06 March 22
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"We Are Not Part of This Conflict ... We Are Not Seeking a War With Russia."
— NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg
For those who seek refuge in denialism, Russian Authoritarian Vladimir Putin delivered a yet another wakeup call this morning calling Western sanctions, “a direct participation in the conflict.” While the US and NATO may still want to avoid the perception of being at war with Russia they dare not ignore the painfully obvious fact that Putin is absolutely at war with them. Take Putin seriously, he really wants you to.
Say It: The Ukrainian Genocide
After every genocide there is a question that is always asked, who stood back and let it happen? The Ukrainians are desperately pleading for help from the West, as well they should be. What is unfolding in Ukraine is a genocidal catastrophe on scale of Rwanda and the refugee crisis in Europe has no parallel in the post World War II era. We are talking about human suffering and economic destabilization on a grand, perhaps unimaginable scale. Whatever NATO is, whatever NATO wants to be, if it allows a genocide of an ally on its doorstep it is nothing.
The most urgent and controversial request by Ukrainian defense forces and officials is for a so called, No-Fly-Zone. US and NATO leaders are rejecting this because it would lead to all-out war with Russia. But that ignores the all-out war already underway. The West must awaken from its slumber. War with Russia has come, it is here. Either the West will win it or pay a staggering price.
Avoiding Humanitarian Catastrophe
The first and most important step towards avoiding humanitarian catastrophe is to establish direct face-to-face negotiations in which the US and NATO — must — participate. It doesn’t matter if the Russians have lied or will lie, they have before and they may well again. The paramount objective is to establish a forum for direct interaction between the principal nations. Russia, Ukraine and NATO owe that to the world.
Second, as a matter of the greatest urgency, the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians must stop at once. NATO must use all means at their disposal now to halt these war crimes. If that means engaging in the conflict directly, that must be on the table. The time has come for the realization that the West has two options, join the conflict now or join the conflict at a point and time of Putin’s choosing and that day will surely come. Denialism now invites destruction.
Right now the Russian military is in disarray and vulnerable. This is the time to confront Putin’s war machine. If they prevail in Ukraine they can and will regroup, resupply and be able to use the Ukrainian territory as a staging ground for further attacks in Western Europe.
The Nuclear Options
The greatest fear for humanity is that Putin will use Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal to initiate a full nuclear engagement with the West. It a terrifying prospect. The problem is that Putin is in effect using Russia’s nuclear capabilities as an offensive weapon. It is his gun to the head of humanity being used to create the space he needs to commit genocide. He seeks to force a choice between genocide and the fear of extinction.
Such a scenario would require an individual or group of individuals willing to take an action that will surely end life on earth. In the nuclear age the thing that has prevented a full scale nuclear engagement has not been good judgment, it has been the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. It is not that we can depend on that, but rather that we are and have been depending on that ultimate deterrent since Nagasaki.
We will confront Putin. Ukraine must not fall.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
An elderly woman is helped while crossing a destroyed bridge as she tries to leave the city of Irpin, in the Kyiv region, Ukraine March 5, 2022. (photo: Jedrzej Nowicki/Agencja Wyborcza/Reuters)
The Russian side was less definitive, saying merely that the talks might start on Monday.
Delegations from Ukraine and Russia have had two rounds of talks since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour on Feb. 24.
On Thursday, the sides agreed to open humanitarian corridors to allow civilians out of some combat zones, although there have been delays in implementing them.
Ukraine said on Saturday the talks had not produced results but that it would keep pursuing negotiations.
"The third round of talks will take place on Monday," Arakhamia, who is also the parliamentary faction leader of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's party, wrote.
Russian news agency Interfax later quoted Russian negotiator Leonid Slutsky as saying "the third round really could take place in the coming days, it's possible it will be on Monday."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that Zelenskiy's attempt to secure direct NATO help in the conflict between their countries was not helping talks between the two sides, but that Moscow was ready for a third round. read more
Wary of being dragged into Moscow's war on its neighbor, NATO on Friday turned down Zelenskiy's appeal to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine, prompting the Ukrainian president to say that the alliance had given Russia the green light to continue its bombing campaign.
Earlier on Saturday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said he was open to talks with Lavrov, but only if they were "meaningful."
The Kremlin said on Friday that progress in the negotiations would depend on Kyiv's reaction to Moscow's position on how to end the war, which had been conveyed to Ukraine on Thursday.
Russia's TASS news agency quoted Slutsky as saying the Ukrainian side had shown some openness in the second round to reaching an agreement.
Hector, a former Marine, boarded a flight to Warsaw on Friday to help Ukraine in its fight against Russia. 'Sanctions can help, but sanctions can't help right now, and people need help right now,' he said. (photo: Zack Wittman/NYT)
“Sanctions can help, but sanctions can’t help right now, and people need help right now,” said the former Marine, who lives in Tampa Bay, Florida, and like other veterans interviewed for this article asked that only his first name be used for security reasons. “I can help right now.”
He is one of a surge of U.S. veterans who say they are now preparing to join the fight in Ukraine, emboldened by the invitation of the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who this past week announced he was creating an “international legion” and asked volunteers from around the world to help defend his nation against Russia.
Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, echoed the call for fighters, saying on Twitter, “Together we defeated Hitler, and we will defeat Putin, too.”
Hector said he hoped to cross the border to train Ukrainians in his expertise: armored vehicles and heavy weapons.
“A lot of veterans, we have a calling to serve, and we trained our whole career for this kind of war,” he said. “Sitting by and doing nothing? I had to do that when Afghanistan fell apart, and it weighted heavily on me. I had to act.”
All across the United States, small groups of military veterans are gathering, planning and getting passports in order. After years of serving in smoldering occupations, trying to spread democracy in places that had only a tepid interest in it, many are hungry for what they see as a righteous fight to defend freedom against an autocratic aggressor with a conventional and target-rich army.
“It’s a conflict that has a clear good and bad side, and maybe that stands apart from other recent conflicts,” said David Ribardo, a former Army officer who now owns a property management business in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “A lot of us are watching what is happening and just want to grab a rifle and go over there.”
After the invasion, he saw veterans flooding social media eager to join the fight. Unable to go because of commitments here, he has spent the past week acting as a sort of middle man for a group called Volunteers for Ukraine, identifying veterans and other volunteers with useful skills and connecting them with donors who buy gear and airline tickets.
“It was very quickly overwhelming. Almost too many people wanted to help,” he said. In the past week, he said he has worked to sift those with valuable combat or medical skills from people he described as “combat tourists, who don’t have the correct experience and would not be an asset.”
He said his group has also had to comb out a number of extremists.
Fundraising sites such as GoFundMe have rules against collecting money for armed conflict, so Ribardo said his group and others have been careful to avoid specifically directing anyone to get involved in the fighting. Rather, he said, he simply connects those he has vetted with people who want to donate plane tickets and nonlethal supplies, describing his role as being “a Tinder for veterans and donors.”
A number of mainstream media outlets, including Military Times and Time, have published step-by-step guides on joining the military in Ukraine. The Ukrainian government instructed interested volunteers to contact its consulates.
Several veterans who contacted the consulates this past week said they were still waiting for a response and believed staff members were overwhelmed.
On Thursday, Zelenskyy said in a video on Telegram that 16,000 volunteers had joined the international brigade, although it is unclear what the true number is. The New York Times was not able to identify any veterans actively fighting in Ukraine.
The outpouring of support is driven, veterans said, by past experiences. Some want to try to recapture the intense clarity and purpose they felt in war, which is often missing in modern suburban life. Others want a chance to make amends for failed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and see the fight to defend a democracy against a totalitarian invader as the reason they joined the military.
To an extent not seen in past conflicts, the impulse to join has been fueled partly by an increasingly connected world. Americans watching real-time video in Ukraine can, with a click, connect to like-minded volunteers around the globe. A veteran in Phoenix can find a donor in London with unused airline miles, a driver in Warsaw, Poland, offering a free ride to the border and a local to stay with in Ukraine.
Of course, war is rarely as straightforward as the deeply felt idealism that drives people to enlist. And volunteers risk not only their own lives, but also drawing the United States into a direct conflict with Russia.
“War is an unpredictable animal, and once you let it out, no one — no one — knows what will happen,” said Daniel Gale, who lost a leg in Iraq before going on to teach leadership for several years at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He said he understood the urge to fight but said the risk of escalation resulting in nuclear war was too great.
“I just feel heartsick,” he said. “War is terrible and the innocent always suffer most.”
The risk of unintended escalation has led the U.S. government to try to keep citizens from becoming freelance fighters, not just in this conflict, but for centuries. In 1793, President George Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality warning Americans to stay out of the French Revolution. But the efforts have been uneven, and often swayed by the larger national sentiment. So over the generations, a steady stream of idealists, romantics, mercenaries and filibusters have taken up arms, — riding with Pancho Villa in Mexico, ferrying arms to Cuba, battling communists in Africa and even trying to establish new slave states in Central America.
The civil war in Spain just before the start of World War II is the best-known example. More than 3,000 Americans joined what became know as the Lincoln-Washington Battalion, to fight with the elected leftist government against fascist forces.
At the time, the United States wanted to avoid war with Europe, and stayed neutral, but the Young Communist League rented billboards to recruit fighters, and members of the establishment held fundraisers to send young men overseas.
That effort, now often romanticized as a valiant prelude to the fight against the Nazis, ended badly. The poorly trained and equipped brigades made a disastrous assault of a fortified ridge in 1937 and three-quarters of the men were killed or wounded. Others faced near starvation in captivity. Their leader, a former math professor who was the inspiration for the protagonist in Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was later captured and most likely executed.
On Thursday, Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson Igor Konashenkov told the Russian News Agency that foreign fighters would not be considered soldiers, but mercenaries, and would not be protected under humanitarian rules regarding the treatment of prisoners of war.
“At best, they can expect to be prosecuted as criminals,” Konashenkov said. “We are urging all foreign citizens who may have plans to go and fight for Kyiv’s nationalist regime to think a dozen times before getting on the way.”
Despite the risks — both individual and strategic — the U.S. government has so far been measured in its warnings. Asked during a news conference this past week what he would tell Americans who want to fight in Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pointed to official statements, first issued weeks ago, imploring U.S. citizens in the country to depart immediately.
He said: “For those who want to help Ukraine and help its people, there are many ways to do that, including by supporting and helping the many NGOs that are working to provide humanitarian assistance; providing resources themselves to groups that are trying to help Ukraine by being advocates for Ukraine and for peaceful resolution to this crisis that was created by Russia.”
That has not dissuaded a number of veterans who are all too familiar with the risks of combat.
James was a medic who first saw combat when he replaced another medic killed in fighting in Iraq in 2006. He did two more tours, in Iraq and Afghanistan, seeing so much blood and death that 10 years after leaving the military he still attends therapy at a veterans hospital.
But this past week, as he watched Russian forces shell cities across Ukraine, he decided that he had to try to go there to help.
“Combat has a cost, that’s for sure; you think you can come back from war the same, but you can’t,” James said in a phone interview from his home in Dallas, where he said he was waiting to hear back from Ukrainian officials. “But I feel obligated. It’s the innocent people being attacked — the kids. It’s the kids, man. I just can’t stand by.”
Chase, a graduate student in Virginia, said that he volunteered to fight the Islamic State group in Syria in 2019 and felt the same urgency for Ukraine, but he warned against simply going to the border without a plan.
In Syria, he said he knew well-meaning volunteers who were detained for weeks by local Kurdish authorities because they arrived unannounced. He arranged with Kurdish defense forces before arriving in Syria. There he spent months as a humble foot soldier with little pay and only basic rations.
Tactically, as an inexperienced grunt, he said, he was of little value. But to the people of northeastern Syria, he was a powerful symbol that the world was with them.
“I was a sign to them that the world was watching and they mattered,” he said.
A few months into his time in Syria, he was shot in the leg and eventually returned to the United States. He came home and worked for a septic tank company, then got a job writing about used cars. When he saw explosions hitting Ukraine this past week, the part of him that went to war three years ago reawakened.
“Everything here is just kind of empty, and it doesn’t seem like I’m doing anything important,” he said in an interview from an extended-stay hotel in Virginia where he is living. “So I am trying to go. I don’t think I have a choice. You have to draw the line.”
Amazon. (photo: Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Workers at Amazon’s State Island warehouse could become the first in the country to vote yes to a union this month—and employees say the company’s now putting the screws on.
Last week, the NYPD arrested three union activists at the warehouse after a manager complained that one of them was trespassing. Chris Smalls, a former employee and thorn in the side of billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, was delivering catered chicken and pasta for a union luncheon when at least five cops confronted him in the facility’s visitor parking lot and demanded he leave.
Bystander footage revealed the local precinct’s top cop showed up to the 911 call targeting Smalls, who is president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) and fighting to unionize the “fulfillment center” known as JFK8. Amazon’s war with Smalls has been simmering since 2020, when he led a walkout over unsafe working conditions during COVID. At the time, Vice exposed internal memos indicating that Bezos and other Amazon bigwigs discussed a plan to smear Smalls by calling him “not smart or articulate” and make him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement” to discredit unionization. Critics and union crusaders decried the comments about Smalls, who is Black, as racist.
Smalls formed ALU in April of 2021. “Ironically they made me the face of the whole unionizing effort,” he told The Daily Beast. “So I said, ‘OK, good idea.’”
During Smalls’ arrest, an NYPD Deputy Inspector declared, “Listen, we’re going to ask you to, on behalf of Amazon—” before Smalls interrupted in surprise: “You’re protecting Amazon, now?” The cop answered, “I’m not protecting anyone. You’re trespassing.” An assistant general manager, who fired Smalls in 2020, was captured in the video looking on as police addressed his former foe.
Moments later, cops handcuffed employee organizers Brett Daniels and Jason Anthony for obstruction of government administration. The workers had challenged officers for accosting Smalls, and one officer warned Daniels not to get too close and pushed him away. Daniels appeared to push back before he was tackled. Police then frisked Smalls for weapons against a squad car and charged him with obstruction, resisting arrest and trespassing. Before he left, one officer told a worker recording the incident: “We won. You lost.”
The episode marked another clash between the ALU—a crowdfunded and worker-led effort—and the $1.6-trillion multinational corporation that is America’s second-largest private employer behind Walmart. The e-commerce behemoth is simultaneously battling two historic union votes: at JFK8 and at a Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse known as BHM1. (Bessemer voted against unionization last spring, but federal labor officials ordered a do-over after finding Amazon had illegally pressured employees to reject it.)
Now Amazon will likely contend with a third election. On Wednesday, the ALU announced the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) approved a second Staten Island warehouse for a union vote, though a date hasn't yet been scheduled.
The Bessemer employees in Alabama, who will decide on joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, received their ballots in the mail in early February and have until March 25 to return them. Votes will be counted on March 28. On Staten Island, workers will vote in person at the warehouse from March 25 to March 30.
“They know the momentum is building by these luncheons we’re doing,” Smalls told The Daily Beast of his former employer. “They try to intimidate us, intimidate organizers. They’re fearful of the possibility that this would be the first building to ever be unionized.”
Smalls and ALU activists say they're communicating with Amazon warehouse workers across the country asking for help in organizing their own facilities.
“This is monumental, this is a potential Starbucks situation, where one building gets done, and there’s a tidal wave across the country,” Smalls added, referring to the coffee chain’s workers in Buffalo, New York, becoming the first to unionize. “That’s what we want.”
The union wave also swept an Amazon Fresh store in Seattle, where organizers are reportedly threatening to strike if their demands including a $25-an-hour wage aren’t met.
According to Smalls and ALU organizers, Amazon has escalated its “union-busting” playbook ahead of Staten Island’s vote and is retaliating against supporters.
On Tuesday, Amazon sent a mass text message to JFK8 personnel warning against volunteers who were door-knocking as part of ALU’s campaign. “We’ve received complaints that the ALU is going to your homes uninvited and unannounced,” Amazon texted its roughly 5,600 warehouse staff. “We are sorry that they are choosing to do this, but we’re legally required to release eligible associates' contact information to the ALU. These individuals do NOT represent Amazon. You can let them know that you don’t wish to be contacted.”
Amazon’s automated message concluded: “Amazon respects your privacy and will not go to your home, unless we are delivering for a customer, of course!”
Still, not all employees say they’re voting for ALU to represent them. Dana Joann Miller told The Daily Beast she’s voting no, and has tweeted, “The ALU is unprofessional. Get another union in here and it’s a maybe.” The debate has sometimes permeated an employee Reddit forum, where one user skeptical of ALU said, “The dues are not what concern me, I need experienced workers when It comes to this…” and “This charade looks like someone’s trying to get back at amazon for being fired.”
Angelika Maldonado, a pro-union employee, told The Daily Beast that she believed ALU had enough experience because it’s made of workers like her. “We actually work there,” said Maldonado, a single mom who hopes the union can negotiate with Amazon for cheaper health care for families like hers. “To say we don’t have experience, that’s saying we don’t know what we want collectively when we do. We want more time off, we want longer breaks. The only way we can make a change is if we start now.”
Meanwhile, the e-tailer is hosting daily captive audience meetings where labor consultants have encouraged employees to vote against ALU, including by warning them that unionizing could lead to their pay being cut down to minimum wage. (Workers at the Staten Island fulfillment center start at $18.25 an hour and usually work 10- to 12-hour shifts.) The company has obligated Bessemer employees to attend similar presentations. “More and more workers keep telling us their anti-union propaganda is making them want to join the union more,” Daniels said.
The company has also created a website dedicated to fighting the ALU with a banner at the top declaring: “Let’s keep JFK8 one team!”
And, in the past two weeks, three employee agitators were called to HR and disciplined for allegedly tearing down the company’s anti-union posters. (A fourth organizer said HR tried to bring her into a private meeting but they disagreed on whether she could have a representative present. She expects to be reprimanded at her next shift.)
In response to The Daily Beast’s questions about the captive audience meetings, Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said: “It’s our employees’ choice whether or not to join a union. It always has been. If the union vote passes, it will impact everyone at the site which is why we host regular informational sessions and provide employees the opportunity to ask questions and learn about what this could mean for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon.”
Smalls, Daniels, and Anthony spent six hours in a precinct holding cell after the catering-related bust. After they were released, they returned to supply meals for employees on the night shift without incident. “I should have been treated like any other delivery service whether it’s Dominos Pizza, whether it’s Uber Eats, I was delivering catered food to the cafeteria,” Smalls said. “But that day they decided to threaten us and call the cops on us.”
Asked about the employees’ arrests, Nantel said, “Mr. Smalls—who is not employed by Amazon—has repeatedly trespassed despite multiple warnings. On Feb. 23, when police officers asked Mr. Smalls to leave, he instead chose to escalate the situation and the police made their own decision on how to respond.”
The spokeswoman claimed Amazon didn’t call the police on the employees, dismissed Smalls’ characterization that he was only delivering food and not soliciting, and said company lawyers have previously warned Smalls against trespassing. Smalls has tweeted a legal letter from corporate himself, which warned, “Amazon reserves all its legal rights and remedies should non-employee ALU members continue to attempt to access Amazon’s property for the purpose of engaging in solicitation.”
Core employee organizers told The Daily Beast that Amazon is now targeting them. Daniels said that after his arrest, an Amazon manager walked him to the HR office to receive a warning about removing company literature. He refused to discuss the matter without a coworker present, but later on, another supervisor approached him at his station and delivered the writeup. Daniels was attempting to invoke the Weingarten rights afforded to union employees under federal law, and ALU recently appealed to NLRB to allow these rights for the Amazon workers and all of America's non-union employees.
“Not only did the arrest happen, but immediately after, on my next shift going in, they reprimanded me,” Daniels said. “We feel that they’re retaliating against ALU organizers for speaking up and unionizing.”
Connor Spence was also disciplined this week and considers the situation an unfair fight. “Amazon has been aggressive at removing our union literature, confiscating it from us, tearing it down, prohibiting us access, threatening to call the police on us, actually calling the police on us,” he told The Daily Beast. “They did all that and got a slap on the wrist in some cases. When we do the same type of activity [removing fliers], we get disciplined.”
Derrick Palmer, another worker reprimanded by managers, said, “I find it strange how a month before the election everyone gets called down to the office and gets write-ups.” A fourth employee and activist, Justine Medina, claimed HR tried to pull her into a private meeting but the conversation stalled after she asked for a representative to witness it.
Seth Goldstein, a lawyer for the ALU, has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB about the arrests, claiming Amazon violated a national settlement agreement reached with the federal agency in December. He’s also lodged charges over Amazon’s discipline of organizers and captive audience meetings, saying they violate labor laws. Goldstein previously filed other charges accusing Amazon of surveillance of union members’ activities, interrogating employees, and threatening employees “that unionization is futile.” According to another charge, Bradley Moss, an anti-union consultant for Amazon, told employees that the ALU would fail because its leaders were “thugs.”
The consultant’s use of the term was unsettling because more than 60 percent of the facility’s workforce are people of color, as are many of ALU’s activists. “The union busters called us thugs,” Palmer said. “Clearly it’s a majority of minorities who are organizing, so how did you come up with that?”
Another charge that especially troubles Goldstein relates to Daequan Smith, a former Amazon employee who had been commuting to Staten Island from a homeless shelter in the Bronx and was allegedly fired in November because of his union activities. The NLRB agreed Amazon illegally terminated Smith and said it would file a complaint if the company doesn’t settle with him.
“We’re all collateral damage to Amazon,” said Goldstein, who represents the organizers pro bono. “While Bezos is laying on his billion-dollar yacht with his girlfriend, Daequan is in a homeless shelter. How is that right? That’s outrageous.”
“We have workers that are trying to form a union off a crowdfunding mechanism, that are independent of a union, and chose to go that way,” Goldstein told The Daily Beast. “They’re going up against a trillion-dollar company.”
“This whole thing is not just a Staten Island thing,” he said. “This is a national issue. I think at the end of the day, so goes Amazon, so goes labor rights in the United States.”
The union fight follows years’ worth of complaints about the grueling, fast-paced conditions at about 110 warehouses nationwide. To feed the company’s quotas for high-speed package deliveries, many “fulfillment center” employees have struggled with work-related injuries and mental health crises. Some workers skip bathroom and lunch breaks, fearing they’ll be fired if they don’t keep up with demand since employee performance is tracked by company software, and managers monitor workers’ time away from their stations. According to The New York Times, the turnover rate for Amazon’s hourly associates is 150 percent per year, or a loss of 3 percent of employees each week. (Amazon delivery drivers say they’re facing similar problems. A North Carolina man recently sued Amazon after he lost his leg in an accident with a driver and blamed the company’s “unrealistic and dangerous speed expectations” for its workforce’s package deliveries.)
Amazon is also under fire over the death of six employees in Edwardsville, Illinois, who were killed when a tornado obliterated their facility. The family of one victim, Austin McEwen, has filed a lawsuit alleging Amazon “carelessly required” workers to “continue working up until the moments before the tornado struck.”
The deadly storm delayed Amazon’s plan to reinstate a ban on employee cellphones inside warehouses. Before COVID, workers were required to leave their phones in their cars or stow them in company lockers during their shifts, and rumors are swirling that the mandate will return after union elections. “It improves our working conditions just a little bit to be able to have our phones on breaks or to contact family members on the outside if you have an emergency,” Spence said. “It’s one of the biggest pressure points workers are seeing right now. Not having your phone in the warehouse is like being in solitary confinement.”
Staten Island organizers told The Daily Beast they feel that conditions haven’t improved within the windowless warehouse large enough to hold 18 football fields. “They’re starting to get back into writing people up if you don’t hit their target rates,” Medina said. “In the department I’m currently in… you’re supposed to pack two packages a minute.”
Throughout January, workers say, JFK8 mandated 60-hour work weeks. “They see an opportunity for profit, they take it,” Spence said. “I was shocked they did that, because it sent a lot of people our way.”
ALU advocates say they hope their fight will also win over Amazon customers.
“It’s not just as simple as one-click buy and a package magically appears on your doorstep,” Smalls told us. “You’re putting multiple people at risk every time you do that. I’ve watched ambulances pull up to this warehouse. These are the stories consumers don’t hear about. We’re asking them to stand in solidarity with the workers.”
“We’re the ones who represent the community they live in,” Smalls said. “Not the billionaires, not Jeff Bezos, who flies into space and comes back and thanks us for paying for it.”
Families wait to make their way from the main bus and train terminal on Saturday in Lviv, Ukraine. More than 1 million people have fled Ukraine following Russia's assault on the country, with many Ukrainians passing through Lviv on their way to Poland. (photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Sarah Brown, who lives in Salt Lake City, is one of those who got the ball rolling in a Facebook group for Airbnb hosts. She booked a stay in Kyiv.
Someone in the Facebook group noted that it was important to support Ukrainians in places other than Kyiv, so Brown booked two more stays in smaller cities, with plans for more.
Ekaterina Martiusheva is the host of the first apartment Brown booked in Ukraine.
Speaking to NPR from Kyiv, Martiusheva says the bookings mean a lot: "These days we do not have any income. We do not have any right to ask our country to help us, because all the country's resources are for the war and for the victory."
Airbnb hosts are paid 24 hours after a guest checks in, so people abroad are booking stays and letting hosts know that it's a gesture of solidarity, and they don't plan to appear.
The idea spread over the last few days, and Airbnb is waiving all host and guest fees in Ukraine for now. On Wednesday and Thursday, more than 61,000 nights were booked in Ukraine from around the world — bookings that grossed nearly $2 million, Airbnb tells NPR.
The bookings have helped build a sense of connection
Brown says the experience has helped her feel more invested in Ukraine beyond the news, by connecting with an actual person — in this case, with an Airbnb host like herself. Brown and her husband own three properties listed on the platform, and she owns a business that operates another 28.
"It makes me feel like I have so much more skin in the game. I am so heartbroken for Ukraine, but I don't know anyone there. And now I care so much about this woman and what happens to her," she tells NPR.
"It's not happening to someone happening far away — it's happening to people we now know."
Of course Airbnb hosts may not be the neediest cases. But Brown says there are ways of finding hosts who are likely of limited means, for instance by looking for those who rent out a shared room or live in smaller towns.
Martiusheva says the donations via Airbnb bookings have been valuable because of human connections. "It's not just money, it's the support and encouragement. We get these notes of people who are calling us brave, and it does feel great," she says. "It's just amazing, really."
She has also been directing donors on Airbnb to contribute to a fund for the Ukrainian army as well.
In Kyiv, the donations make up for lost income and help neighbors
Along with her husband from whom she is separated, Martiusheva operates 30 apartments on Airbnb in central Kyiv for property owners who live abroad; most of the owners are not Ukrainian.
Martiusheva says the property owners understand that the money coming in now is intended as donations to help Ukrainian people, and they don't ask for a share of it.
With the money that has come in via Airbnb, Martiusheva is able to pay the six people on her staff of maintenance workers and cleaners. Most of them have fled to western Ukraine, she says, and the money helps them as they're on the move.
She's also using the money to support elderly neighbors with food and transportation, as the price of basic goods and taxis have risen.
The mother of two school-aged children, Martiusheva says she stayed in Kyiv because her parents are in their late 70s and have health problems that make it difficult for them to travel.
But she has also stayed to give encouragement to the Ukrainian army.
"It's hard to protect to an empty city," she says.
Last week Martiusheva woke up to the noise of bombs, helicopters and planes.
But the last three days have been quiet, she says, as Ukrainian forces hold back the Russian army outside Kyiv.
"Only pharmacies and supermarkets work now," she says. "Everything else is stopped. People are just surviving on their savings, and that's it."
The company has taken its own steps to help Ukrainians
While this solidarity-booking phenomenon appears to have developed in a grassroots manner, Airbnb also has its own initiative to provide housing to those in need. The company will offer short-term housing for free for up to 100,000 of those fleeing Ukraine. People can go to Airbnb.org and sign up to host refugees or donate to the cause.
CEO Brian Chesky said this week that the company had suspended its operations in Russia and Belarus.
For Brown in Salt Lake City, the bookings are not meant to replace donations to organizations like the Red Cross that provide crucial aid.
"This is a multiprong approach," she says. "This is just as much about shared solidarity and making sure people don't feel alone, as much as getting money to those who need it most."
Leonard Cohen's masterpiece rendition of the War II resistance anthem The Lament of the Partisan. (photo: Image outtake The Partisan live in France, 1970/YouTube.)
"The Partisan" is an anti-fascist anthem about the French Resistance in World War II. The song was composed in 1943 by Russian-born Anna Marly (1917–2006), with lyrics by French Resistance leader Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie (1900–1969), and originally titled "La Complainte du partisan" (English: "The lament of the partisan"). Marly performed it and other songs on the BBC's French service, through which she and her songs were an inspiration to the Resistance. A number of French artists have recorded and released versions of the song since, but it is better recognised globally in its significantly, both musically and in the meaning of its lyrics, different English adaptation by Hy Zaret (1907–2007), best known as the lyricist of "Unchained Melody".
Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) recorded his version, using Zaret's adaptation, and released it on his 1969 album Songs from a Room, and as a 7-inch single in Europe. Cohen's version re-popularised the song and is responsible for the common misconception that the song was written by Cohen. It has inspired many other artists to perform, record and release versions of the song, including American Joan Baez (born 1941), on her 1972 album Come from the Shadows, and with the title "Song of the French Partisan", Canadian Buffy Sainte-Marie (born c. 1941) and Israeli Esther Ofarim (born 1941)."
Lyrics Leonard Cohen, The Partisan.
When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender,
this I could not do;
I took my gun and vanished.
I have changed my name so often,
I've lost my wife and children
but I have many friends,
and some of them are with me.
An old woman gave us shelter,
kept us hidden in the garret,
then the soldiers came;
she died without a whisper.
There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
but I must go on;
the frontiers are my prison.
Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we'll come from the shadows.
Les Allemands étaient chez moi (The Germans were at my home)
ils m'ont dit "Résigne-toi" (They said, "Surrender,")
mais je n'ai pas pu (this I could not do)
j'ai repris mon arme (I took my weapon again)
J'ai changé cent fois de nom (I have changed names a hundred times)
j'ai perdu femme et enfants (I have lost wife and children)
mais j'ai tant d'amis (But I have so many friends)
j'ai la France entière (I have all of France)
Un vieil homme dans un grenier (An old man, in an attic)
pour la nuit nous a cachés (Hid us for the night)
les Allemands l'ont pris (The Germans captured him)
il est mort sans surprise (He died without surprise)
Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we'll come from the shadows.
Bill Hoppe looks out the door of his barn on his ranch in Jardine, Mont., on Feb. 4. Hoppe relocated his multigenerational outfitting business 150 miles north soon after the wolves were reintroduced because he said the wolves decimated the elk herds he used to hunt. (photo: Louise Johns/WP)
On the 150th anniversary of America’s first national park, one-third of its wolves are dead
The carcass had been on the hillside overlooking Yellowstone National Park for some time, but there was still enough flesh to attract scavengers. Bean crouched over it, examining the thin bones on the snowy ground.
“They chopped off the feet,” she said.
The head was also gone, making it harder to identify the animal. But there were clues. The radius and ulna were not fused, ruling out the mule deer or elk that migrate out of the park in winter across the plateau known as Deckard Flats. Bean suspected it was a gray wolf, and she had plenty of reasons to think so.
In less than six months, hunters have shot and trapped 25 of Yellowstone’s wolves — a record for one season — the majority killed in this part of Montana just over the park border. The hunting has eliminated about one-fifth of the park’s wolves, the most serious threat yet to a population that has been observed by tourists and studied by scientists more intensively than any in the world.
Since 1995, when staff released wolves into Yellowstone — where they had been wiped out decades before — this celebrated experiment in wildlife recovery has become a defining feature of America’s first national park, now celebrating its 150th anniversary.
Each step of their comeback has been documented in books, movies and daily reports from the field by a passionate band of wildlife watchers. Bean, who helps lead the nonprofit group Wolves of the Rockies, is one of those enthralled with wolves and their stories. And she has watched in horror as the body count has mounted.
“This is a definite war,” she said.
‘Take wolves out through any means possible’
A federal judge’s ruling last month that overturned a Trump administration policy and restored federal protections to gray wolves across much of the United States does not apply to wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. It is in these Republican-led states where most of the wolf hunting — and the most intense fights over wolf management — is playing out.
The Interior Department is reviewing whether to put the gray wolves of the Northern Rocky Mountains back on the endangered species list. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland recently warned Montana officials that their actions “jeopardize the decades of federal and state partnerships that successfully recovered gray wolves in the northern Rockies.”
The management of Montana’s wolves passed to the state a decade ago. Since that time, it has sharply restricted hunting around Yellowstone — until last year.
Hounds chased a Yellowstone mountain lion into a tree. Then Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) shot it.
The Republican-controlled legislature passed laws mandating a decrease in the state’s wolf numbers and allowing hunters to catch wolves in neck snares, hunt them at night and lure them with bait. Then in August, the state fish and wildlife commission eliminated rules that only one wolf could be killed per year in each of the two hunting districts bordering Yellowstone.
The result has been “four to five months of basically gloves-off, take wolves out through any means possible,” Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly said in an interview. “It is highly concerning to us.”
The culling has also divided neighbors and relatives who live at the park’s edge. Dozens of businesses that depend on tourism and wildlife viewing argue that these wolves are worth more alive than dead. Wolf hunters have celebrated their kills on social media, and they defend their actions as legal and just.
And each day at sunrise, both sides were watching. In pickup trucks and on horseback, hunters “glassed” the hillsides with binoculars and scopes, checked their traps and listened for howls. Their opponents were out, too, lingering on gravel pullouts on Forest Service roads, their own spotting scopes watching for hunters watching for wolves.
When Bean found the carcass, she texted a photo of it to Carter Niemeyer, a legendary trapper who had been hired by the U.S. government in the 1990s to catch the Canadian wolves that launched Yellowstone’s wolf recovery. It was hard to tell, he told her, but it looked to him like a trophy animal killed and skinned in the field.
Bean read his response aloud: “The reason I say this is the hide was saved along with the head removed and the feet sawed off. This is how an outfitter rough skins a lion, bear, or wolf before taking to taxidermy.”
She bent down and tugged at some soft white hairs that remained near the animal’s tail. She wanted a DNA sample.
“Okay, listen,” she said, straining. “You gave up your life. You can give up your fur. Come on.”
‘It’s sick, is what it is’
Nearly every day in winter, Ralph Johnson and his blue heeler, Sage, hike the hills around Deckard Flats. Johnson can look at a trampled patch of ground and distinguish tracks of the coyote from the fox from the cottontail rabbit. He can point out the two ivory teeth in an elk’s skull on the trail — and explain the evidence that a mountain lion brought it down. This place that hunters and wildlife enthusiasts travel the globe to glimpse is, to him, the backyard.
Johnson is a hunting guide. Along with his brother Lloyd, he runs Specimen Creek Outfitters & Adventures, a business started by his father. Winter is normally downtime, staying in shape for long summertime backcountry hunting and horseback riding trips for clients who want to experience a real, if disappearing, Montana. He prefers old-time hunters — Midwesterners who show up in L.L. Bean clothes with wooden-stock rifles — more than the camouflage and assault-weapons crowd. Much of the hunting scene turns him off these days. This winter more than ever.
He has watched hunters regularly gather in groups as large as 20 above Deckard Flats in the late afternoon to scan for wolves, then head out at dawn to shoot them. He has heard them play recordings of howls to lure wolves over the Yellowstone border. Other hunters say dead animals, including elk and horses, are being left out as wolf bait along stretches of park boundary. Johnson hasn’t seen that yet, but it wouldn’t surprise him.
“A person can understand if you want one. One animal of something. Just to respect it, just to have it. But when you start killing like they’re doing, multiple, it’s not even hunting. It’s just killing is all it is. I totally don’t agree with it,” he said. “It’s gross, and it’s sick, is what it is.”
Johnson knows many of the area’s wolf hunters. He doesn’t want to name names or start a feud in the community. But wolf advocates in town say one of them is his brother Warren Johnson, who runs Hell’s A-Roarin’ Outfitters across the creek from Ralph Johnson’s place.
When a reporter approached him in his pickup truck outside his ranch, Warren Johnson didn’t want to talk wolves. “I’ve been into it too many times,” he said. “That’s it.”
Their clients don’t set out to kill wolves, his wife, Susan, responded by email, but “we just let our elk hunters shoot one if the season is open and they have a license!”
“We definitely know they need to be shot to keep their numbers in check,” she said.
She mentioned another local outfitter whose clients shot three wolves this fall from “a pack of 27!!!!!”
“Way too many!”
Anti-wolf fervor has been around as long as humans have shared land with wolves. But it has flourished in the West in an era of increasing political polarization. Wyoming permits unlimited wolf hunting across 85 percent of its state. Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) last year signed a bill that allows killing as much as 90 percent of the state’s wolves.
There is a stick-it-to-liberals flavor to this debate. Around Yellowstone, visiting hunters have heard others bragging about wolf kills. On the Facebook page of one local guide, the O Bar Lazy E Outfitters, are several pictures of slain wolves, including one image where two dead wolves flank a Trump-Pence 2020 campaign sign.
“We saved a few elk today,” read the October 2020 caption.
Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) himself killed a Yellowstone wolf last year that was wearing a research collar and had strayed from the park. In December, he killed a mountain lion that was also being tracked by Park Service biologists. In shooting the wolf, the governor violated a state hunting rule because he failed to take a required trapper certification course, and was given a written warning. He later said he “made a mistake.”
Gianforte’s office did not respond to a request for comment about wolves; his spokeswoman defended his lion hunt as legal.
In December, Sholly, the Yellowstone superintendent, wrote to Gianforte asking him to suspend wolf-hunting in the two districts north of the park because of the “extraordinary” number of dead wolves. The past quotas in those areas had not only protected wildlife, he wrote, but also the economic and tourism interests of the state. Yellowstone hosted nearly 5 million people last year, the most in its history. Tourism generates $640 million annually and thousands of jobs; wolf viewing alone accounts for $30 million to $60 million per year, according to peer-reviewed studies.
“Once a wolf exits the park and enters lands in the State of Montana, it may be harvested pursuant to regulations established” by the state fish and wildlife commission, Gianforte replied last month. “These regulations provide strong protections to prevent overharvest.”
To Sholly’s mind, two main arguments against wolves — that they prey on livestock and threaten elk — are not convincing here. A wolf has killed livestock only once in the past three years in the county that encompasses the hunting districts near the park. And elk numbers, locally and across Montana, meet or surpass objectives set by the state.
“If we’re not accomplishing a conservation objective, and we’re hurting the economies, I’m not sure what we’re doing,” Sholly said in an interview.
The commission held an online meeting in late January to address the rising wolf death toll in southwestern Montana. Six of the seven commissioners had been appointed by Gianforte; three of the commissioners had animals mounted on the walls behind them.
When the public got to speak, people from across the country made impassioned pleas on behalf of wolves and Yellowstone.
“Yellowstone was created to protect wildlife,” Stephen Capra of the organization Footloose Montana told the commission. “What we’re doing is criminal around the park. It’s a disgrace to the nation.”
The commission voted to stop hunting in the broader southwest Montana region that included the Yellowstone-adjacent districts once 82 wolves had been hunted. At that time, the body count stood at 76. For the moment, hunting around Yellowstone would continue.
Sholly had gone to high school in the small town of Gardiner, just north of the park, and his dad had been chief ranger at Yellowstone. He knew the charged politics of the issue and was familiar with the local hunters. He could only wait and hope that the remaining six wolves wouldn’t come from the park.
“This is a very small number of people that are killing these wolves,” he said.
‘Hard to see all the change’
Every morning, Bill Hoppe leaves his house to hunt wolves. But at 69 years old, he is engaging in more of a daily ritual than determined stalking.
“I don’t try very hard. I guard the road,” he said. “Mornings at daylight, you’ll see the eagles coming down the creek out of their roosts, you’ll see elk scattered around, a few deer. I just like to look at everything.”
Hoppe was the nearest neighbor to the carcass Kim Bean discovered. In local wolf circles, his name is often spoken with bitterness. In 2013, he shot and killed a Yellowstone wolf wearing a research tracking collar after wolves had killed more than a dozen of his sheep.
“I never spent such a summer,” he recalled. “Oh, boy. Death threats? Oh, hell, yeah.”
To Hoppe, the debate over wolf-hunting has lost its mind. Wolves need to be managed just as any predator does, he said, and they’re a resilient species that repopulates quickly. The fact that tourists and many locals observe them so intently and know their names — “Old Fluffy or whatever,” as Hoppe says — makes them too emotional.
“I don’t know of anybody around here who’s ever promoted killing all the wolves,” he said. “But, on the other hand, you’ve got all these people who say, ‘Don’t kill any. Let ’em overrun.’ When they get so many, they get diseased.”
A fourth-generation hunting guide whose living room walls are decorated with moose and elk and mountain goat trophies, he made his career taking clients to hunt elk migrating out of Yellowstone and past his house. That herd numbered about 20,000 before wolves were reintroduced and has declined substantially, partly because of wolves but also because of human causes such as climate change and habitat loss.
“One family I knew had outfitted here for generations, and as the elk herd collapsed, they just kind of moved off and separated and went their own way,” he said. “I saw it break up families that lived here for 100 years.”
The sepia-toned photographs on Hoppe’s living room walls depict a Yellowstone long gone. Back when only a suspension bridge crossed the Yellowstone River, not a paved road jammed with tourists. Back when his grandfather was hired to help eradicate wolves in the 1920s as official park policy.
Wolf hunting connects him to a vanishing past, before tech money moved in and the government micromanaged his backyard.
“It’s hard to see all the change, is all.”
Hoppe said he wants people to be “reasonable.” If the federal government tries to put wolves back on the endangered species list, he said, the consequences for the wolves could be worse.
“This perception that they’re all going to disappear and we’re going to murder ’em all? There’s no way to get rid of them, short of poison,” he said. “And if these people keep pushing and pushing and keep taking away and keep taking away, that’s what will happen.”
“Don’t try to take it all from us,” Hoppe warned. “Because this is Montana. This is not Yellowstone Park.”
‘Best wildlife viewing situation in the world’
Inside Yellowstone, the wolf-watchers’ cars were double- and triple-parked on a snow-covered pullout overlooking the drainage area of Hellroaring Creek. They had clustered their tripods together like cameramen at a news conference, their eyes pressed to their Swarovski spotting scopes.
“There’s a huge bunch. Holy cow!” said Reve Carberry, who lives in a motor home outside the park to devote himself to the daily pursuit of observing wolves. “There’s about seven or eight over in a line.”
“Rick just said 10,” added Jeff Reed, a lodge owner who stood next to him.
“That’s probably the correct number, then,” Carberry conceded.
Rick McIntyre is rarely wrong about wolves. The former Park Service employee is a legendary figure in Yellowstone who has observed and chronicled the predators on a daily basis for nearly three decades. With his courtly demeanor and soothing voice, he’s chief historian for the most famous wolf population in the world.
He has written three books on wolves — with a fourth forthcoming — and has compiled more than 12,000 pages of single-spaced notes from his daily observations. He can tell stories from memory about individual wolves and their family histories, their acts of heroism and betrayal, their hunting prowess and empathy for the wounded or outmatched.
The wolves lounging on a rocky hillside about two miles across the valley from McIntyre and the others were members of the Junction Butte pack. Starting last spring, McIntyre observed that pack for 184 days in a row. Their den was visible from the road, and hundreds of tourists gathered alongside him each morning to watch the pups as they tumbled and scampered in the grass.
“It certainly was, at that time, the best wildlife viewing situation in the world,” he said. “For anyone, regardless of their age or physical abilities, could drive to that spot in Yellowstone, with binoculars or a spotting scope, and see a mother wolf nursing and caring for her pups.”
When the September hunting season started, two of the Junction Butte pups and a yearling were shot dead. In subsequent weeks, five more of their relatives were killed.
“Virtually every time they go out of the park, they lose wolves,” said Doug Smith, the park’s senior wildlife biologist who has led Yellowstone’s wolf restoration project since its inception in 1995. “They’re going out for a day or two, and then they come in for weeks. I sit here with my fingers crossed: Please don’t leave the park.”
Hunters have killed off one entire pack — the Phantom Lake pack — as well as Brindle, the alpha female of the 8 Mile pack, known for her distinctive salt-and-pepper coat, shortly before breeding season, putting that pack’s reproduction at risk. Smith estimated that there were 125 to 130 wolves in Yellowstone when the hunting season started and 89 now.
That is not a rough guess. His staff monitors their movements using radio telemetry and GPS tracking collars — applied by darting them with tranquilizers — along with regular airplane flights and remote cameras. They know how many wolves are in each of the park’s remaining eight packs, along with their age, sex, color and hierarchical position.
The decades-long research project Smith oversees charts one of the most successful ecosystem recovery efforts in the United States. It has informed wildlife management around the world, showing how apex predators shape their environment; how, for example, overgrazed willows, aspens and cottonwoods rebounded when wolves began thinning the elk and bison herds.
After a particularly costly wolf hunt in 2012, some of Smith’s donors said he could no longer characterize the park’s wolves as being in a natural, unexploited state.
“We got through that, with just 12 killed. Now we’re at 24,” he said in an interview in February, before another wolf was killed. “We were doing some of the best science on one of the few unexploited wolf populations in North America. We can’t make that claim anymore.”
“The two primary objectives of the National Park Service are nature preservation and visitor enjoyment,” he added. “And both of these things are impacted by this unprecedented killing.”
Cara McGary, who runs In Our Nature Guiding Services, and Reed, the owner of Reedfly Farm on the Yellowstone River, recently formed the Wild Livelihoods coalition to represent businesses whose interests are threatened by such an aggressive wolf hunt.
The wildlife viewing trips led by McGary, a biologist who has worked in Antarctica and Australia before moving to Gardiner, can cost $700 per day. And viewing a Yellowstone wolf is a primary draw for her clients. The impact on her business this winter is already noticeable, she said.
“More days are happening when people are not seeing wolves at all,” she said.
‘This is how they get killed’
On the same day Bean found the carcass, McGary received a text from a friend.
“Wolves howling audible from our place rt now. This is how they get killed..." she read. “Trucks racing up the rd...”
McGary drove up the hill and met Bean as she was heading down. They conferred about the carcass and both suspected wolf. Bean later realized she didn’t have enough fur for DNA testing, and she wanted a quicker answer. She returned and picked up the animal’s leg and put it in her car.
“It was a wolf,” she said.
Bean said the confirmation came from a government wildlife official who performs necropsies, but she declined to name her contact.
As it happened, the last six wolves killed in southwestern Montana this year came from places other than Yellowstone. The state closed the region for wolf-hunting on Feb. 17, after harvesting 82. Bean doesn’t know whether the one she found had already been reported to the state. Or whether it had been poached. Both hunters and wolf-lovers believe that more wolves get killed than make the official tally.
When she had first seen the carcass, her mind raced. Who is this?
“Is this one of my Junction Buttes? Is this one of my 8 Miles?” she recalled. “It’s immediately just that feeling of — a family lost.”
As she stood over the bones, the mountainside resounded with a ghostly keening: the howling of wolves.
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