland.

While at the border later, Blinken stepped briefly onto Ukrainian soil to meet Foreign Minister Dymtro Kuleba, who predicted Russia would be defeated but appealed for more military assistance to lower the cost in lives that he said victory will require.

At the refugee center, America’s top diplomat heard harrowing tales from mothers and their children who described long and perilous journeys — and the shock of the sudden disruption and the fear for their lives — after fleeing the devastation of the war.

“Near our home we heard bombs,” said Venera Ahmadi, 12, who said she came with her brother and sister, six dogs and seven cats from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, more than 600 kilometers (372 miles) away. “We walked to the border, I don’t know how many hours. We crossed the border on foot.”

Her 16-year-old sister, Jasmine, said: “I was scared I would die.”

Natalia Kadygrob, 48, reached the center with her four adopted children from Kropyvnytskyi, almost 800 kilometers (about 500 miles) by bus on their way to her brother’s home in Germany. Her husband stayed behind.

“There they bombed planes at the airport,” she said. “Of course we were afraid.”

Tatyana, 58, who wouldn’t give her last name, came with her daughter, Anna, 37, and her 6- and 1-year-old daughters, Katya and Kira, from Kharkiv, about 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) away. “They were shooting on the street,” Tatyana said. Anna said her home had been destroyed by a shell or a rocket.

She was in the basement with her daughters when the explosion happened. “They should be in school,” Anna said. “They are children, they don’t understand.”

Blinken then met with Kuleba on a visit to the Korczowa border crossing where Polish authorities escorted small groups of refugees — about 20 at a time — across the frontier from the Ukrainian town of Krakovets as sporadic snow flakes fell from a gray sky.

Groups mainly of women, children and elderly men — grimly rolling their possessions in luggage and carrying infants and the occasional family pet — made their way into makeshift processing centers set up in tents on Polish territory.

The foreign minister said he wanted to convey a simple message: “Ukraine will win this war because this is the people’s war for their land and we defend the right course.” He added, “The question is the price, the price of our victory.”

Kubela said that if Ukraine’s allies “continue to take bold, systemic decisions to step up economic and political pressure on (Russia), if they continue to provide us with necessary weapons, the price will be lower” and “this will save many lives in Ukraine.”

Blinken praised Kuleba, President Volodmyr Zelenskyy and other officials for their courage and “inspiring” leadership during the crisis. He said support for Ukraine and pressure on Russia to end the war would increase “until this war of choice is brought to an end.”

Kuleba thanked Blinken for the support so far but said Ukraine needed even more if his country’s predicted victory was not to come at too high a cost. He lamented that NATO on Friday had rejected appeals from nonmember Ukraine and others to set up a no-fly zone over the country.

“We are now in the phase where maybe saying ‘No, we’re not going to do that’, but the time will come,” Kuleba said. “It’s again the issue of price. It is the people of Ukraine who will pay the price for the reluctance of NATO to act.”

Blinken earlier was in the city of Rzeszow for talks with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau a day after attending a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels. The alliance pledged to step up support for eastern flank members such as Poland to counter the Russian invasion. Poland is seeking more U.S. forces on its territory, where there are currently more than 10,000 American troops.

Rau said Poland had already taken in more than 700,000 refugees from Ukraine and that he expected hundreds of thousands more in the coming weeks unless Russia backs down.

“Poland will never recognize territorial changes brought about by unprovoked, unlawful aggression,” he said, adding that his country will demand that alleged Russian war crimes committed in Ukraine will be prosecuted.

Morawiecki and Blinken discussed stepping up sanctions and freezes of assets on Russia, which Morawiecki said should be “crushing” for Russia’s economy. No Russian banks should be exempted from the exclusions from the SWIFT system, he said. Currently, all but the largest Russian banks have been kicked off the financial messaging service.

Pulitzer Winner Walter Mears Dies, AP’s ‘Boy On The Bus’

WASHINGTON — 

Walter R. Mears, who for 45 years fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it, has died. He was 87.

“I could produce a story as fast as I could type,” Mears once acknowledged — and he was a fast typist. He became the AP’s Washington bureau chief and the wire service’s executive editor and vice president, but he always returned to the keyboard, and to covering politics.

Mears died Thursday at his apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight days after being diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer, said his daughters Susan Mears of Boulder, Colorado, and Stephanie Mears of Austin, Texas, who were with him.

They said he was visited on his last night by a minister, with whom he discussed Alf Landon, the losing Republican presidential candidate in 1936, a year after his birth.

Mears’ ability to find the essence of a story while it was still going on and to get it to the wire — and to newspapers and broadcasters around the world — became legend among peers. In 1972, Timothy Crouse featured Mears in The Boys on the Bus, a book chronicling the efforts and antics of reporters covering that year’s presidential campaign.

Crouse recounted how, immediately after a political debate, a reporter from The Boston Globe called out to the man from AP: “Walter, what’s our lead? What’s the lead, Walter?” The question became a catchphrase among political reporters to describe the search for the most newsworthy aspect of an event — the lead. “Made me moderately famous,” Mears cracked in 2005.

FILE – In this 1976 file photo, Associated Press Special Correspondent Walter R. Mears, right, talks with presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in Concord, N.H., before the New Hampshire Primary.

It was a natural question. Mears had to bang out stories about campaign debates while they were still underway. Newspaper editors would see his lead on the wire before their own reporters filed their stories. So it was defensive for others on the press bus to wonder what Mears was leading with, and to ask him.

Early in his Washington career, he was assigned to write updates on the 1962 congressional elections. His bureau chief asked a senior colleague to size up how Mears worked under pressure and report back. “Mears writes faster than most people think,” the evaluator wrote, then, tongue in cheek, “and sometimes faster than he thinks.”

“Walter’s impact at the AP, and in the journalism industry as a whole, is hard to overstate,” said Julie Pace, AP executive editor and senior vice president. “He was a champion for a free and fair press, a dogged reporter, an elegant chronicler of history and an inspiration to countless journalists, including myself.”

Kathleen Carroll, a former AP executive editor, said he taught generations of journalists “how to watch and listen and ask and explain.”

“Walter was also a wonderful human being,” she said. “He loved his family — being a grandfather was one of the great joys of his life. He loved golf and the Red Sox, in that order. He loved politics and he loved the AP.”

Mears didn’t seem to mind being known as a pacesetter. “I came away with a slogan not of my making, but one that stuck for the rest of my career,” he recalled in his 2003 memoir, Deadlines Past. Over four decades, Mears covered 11 presidential campaigns, from Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 to Bush-Gore in 2000, as well as the political conventions, the campaigns, debates, the elections and, finally, the pomp and promise of the inaugurations.

In tribute, Jules Witcover, who covered politics for The Sun in Baltimore, said Mears combined speed and accuracy with an eye for the telling detail.

“His uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any story and relate it in spare, lively prose showed the way for a generation of wire service disciples, and he did so with a zest for the nomad’s life on the campaign trail,” Witcover said.

FILE – President Bill Clinton is interviewed by Associated Press reporters, White House correspondent Terry Hunt, second from right and AP special correspondent Walter Mears, aboard Air Force One en route to Brunei, on Nov. 14, 2000.

At other times in his career, Mears served AP as Washington bureau chief and as the wire service’s primary news executive, the executive editor in the New York headquarters. But he missed writing and went back to it.

He left once, to be Washington bureau chief for The Detroit News, but returned to AP nine months later. “I couldn’t take the pace,” he said. “It was too slow.”

In 1977 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work covering the election in which Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated a sitting president, Gerald R. Ford, who had inherited his office through the resignation in disgrace of Richard M. Nixon.

It was the Pulitzer, not the Crouse catchphrase, for which Mears thought he would be remembered. Asked to address a later crop of Pulitzer winners, he told them they would never have to wonder what would be the first words of their obituaries: They would be, he said, “Pulitzer Prize-winning.”

Winning his Pulitzer, Mears said, was “the sweetest moment in a career that is like no other line of work.”

In his lead paragraphs, Mears captured the essence of events, not just the words but the music.

• When the 1968 Democrats, in a convention held in the midst of antiwar rioting on the streets of Chicago, finally chose their nominee, he wrote: “Hubert H. Humphrey, apostle of the politics of joy, won the Democratic presidential nomination tonight under armed guard.”
• When, earlier that year, a gunman killed John Kennedy’s brother: “Robert F. Kennedy died of gunshot wounds early today, prey like his president brother to the savagery of an assassin.”
• And, in 1976, when former peanut farmer Carter took the presidency from its accidental occupant: “In the end, the improbable Democrat beat the unelected Republican.”

Said Terry Hunt, former AP White House correspondent and deputy bureau chief in Washington: “You can’t talk about Walter without using the word legendary. He was a brilliant writer, astonishingly fast, colorful and compelling.”

David Espo, former special correspondent and assistant Washington bureau chief agreed. “No one ever wrote faster or with more clarity, nor worked harder and made it look easier than Walter did,” he said. “He took care to mentor those less talented than he, in other words, all of us.”

Mears was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and grew up in Lexington, the son of an executive of a chemical company. He graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1956 and within a week joined the AP in Boston.

In those days, news was written on typewriters and transmitted on teletypes. “They were slow and they clattered,” Mears once wrote, “but the din was music to me.”

His first assignment was far from the din. He single-handedly covered the Vermont Legislature. “It was fun covering a citizen legislature with a representative from every hamlet in the state” — 276 of them, he recalled years later, including one elected by his townspeople to keep the fellow from being eligible for welfare.

Mears covered John F. Kennedy in 1960 whenever Kennedy campaigned in New England and covered Barry Goldwater’s hapless race against Lyndon Johnson four years later. He was back at it every presidential year, even after he retired in 2001.

On election night, 2008, he wrote an analysis of Barack Obama’s victory, and the challenge before him.

“Obama is the future,” he wrote, “and it begins now, in troubled times, for a president-elect with a costly agenda of promises that would be difficult to deliver in far better economic circumstances.”

No cheerleading from Mears there. He didn’t believe in reporters expressing political opinions and he kept his own to himself. Although he got to know the candidates he covered, sometimes shared after-hour drinks and played golf with them, he always addressed them by their titles.

He considered a distance between newsperson and newsmaker to be appropriate. He once explained: “I can’t really say I ever felt close to any of them, maybe because I always felt that there’s a line there, there’s sort of a reserve that I think needs to be maintained because you’re not covering a friend. You’re covering somebody who’s trying to convince the American people to give him the most important job they’ve got at their command.”

After retiring, Mears taught journalism for a time at the University of North Carolina and made his home there, in Chapel Hill.

His wife, Frances, died in January 2019. His first wife and their two children were killed in a house fire in 1962. Mears directed that a portion of his ashes be distributed with Frances’ remains and the rest in Massachusetts with those of his first wife and two children lost in the fire.

As Vaccine Demand Falls, US States Left With Huge Stockpile

As demand for COVID-19 vaccines collapses in many areas of the U.S., states are scrambling to use stockpiles of doses before they expire and have to be added to the millions that have already gone to waste.

From some of the least vaccinated states, like Indiana and North Dakota, to some of the most vaccinated states, like New Jersey and Vermont, public health departments are shuffling doses around in the hopes of finding providers that can use them.

State health departments told The Associated Press they have tracked millions of doses that went to waste, including ones that expired, were in a multi-dose vial that couldn’t be used completely or had to be tossed for some other reason like temperature issues or broken vials.

Nearly 1.5 million doses in Michigan, 1.45 million in North Carolina, 1 million in Illinois and almost 725,000 doses in Washington couldn’t be used.

The percentage of wasted doses in California is only about 1.8%, but in a state that has received 84 million doses and administered more than 71 million of them, that equates to roughly 1.4 million doses. Providers there are asked to keep doses until they expire, then properly dispose of them, the California Department of Public Health said.

The national rate of wasted doses is about 9.5% of the more than 687 million doses that have been delivered as of late February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. That equates to about 65 million doses.

The problem is not unique to the U.S. More than a million doses of the Russian Sputnik vaccine expired this week in Guatemala, because nobody wanted to take the shot.

Vaccination program managers say that tossing out doses is inevitable in any inoculation campaign because of the difficulty in aligning supply and demand for a product with a limited shelf life.

But the coronavirus pandemic has killed nearly 6 million people and shattered economies across the globe, and every dose that goes to waste feels like a missed opportunity considering how successful the vaccines are in preventing death and serious disease.

It also comes only about a year after people desperate to get the vaccine attempted to jump in line to get ahead of those deemed higher priority. Hospital board members, their trustees and donors around the U.S. got early access or offers for vaccinations, raising complaints about favoritism and inequity at a time when the developing world had virtually no doses.

And many poorer nations still have low vaccine rates, including 13 countries in Africa with less than 5% of their population fully vaccinated. T hey are plagued by unpredictable deliveries, weak health care systems, vaccine hesitancy and some supply issues, although health officials say inventory is markedly stronger than earlier in the pandemic.

In fact, supplies are so strong that the CDC now advises doctors that it’s OK to discard doses if it means opening up the standard multi-dose vials to vaccinate a single person and the rest has to be tossed.

“Pivoting to what’s happening now, you have much more production and distribution to low-income countries,” said Dr. Joseph Bresee, who directs the COVID-19 Vaccine Implementation Program at the Task Force for Global Health in Decatur, Georgia. “The issue of some stockpiles in the U.S., Germany and Japan, that are not redistributed to sub-Saharan Africa, it’s less of an acute problem now because vaccine production and distribution is in high-gear right now serving those low-income countries.”

The Department of Health and Human Services also said that redistributing states’ excess doses to other nations is not feasible because of the difficulty in transporting the shots, which must remain cold, in addition to not being cost effective because of the relatively small number concentrated at sites.

Of the more than 687 million doses sent to states, 550 million to 600 million have been administered, HHS said Monday. The vaccines authorized in the U.S., made by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, can last for up to about six months from the time of manufacture.

A senior HHS official familiar with vaccine distribution plans took issue with the word “wastage,” saying it implies mismanagement when states are effectively overseeing their inventories. The CDC, however, uses the term “wastage” on its website and asks states to report their numbers.

The CDC said Thursday that the federal government, jurisdictions and vaccine providers have a strong partnership to get as many people vaccinated as possible while reducing vaccine wastage, and that the likelihood of leaving unused doses in a vial may increase as demand slows, even when providers continue to follow best practices to use every dose possible.

The fading demand comes as the pandemic itself wanes in the U.S. On Thursday, the CDC said about 90% of the U.S. population lives in counties where the risk of coronavirus is posing a low or medium threat — meaning residents don’t need to wear masks in most indoor settings. That was up from 70% last week.

FILE – Prepared Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine syringes wait for patients at a middle school in Wheeling, Ill., June 11, 2021.

The average number of Americans getting their first shot is down to about 70,000 a day, the lowest point since the U.S. vaccination campaign began in December 2020. About 76% of the U.S. population has received at least one shot and roughly 65% of all Americans are fully vaccinated.

With demand so low, states will undoubtedly be confronted with more waste in the months ahead, although they will benefit from any booster expansions.

Idaho, for example, has 230,000 doses on hand but is only averaging fewer than 2,000 doses administered a week.

Oregon’s vaccination rate is slightly higher than the national average, but the health authority there said last week that they have “significant excess vaccine on hand” because of the recent drop in demand. The state is trying to use up as many of the 716,000 doses in its inventory as possible.

Rhode Island has the highest percentage of residents who are fully vaccinated in the nation, at slightly more than 80%, but the health department reported having 137,000 doses on hand last week. Health officials say they need them for a big push to increase the vaccination rate for booster doses.

Health officials in some states have developed “matchmaker” programs to connect vaccine providers with excess doses with providers seeking doses. Many said they’re attempting to redistribute doses with expiration dates that are quickly approaching. New Jersey has a task force that has transferred more than 600,000 doses around the state since June. West Virginia has offered to transfer Pfizer adult doses to nearby states.

Immunization managers have been asking for single-dose vials, especially for pediatricians, but it may not work for manufacturers to package it that way yet, said Claire Hannan, executive director at the Association of Immunization Managers. She said wasting vaccine “just can’t be an issue.”

“We tell this to providers, but the most important thing is getting people vaccinated. And that’s hard when the demand goes down. You don’t have constant flow,” she said. “But that’s just a necessary evil I guess.”

HHS said states are ordering prudently, paralleling the drop in demand. The minimum order for Pfizer used to be nearly 1,200 doses but now it’s 100, and Moderna reduced the number of doses per vial, the agency said.

“Given what we’ve seen in terms of the number of people still unvaccinated, I do think finding any way to get the shot in arms, even at the expense of potential wastage, is still important,” said Katie Greene, an assistant research director at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy.

Republicans Make Headway in Texas’ Booming Latino Communities

AUSTIN, TEXAS — 

Democrats have long dreamed of flipping Texas from a bedrock Republican state to one that elects more Democrats to Congress and awards its mother lode of electoral votes to a Democratic presidential contender, something that hasn’t happened since 1976.

That dream has been buoyed by dramatic demographic changes in Texas, where the population has grown at more than twice the national average for the last 20 years, and people of Latin American descent account for 60% of that growth.

But Democrats have a problem. Latino voters, regarded as a key Democratic Party constituency, are showing a greater willingness to vote Republican, even in Texas’ southernmost counties along the border with Mexico.

In 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump received less than 28% of the vote in Hidalgo County, the most populous of Texas’ border counties, and one in which Latinos account for 93% of the population. In his 2020 reelection bid, Trump scored almost 41% of the vote.

Last year, Hidalgo County’s largest city, McAllen, elected its first Republican mayor in 24 years.

Such results may serve as a warning sign for Democrats ahead of November’s midterm elections that will determine control of Congress for President Joe Biden’s final two years of his current term.

Texas has long been critical territory for the Republican Party. The state sends the country’s largest Republican delegation to the House of Representatives and hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994.

‘Exciting time to be a Republican’

But Democrats have historically dominated at the ballot box in the land between San Antonio and the Mexican border — a vast, sunny scrubland where Spanish-speaking cowboys founded the first Texas cattle ranches a century before English-speaking settlers arrived.

Political observers predicted for years that Latino population growth in other parts of the state would boost support for Democrats in Texas. But for the most part, it hasn’t happened. In fact, while South Texas still leans toward the Democrats, Republicans are making inroads.

“It’s an exciting time to be a Republican,” said Adrienne Peña-Garza, the Republican Party chairperson for Hidalgo County. “The new generation is much more bold than I was.”

Peña-Garza is the first Latina to head the Republican Party in Hidalgo County. She told VOA she has critics who maintain that a woman — especially a Hispanic one —shouldn’t be a Republican. Yet, she says she has seen many Latina and Latino Republicans enter the political arena and is encouraged to see the party grow in her area.

Hildalgo County remains Democratic

Texas Democrats insist that they are not sitting idly by. Manuel Medina, state chairman for Tejano Democrats, the Latino wing of the Texas Democratic Party, said Democrats picked four Latina women to run for reliably Democratic seats in the Texas State House in Tuesday’s primary elections. He said he was glad to see more Hispanic involvement in the Republican Party, as well.

“That more doors are open for people to participate in the political system is a good thing. In general, it’s positive,” Medina said. “Hispanic women will lead.”

But he cautioned against reading too much into recent voting trends in Texas, pointing out that Democratic primary voters in Hidalgo County still outnumbered Republicans more than two-to-one on Tuesday. Despite Republican gains, the area remains largely Democratic.

Even so, Peña-Garza is optimistic about the Republican Party’s future in South Texas. She credited Trump for Republicans’ growing popularity in the region and noted that a stream of high-profile Republicans has visited Hidalgo County, including Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who drew 700 people to a local auditorium at 8 a.m. last year.

“It makes us feel included in state and national politics,” Peña-Garza said. “We have been voting Democrat for over 100 years. Has that helped us?”

Jason Villalba, chairman of the nonpartisan Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, told VOA that a variety of issues have boosted Republicans’ fortunes in South Texas, including perceptions that Democrats are critical of law enforcement and want to restrict the fossil fuel industry — two major employment sectors in South Texas.

Villalba also contends that Trump’s “strongman” image played well among some Latino voters.

Villalba noted that until recently, turnout was often low among Hispanic voters.

“We were not able to be impactful,” he said.

Latino political clout growing

That is no longer true, as Latinos have grown in numbers and clout and are increasingly engaged in the political sphere. But they don’t vote as a bloc. Texas Hispanics include 2.5 million immigrants from Mexico, nearly 500,000 from Central America and 170,000 from South America — all of whom came with distinct viewpoints that influence the political leanings of their voting-eligible children.

According to Hector de Leon, a longtime political organizer and blogger in Houston, expectations for a wave of Democratic support amid the Texas population boom were based in part on incorrect assumptions from the national party that nonwhite voters would naturally vote Democrat.

“They just assume every person who is a person of color is going to behave the same electorally, and they got that completely wrong,” de Leon said. “That is continually driving their methods, and that’s why they may be losing more Hispanic voters.”

Those assumptions led to speculation as early as 2016 that perhaps Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee that year, could carry Texas. She lost the state to Trump by nine percentage points.

Looking ahead, a redrawing of Texas’ congressional districts based on the 2020 U.S. Census may give Democrats little to cheer in this year’s midterm elections.

“You don’t see progress being made by Democrats up and down the ballot,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Political Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “The idea that Texas is turning blue (Democratic) has been abandoned by most people, given the results.”

Will COVID Mutate in Animals and Jump Back to Humans?

A new variant of the coronavirus found in white-tailed deer in Canada was later discovered in a person who lived nearby and had contact with the deer population, according to a recent study. The researchers say it’s possible the deer transmitted the virus to the human.

Emerging evidence that COVID-19 is gaining a foothold in wildlife could have negative long-term consequences for humans, according to Nükhet Varlik, associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark.

“Even if we managed to vaccinate the entire human population, the disease can still come back — from the animals back to us — which is, in fact, what happened with some of the other historical pandemics,” Varlik says. “So, in the long term, I don’t think COVID can be eradicated, to be honest.”

In September 2021, zoo officials said gorillas at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia, seen here on Sept. 14, 2021, contracted the coronavirus from a zoo staff worker.

Six out of every 10 infectious diseases in people are zoonotic, meaning they pass between species, from animals to humans.
Examples of zoonotic viruses include the flu, West Nile virus, the plague, rabies and Lyme disease.

The coronavirus outbreak has been linked to a market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were slaughtered on site. And although the virus is classified as zoonotic, no animal reservoir of the disease has been found.

Any new COVID-19 variant that animals might pass back to humans has the potential to mutate into something totally new.

“It’s definitely going to evolve differently in an animal than it will in a human,” says Cody Warren, a virologist and immunologist who is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Now we have what we’re considering a human virus trying to evolve to grow in an animal, and so, it’s going to undergo its own unique evolutionary trajectory in that animal.”

Multiple COVID-19 variants such as delta and omicron have been found in humans, and scientists cannot rule out the possibility that some variants came from animals.

“Most of the attention and resources are focusing on, ‘How do we test humans?’ and ‘How do we coordinate hospital beds?’” says Suresh Kuchipudi, a professor and chair of emerging infectious diseases at Pennsylvania State University. “But, in this process, we haven’t really been looking at animals. …That’s why we have a lot of missing links to trace back the origins of these viruses. So, it may be that we haven’t been looking into some animal species in some part of the world where this evolution largely may have happened. We have lots of gaps in connecting the dots.”

Guests drive their vehicles through the Phoenix Zoo, May 9, 2020, in Arizona.

Kuchipudi, a veterinary virologist, co-authored a separate study that found evidence of COVID-19 in white-tailed deer in Staten Island, New York. Researchers tested the animals between December 12, 2021, and January 31, 2022, and found COVID-19 antibodies in 19 of the 131 animals sampled.

When a virus goes from humans back into animals, the process is referred to as spillback.

“And what I think is most concerning about that is that it gives new opportunities for the virus to evolve in new, unique and innovative ways,” says Warren. “And that virus could potentially evolve in a way and then jump back into humans and spread again throughout the human population as a new disease.”

Kuchipudi emphasizes the need to begin monitoring high-risk animals where the force of infection is high and based on their frequent exposure to humans in order to stop, or at least minimize, transmissions from animals to humans.

“Then we can track down what is happening in terms of the virus evolution. But will we also be able to determine what are the routes through which this exposure has happened? Is it through wastewater or leftover food?” says Kuchipudi. “Although we found deer have the virus, it is not entirely clear how the free-living deer, that don’t really come close to humans typically, are picking up the infection.”

Right now, there is no coordinated, concerted effort nationally or internationally to address the problem of COVID-19 in animals, according to Kuchipudi. But he is hopeful that is changing. The American Rescue Plan provides $300 million for the monitoring and surveillance of animals believed susceptible to COVID-19.

“I see a lot of momentum happening,” Kuchipudi says. “A lot of relevant people recognize this is a problem. And I think most federal and state agencies are very seriously discussing looking into this.”

US Embassy in Ukraine Calls Nuclear Power Plant Attack 'War Crime'

WASHINGTON — 

The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine said that attacking a nuclear power plant is a war crime, after Russia on Friday seized a Ukrainian nuclear facility that is the biggest in Europe.

The statement on the embassy’s Twitter account went further than any U.S. characterization of Russia’s actions in Ukraine since it launched its invasion Feb. 24.

“It is a war crime to attack a nuclear power plant. Putin’s shelling of Europe’s largest nuclear plant takes his reign of terror one step further,” U.S. Embassy Kyiv said in its post.

Russian invasion forces seized Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant in heavy fighting in southeastern Ukraine, triggering global alarm, but a blaze in a training building was extinguished and officials said the facility was now safe.

Russia’s defense ministry blamed a fire at the plant on a “monstrous attack” by Ukrainian saboteurs and said its forces were in control.

The State Department sent a message to all U.S. embassies in Europe telling them not to retweet the Kyiv Embassy’s tweet calling the attack a war crime, according to CNN, which said it reviewed the message.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters asking if the Kyiv Embassy’s tweet reflects the position of the entire U.S. government.

Rights groups have alleged violations of international war crimes law in Ukraine, including the targeting of civilians, as well as indiscriminate attacks on schools and hospitals.

On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden stopped short of calling Russia’s actions war crimes, saying, “It’s too early to say that.”

Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby on Friday declined to answer the question, saying he would leave that determination to the International Criminal Court.

“This just underscores how reckless the Russian invasion has been and how indiscriminate their targeting seems to be. It just raises the level of potential catastrophe to a level that nobody wants to see,” Kirby said in an interview with CNN.

“It is certainly not the behavior of a responsible nuclear power.”

Britain has publicly accused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government of war crimes.

The ICC, the world’s top war crimes prosecutor, on the request of 39 member states, is investigating reports of cluster bombs and artillery strikes on Ukrainian cities.

Karim Khan, a British lawyer named as the chief prosecutor of the ICC last year, said the crisis in Ukraine is a chance to demonstrate that those committing war crimes would be held to account.

Intentionally targeting civilians and civilian objects is a war crime, a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Reuters, adding that it is backing the investigation, particularly Khan’s efforts to preserve evidence of possible atrocity crimes.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has strongly denied claims that Russian forces have struck civilian infrastructure targets or residential complexes.

Ukraine Digital Army Brews Cyberattacks, Intel and Infowar

BOSTON — 

Formed in a fury to counter Russia’s blitzkrieg attack, Ukraine’s hundreds-strong volunteer “hacker” corps is much more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe’s first major war of the internet age. It is crucial to information combat and to crowdsourcing intelligence.

“We are really a swarm. A self-organizing swarm,” said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT executive at the center of Ukraine’s bootstrap digital army.

Inventions of the volunteer hackers range from software tools that let smartphone and computer owners anywhere participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks on official Russian websites to bots on the Telegram messaging platform that block disinformation, let people report Russian troop locations and offer instructions on assembling Molotov cocktails and basic first aid.

Zahkarov ran research at an automation startup before joining Ukraine’s digital self-defense corps. His group is StandForUkraine. Its ranks include software engineers, marketing managers, graphic designers and online ad buyers, he said.

The movement is global, drawing on IT professionals in the Ukrainian diaspora whose handiwork includes web defacements with antiwar messaging and graphic images of death and destruction in the hopes of mobilizing Russians against the invasion.

“Both our nations are scared of a single man — (Russian President Vladimir) Putin,” said Zakharov. “He’s just out of his mind.” Volunteers reach out person-to-person to Russians with phone calls, emails and text messages, he said, and send videos and pictures of dead soldiers from the invading force from virtual call centers.

Some build websites, such as a “site where Russian mothers can look through (photos of) captured Russian guys to find their sons,” Zakharov said by phone from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

The cyber volunteers’ effectiveness is difficult to gauge. Russian government websites have been repeatedly knocked offline, if briefly, by the DDoS attacks, but generally weather them with countermeasures.

A woman has breakfast inside a cafe in Lviv’s downtown, western Ukraine, March 4, 2022.

It’s impossible to say how much of the disruption — including more damaging hacks — is caused by freelancers working independently of but in solidarity with Ukrainian hackers.

A tool called “Liberator” lets anyone in the world with a digital device become part of a DDoS attack network, or botnet. The tool’s programmers code in new targets as priorities change.

But is it legal? Some analysts say it violates international cyber norms. Its Estonian developers say they acted “in coordination with the Ministry of Digital Transformation” of Ukraine.

A top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, insisted at his first online news conference of the war Friday that homegrown volunteers were attacking only what they deem military targets, in which he included the financial sector, Kremlin-controlled media and railways. He did not discuss specific targets.

Zakharov did. He said Russia’s banking sector was well fortified against attack but that some telecommunications networks and rail services were not. He said Ukrainian-organized cyberattacks had briefly interrupted rail ticket sales in western Russia around Rostov and Voronezh and knocked out telephone service for a time in the region of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014. The claims could not be independently confirmed.

A group of Belarusian hacktivists calling themselves the Cyber Partisans also apparently disrupted rail service in neighboring Belarus this week seeking to frustrate transiting Russian troops. A spokeswoman said Friday that electronic ticket sales were still down after their malware attack froze up railway IT servers.

Over the weekend, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced the creation of an volunteer cyber army. The IT Army of Ukraine now counts 290,000 followers on Telegram.

Zhora, deputy chair of the state special communications service, said one job of Ukrainian volunteers is to obtain intelligence that can be used to attack Russian military systems.

In this image from video, Victor Zhora, a top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, holds a news conference for international media March 4, 2022, from a bunker in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Some cybersecurity experts have expressed concern that soliciting help from freelancers who violate cyber norms could have dangerous escalatory consequences. One shadowy group claimed to have hacked Russian satellites; Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, called the claim false but was also quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying such a cyberattack would be considered an act of war.

Asked if he endorsed the kind of hostile hacking being done under the umbrella of the Anonymous hacktivist brand — which anyone can claim — Zhora said, “We do not welcome any illegal activity in cyberspace.”

“But the world order changed on the 24th of February,” he added, when Russia invaded.

The overall effort was spurred by the creation of a group called the Ukrainian Cyber Volunteers by a civilian cybersecurity executive, Yegor Aushev, in coordination with Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Aushev said it numbers more than 1,000 volunteers.

On Friday, most of Ukraine’s telecommunications and internet were fully operational despite outages in areas captured by invading Russian forces, said Zhora. He reported about 10 hostile hijackings of local government websites in Ukraine to spread false propaganda saying Ukraine’s government had capitulated.

Zhora said presumed Russian hackers continued trying to spread destructive malware in targeted email attacks on Ukrainian officials and — in what he considers a new tactic — to infect the devices of individual citizens. Three instances of such malware were discovered in the runup to the invasion.

U.S. Cyber Command has been assisting Ukraine since well before the invasion. Ukraine does not have a dedicated military cyber unit. It was standing one up when Russia attacked.

Zhora anticipates an escalation in Russia’s cyber aggression — many experts believe far worse is yet to come.

Meantime, donations from the global IT community continue to pour in. A few examples: NameCheap has donated internet domains while Amazon has been generous with cloud services, said Zakharov.

NATO Rejects No-Fly Zone for Ukraine After Russian Attack on Nuclear Plant

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with NATO foreign ministers in Brussels just hours after Russia’s shelling of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine. VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports from Washington.

White House Disavows Senator's Call for Assassination of Putin

The Biden administration is not advocating for regime change in Russia, the White House said Friday, after a U.S. senator called for Russians to assassinate President Vladimir Putin.

“That is not the position of the U.S. government and certainly not a statement you’ll hear from — coming from the mouth of — anybody working for the administration,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in response to a question from Voice of America.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, suggested in a televised interview Thursday evening that “somebody in Russia” should assassinate Putin. He repeated his statement Friday in another televised appearance on Fox News Channel.

“How does this end? Somebody in Russia has to step up to the plate … and take this guy out,” Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Following the interview, Graham posted on Twitter, “The only people who can fix this are the Russian people.”

“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” the senator wrote. Marcus Junius Brutus assassinated Roman ruler Julius Caesar, while German army officer Claus von Stauffenberg tried but failed to assassinate German leader Adolf Hitler in July 1944.

Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, called Graham’s comments “unacceptable and outrageous” and said they expressed “off the scale” hatred in the United States toward Russia.

He demanded “official explanations and a strong condemnation of the criminal statements.”

U.S. lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, also criticized Graham’s comments.

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz called Graham’s proposal “an exceptionally bad idea,” while Democratic Reprepresentative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted: “I really wish our members of Congress would cool it and regulate their remarks as the administration works to avoid WWIII.”

Graham introduced a resolution in Congress condemning Putin and his military commanders for committing “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.

US Court Partly Upholds Fast-Track Expulsion of Migrants

A federal court ruled Friday that the U.S. can continue to expel certain migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border unless they would be returned to a country where they might face persecution or torture.

The ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit allows a rule, known as Title 42, implemented during the Trump administration at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, to largely stay in effect.

The case was brought by a group of migrants who were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The court ruled the migrants, who entered the United States without authorization, “have no right to be in the United States” and that the government “can immediately expel them.”

However, they cannot be expelled to a country where their “life or freedom would be threatened” – or because of “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion” – or to a country where they will likely be tortured.

Kept as health measure

Amid continuing chaos along the U.S.-Mexico border, the Biden administration has opted to retain the policy, which was originally put forth as a public health measure.

Migrants are fast-tracked for removal if U.S. immigration officers conclude they do not have a valid asylum claim, a determination made without migrants appearing before an immigration judge. Unaccompanied children who cross the border into the United States are exempted from the policy.

The U.S Department of Justice has not commented on the ruling.

Enforcement of Title 42 appears to be uneven in some cases.

According to Reuters, many crossing the border on foot are expelled or quickly turned back, but those in vehicles are more often able to make their claim of asylum.

A U.S. Border Patrol officer told Reuters that some migrants buy cheap cars in Mexico to boost their odds of making it across.

“It’s a way to jump the line,” said U.S. Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 153,941 migrant encounters on the U.S. southern border in January, which was almost double the number reported in January 2021 and four times the total in January of 2020.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.

Ukraine Says Russia Shelling Promised Humanitarian Corridors

Ukraine says Russian forces are shelling agreed-upon evacuation routes from Mariupol as well as the city itself, breaking a cease-fire that was to have gone into effect at 7 a.m. UTC.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov had said, “Today, March the 5th, from 1000 am Moscow time (0700 GMT), the Russian side declares a ceasefire and the opening of humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to leave Mariupol and Volnovakha. Humanitarian corridors and exit routes have been agreed upon with the Ukrainian side.”

Mariupol officials said they are delaying the evacuation plans and urged residents to take shelter. The evacuation routes were to have been open for five hours for both buses and private cars.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russian forces “are increasingly using brutal methods in Ukraine, including going at civilian populations.”

His comments followed a Russian attack on a Ukrainian nuclear plant — the largest facility of its kind in Europe — that had sparked a fire in a building at the plant compound.

Speaking to reporters Friday before a meeting with his European Union counterparts in Brussels, Blinken said, “We are faced together with what is [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin’s war of choice: unprovoked, unjustified, and a war that is having horrific, horrific consequences.”

People who have fled Ukraine carry luggage past a bus after arriving at Nyugati station in Budapest, Hungary, March 4, 2022.

“We’re committed to doing everything we can to make it stop,” he added, but he ruled out imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, saying such an action could lead to a broader conflict.

“We have a responsibility to ensure the war does not spill over beyond Ukraine. … A no-fly zone could lead to a full-fledged war in Europe,” he said.

The meeting in Brussels came after Ukraine accused Russia of “nuclear terror” for shelling and starting a fire at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant before taking control of it. The plant is in the city of Enerhodar in the country’s southeast.

Enerhodar, Ukraine

Ukraine’s nuclear inspectorate said that no radiation had leaked at the plant and that personnel were continuing to operate the facility safely. Firefighters were able to get the blaze under control, Ukrainian officials said.

The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting Friday to discuss the attack at the request of the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Norway and Albania.

“The world narrowly averted a nuclear catastrophe last night,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said during the meeting. “We’ve just witnessed a dangerous new escalation that represents a dire threat to all of Europe and the world.”

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said a Russian “projectile” hit a training center at the plant.

“This just demonstrates the recklessness of this war,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said of the power plant attack before Friday’s meeting in Brussels with Blinken and EU foreign ministers.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson Konashenkov blamed the attack on a Ukrainian “sabotage group” that he said had occupied the plant’s training building, attacked a Russian patrol and set the building on fire as it left. He offered no evidence, and no other country appeared to take the claim seriously.

The Zaporizhzhia facility produces about 25% of Ukraine’s power.

Nuclear safety experts have expressed concern that fighting so close to the power station could cut off the plant’s power supply, which would adversely affect its ability to keep nuclear fuel cool and would increase the possibility of a nuclear meltdown.

On the ground

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Friday that Russian ground forces are attacking a Ukrainian town near Odesa and that the United States is watching to see what it means for the city.

A Russia convoy outside the capital, Kyiv, was still trying to reach the city, he said, but the “actions by the Ukrainians have in fact stalled that convoy … stopped it in some places.”

Ukraine’s use of its air and missile defenses has been “quite extraordinary,” Kirby said.

Refugees, mostly women with children, wait for transportation at the border crossing in Medyka, Poland, March 5, 2022, after fleeing from the Ukraine.

On Thursday, local Ukrainian government officials and the Russian military confirmed the seizure of the strategic port of Kherson, but a U.S. defense official said Washington was unable to confirm the development.

Ukrainian defense officials say some 66,000 Ukrainians have returned from abroad to fight against the Russians.

A Russian diplomat said Friday that Russia has no intention of occupying Ukraine should its invasion be successful, and that its troops will withdraw once it has fulfilled its objective.

Speaking to reporters at U.N. headquarters in Geneva, Russian Ambassador Gennady Gatilov called the invasion a “military operation with limited objectives,” which he said were to “denazify the regime and demilitarize Ukraine.”

Ukraine is a country with a democratically elected Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust. Historians and political observers view Russia’s invocation of World War II as disinformation.

Possibility of more sanctions

Blinken said Friday that the United States was considering additional sanctions against Russia and had not ruled out anything.

“Nothing is off the table. We are evaluating the sanctions every day,” he said.

On Thursday, Washington heaped another round of sanctions on Putin’s inner circle.

“Today I’m announcing that we’re adding dozens of names to the list, including one of Russia’s wealthiest billionaires, and I’m banning travel to America by more than 50 Russian oligarchs, their families and their close associates,” Biden said Thursday before a Cabinet meeting. “And we’re going to continue to support the Ukrainian people with direct assistance.”

VOA State Department Bureau chief Nike Ching, national security correspondent Jeff Seldin, Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb, Istanbul foreign correspondent Heather Murdock, White House correspondent Anita Powell, and senior diplomatic correspondent Cindy Saine contributed to this report.

Some information came from the Associate Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.