30 April 22
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Resistance fighters, the wounded and families with children have been trapped in a steel works in Mariupol for weeks. Shocking reports from the people trapped inside are now trickling out. Many fear they won’t survive the siege.
In the steel factory in the city on the coast of the Sea of Azov, hundreds, and possibly even thousands, of people are trapped, under almost constant attack by Russian troops. From the sea. From the ground. And apparently also with bunker-buster bombs from the air.
The steel factory is called Azovstal, an industrial facility spread out across eight square kilometers that is completely inscrutable to the layperson, a sprawling collection of structures beneath whisps of smoke, even in times of peace. Beneath the compound is a maze of shafts, tunnels and bunkers, in which the final remaining defenders of Mariupol are now making their last stand.
Ukrainian soldiers are holding their ground along with fighters from the Azov Battalion, a unit that also includes Ukrainian nationalists. Many of the troops are thought to be injured, some of them seriously. An unknown number of families are also at the site, civilians, children and the elderly. They fled to the steel factory back when they were still able to move about the city, when entering and leaving the steel mill was still possible. They crossed over the Kalmius River to escape the war, but now, their erstwhile shelter has turned into a trap. Nothing is certain: How long they will still have water. Food. Electricity. When the attackers will storm the facility.
All appeals that have been made to the Russian leadership to end the siege – and there have been many – have fallen on deaf ears. The establishment of humanitarian corridors for the evacuation of civilians are agreed to every couple of days, only to then be revoked by the Russians or used for attacks. Another attempt to get the civilians out has been announced for Friday. But for those trapped inside the Azovstal factory, a third world war is no abstract threat. It has, for them, long since begun.
Far away in Moscow, at the long white table in the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to tell his guest this week, United Nations Secretary General Antonió Guterres, that the truth is actually quite different and that the world has been misinformed about the situation in Mariupol. The city, Putin said, has been "liberated," which means that military operations there are no longer necessary. The truth really is the first victim of war, but that maxim can also be misleading.
Because truth does, in fact, continue to exist in times of war. The truth of the victims. It is something that reporters in war zones encounter over and over again: the fact that civilian victims of war hardly ever lie. They may be mistaken about details and confuse places or timelines, they might have hazy recollections of specifics and even mix up things they experienced themselves with things they heard. But as a rule, victims hardly ever intentionally lie. The perpetrators, on the other hand, are almost always lying.
In contrast to the victims, they have much to hide and a lot to lose. They have to justify their actions, even if only to themselves. And they would like to completely cover up the worst atrocities, make all the evidence disappear and ideally delete the memory in their own minds. But this war cannot be erased. People will ultimately be forced to justify what they did, and not only to themselves. They will have to explain the executions, torture, massacres and mass graves in Ukraine. And in Mariupol.
War crimes are being committed there as you read these lines, and very possibly also crimes against humanity – atrocities on which international courts must one day pass judgment. The escape route for civilians and the wounded has been blocked, and the attacking army has intentionally made sure that their suffering is acute. Although they are trapped, hungry and basically defenseless, the bombing and shelling continues. With no mercy.
No evidence for the crimes has yet been gathered that could hold up in court. Furthermore, neither independent media organizations nor international organizations have access to the steel factory. But voices from the inside have gotten out. The truth of the victims.
It has come in the form of short reports, a few videos, text messages and chats from the catacombs beneath the Azovstal factory, isolated by war, a place where mobile phones represent a potential fatal risk due to the possibility that they can be tracked by the enemy. Still, DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to establish contact with people in the steel factory, communicating with those stuck inside – who are fully aware that they might not make it out alive. Contact was also established with others who managed to escape this horrific siege and with former and current company officials, who were able to provide insight into the topography of the facility. The result is a picture of the situation that is far from complete, with gaps in the narrative that cannot currently be filled. But it is, at least, a rough approximation of what is currently taking place in Mariupol.
The following is a documentation of the statements from witnesses. The sections combine to form a dramatic narrative about the conditions and occurrences inside the steel factory in Mariupol. And if the deadly siege isn’t immediately lifted, the name Azovstal and Mariupol will be added to the book of war crimes, and they will take their place among those that humanity will never forget.
MIKHAIL VERSHININ
Head of police patrol in the Donetsk Oblast
Vershinin, 48, has been on the Azovstal factory grounds since April 7. He received a list of questions from DER SPIEGEL that he answered via several messages sent through the messaging service Signal between April 24 and April 27.
What is your full name and rank?
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vershinin, captain of the patrol police in the Donetsk Oblast since 2015.
What is your familial situation?
Why do you want to know that? Normal.
What is your role in the defense of Mariupol?
Hopefully an important one. I can’t really say for sure at the moment.
How long have you been on the grounds of Azovstal?
I was brought here on April 7 after I was wounded and had to be operated on here in the hospital.
Where are you sheltering at the facility?
No comment. In a bunker.
VALERIYA
Author
The 32-year-old Azov Battalion fighter sent DER SPIEGEL several voice messages via Telegram.
"The conditions are awful. There is a hospital on the site, but we are constantly being bombed or shelled by artillery. The doctors are operating in the light of a flashlight because there is no electricity. The nurses and medics are working around the clock.
Soldiers are brought to our field hospital who are missing limbs or who have suffered shrapnel wounds. We have no medicines, no anesthetics, no antibiotics. Even if an operation is successful, there is great risk of gangrene or sepsis. Many soldiers will only survive if they are evacuated immediately. Others are dying before our eyes.
There isn’t enough food or water. We don’t know how we are supposed to feed the wounded. The fighters have served their country, and now they are being abandoned. That’s not how it should be. The soldiers have fought for their country. Now, their country should fight for them."
YURIY RYZHENKOV
CEO
Azovstal belongs Metinvest whose CEO Ryzhenkov is. DER SPIEGEL conducted a video interview with the 45-year-old on Wednesday.
"The entire world warned us that Russia was going to attack Ukraine, but we didn’t believe it. We thought: Maybe there will be attacks in the east, but a real war? Even on the eve of the invasion, we were certain that nothing would happen. We were fools.
Still, Metinvest, the company to which Azovstal belongs, did make some preparations. Eastern Ukraine has been at war since 2014, and there were occasional explosions near Mariupol as well. In Avdiivka, not far from Donetsk, our workers once had to live in bunkers for a time. We also wanted to make preparations in Mariupol for such a situation.
We stockpiled supplies in Azovstal, including water and food. We thought reserves for three weeks would be enough. None of us imagined at the time that the war could last for several months.
The bunkers can provide protection to around 4,000 people. When the invasion began, we saw it as our duty to welcome anybody who wanted to shelter there. Not just our employees fled to the factory, but also people from the surroundings. Civilians, women, children. Many of them are still there, trapped by the Russian troops. But if the Azovstal bunkers hadn’t existed, they may already have been dead.
Before the war, Azovstal had 11,000 employees. We have contact with 4,500 of them, or at least we know where they are. Some are still in areas that have been occupied, but at least they are safe. Others have managed to leave Mariupol. We know nothing about the remaining 6,500. I hope they are alive and well.
In the first weeks of the war, we still had contact with the people in the factory. There was electricity and we had distributed satellite phones to some of the workers. Now, though, the connection has essentially been severed. I don’t even know how many people are still in the factory. But I think it must be quite a few.
In the initial days of the war, I was worried that the factory could be hit by a shell. There are pressurized containers in our plant that contain hazardous materials. Had they exploded, it would have been a catastrophe. When the fighting got closer, our employees stopped the machines and removed everything they could. And they did so under constant bombardment and at risk to their own lives! For me, they are heroes.
The Russians claim that there are vast catacombs beneath the steel factory from which fighters are operating. In truth, that is all a fake. Every factory, of course, has tunnels for cables and pipes. But they certainly aren’t sophisticated facilities where people can freely move about or even live in. Don’t believe what they are saying.
We request the occupiers to allow the women and children to leave. To give them a possibility to escape. What is happening in Mariupol is a catastrophe."
MIKHAIL VERSHININ
Head of police patrol in the Donetsk Oblast
Why is it so difficult for your enemies to conquer Azovstal?
Excuse my choice of words: It’s because it is being defended by men with balls. Also, it is a strategically important site that was built during Soviet times, back when a nuclear war was a possibility.
Who is there with you?
They’re not directly with us, but there are hundreds of civilians on site, including children and babies. There are a number of units here that I’m not going to name, but the navy is among them. The Azov Battalion is the largest resistance unit. They are the backbone. There are injured people here, a lot of injured. They urgently need medical help because some of them have serious injuries and the conditions here are not adequate to help them. As far as I know, an injured fighter is no longer a fighter according to the Geneva Conventions, rather a person who needs medical care.
Do you still have hope?
We always have hope. Without hope, there would be no resistance.
For how long can you still hold out?
As long as possible. The people here are fully aware of their prospects. If anyone out there thinks that we are hoping for capitulation, that isn’t true. Of course, nobody wants to die, but if it is necessary, that is what the people here will do. They already are doing so. In every hour, every minute, the people here are fighting against the enemy.
VIKTOR OTSHERETIN
Former head of production
Otsheretin, 62, was a foreman at Azovstal, a steelworker who advanced to ultimately become head of the large rolling mill on site. He oversaw 1,780 people from 43 different countries. DER SPIEGEL reached him by phone in Talne in the Cherkasy Oblast south of Kyiv, where he and his family are staying with relatives.
"Even as a young man, I knew where I wanted to work one day. A third of the residents of Mariupol worked at the steel factories Azov and Illich. I always wanted to work with steel and fire.
Our factory alone was one-and-a-half kilometers long and 500 meters wide, about 10 percent of the total area of the Azovstal factory. Our factory is among the newer parts of the Azovstal facility and was opened in 1973. Under my leadership, it was one of the largest steel factories in Europe, and it was extremely safe. The buildings were erected at a time when the risk of a third world war was significant. For that reason, it was equipped with extremely solid bunkers. The goal was to at least save the experts if the production facilities were destroyed. Their knowledge was crucial.
Our factory had two bunkers, each at least five meters deep – equipped with showers, toilets, changing areas, simple beds, a generator and two different entrances, each for 150 people. A total of 300 people could be protected there. All of the production facilities at Azovstal have their own bunkers, for a total of probably close to 50. People can live there for 50 days or more, as long as they have sufficient supplies.
In the first days of the bombardment of Mariupol, right after Feb. 24, I frequently saw residents from the left bank (of the Kalmius River, which flows into the Sea of Azov west of the factory) moving towards Azovstal. Many of them knew of the bunkers there, as did former workers, of course.
When the bombardment grew more intense after Feb. 28, masses of people began arriving. They walked to the factory or arrived by car, the gates were open. By the time the bridges over the river were bombed on March 17, 4,000 people were already in the Azov bunkers. After that, it was extremely difficult to get out again, particularly for people with young children. There was constant shelling, and it was a long way to the factory gate, up to six kilometers from some bunkers.
I was on the factory grounds everyday until March 11. On March 2, I started bringing in bread and water for those in need in my Renault Logan. I also took photos, but I had to delete most of them for fear of controls by Russian soldiers when we escaped the city.
The bunkers in Azovstal are not connected to each other, but it is still possible at the site to get from one factory to the next underground. There are cable tunnels that are taller than a person, channels for electric cables and heating pipes. Up to four levels of such connections are piled on top of each other beneath the factory grounds. All of it is 20 to 30 meters below ground. My assumption is that there are still around 1,200 civilians in the bunkers. But that is only an estimate on the basis of the number of people who sought shelter there in the beginning and what has happened since.
I worked in the steel factory for 38 years before I was asked in 2016 to become head of administration for the Livoberezhna district, on the left bank. I had lived there for decades. We achieved a lot during my five years of work there, building three parks, paving roads and equipping the streetlights with LED bulbs. There are new city buses with air conditioning, 5,000 trees were planted and a number of structures were renovated, including schools, day care centers, swimming pools and also the cultural center.
Now, everything is destroyed. Everything. I can’t ven talk about it without crying."
LESYA
Computer programmer
Lesya, 32, doesn’t want to reveal much about herself. She provides neither her full name nor says where she lives. Her mother, Olena, is a medical orderly in the Azov Regiment who has been detached to the Azovstal steel works since the end of February. Mother and daughter have had daily contact at times, but sometimes they hear nothing from each other for days. During an interview via Zoom on Tuesday evening, Lesya seems strong and composed until the end of the conversation, when she says she and her mother know they will probably never see each other again.
"I’ve never been to Mariupol. But I hope to visit the city one day once we have won and it has been rebuilt. My mother was deployed there on Jan. 28. She’s a medical orderly with a unit that guards industrial facilities. I had a bad feeling, but my mom reassured me. She told me that the soldiers she takes care of aren’t in Mariupol to fight. They were only supposed to supervise the operation and even had instructions to withdraw if war broke out. But when it really did happen, they also had to fight.
The war came as a shock to us. On Feb. 24, I woke up because my mother called from Mariupol. 'It has started,' she said. 'They’re already bombing.' On March 2, I lost contact with my mother for the first time. We didn’t know if she was still alive. At the time, initial reports were coming out that the Russians were entering the city. A little later, the internet apparently got fixed, and we started writing on Telegram. We couldn’t talk on the phone because that would have put my mom and her colleagues in danger.
I didn’t find out that she was at the steel works until the end of March. I don’t know when she got there. I tried to find out exactly where she was in the works, but I was told it might put her in danger if I knew her location. So, I stopped asking.
Until recently, my mom assured me that they had enough food and water. But today she wrote that they are running out of both. That was to be expected, since the channels through which they used to receive supplies no longer exist. Sooner or later, their supplies will run out. The steel works haven’t had water since the beginning. My mom used rainwater to wash her hair. She was also able to wash her body once every two weeks.
She doesn’t say how many people are around her. But from what I’m hearing, I gather that there is a common space for women and men in which they also sleep. The injured are cared for in another room.
If I understand it correctly, no one is leaving the works now because they are being bombed nonstop, from the sea and the air. My understanding is that there is a hospital somewhere in the area around the plant, but there are only a few spots in it. As soon as someone gets better, they take them back to the bunker. My mom changes their bandages there."
Sergei Poluchin
Former foreman at the rail plant
Poluchin, 60, worked at the steel mill for 27 years. DER SPIEGEL reached him by phone this week near Chernivtsi, a city in southwestern Ukraine.
"My whole family is very attached to Azovstal. Last year, its parent company, Metinvest, presented us with an award because 16 members of our family have put in a total of 285 years of service at Azovstal. I myself worked at Azovstal for 27 years, from 1984 to 2011. I started right after my military service in Afghanistan.
I’m an electrician and worked as a foreman in the rail plant with responsibility for 20 workers. We made rails and rail ties there around the clock. Azovstal has its own large rail network. There were 50 locomotives. I also trained two of my sons there.
Two thousand workers were employed in our sub-plant. There were 300 people working on each shift. The site had two bunkers, each with two entrances, with toilets, supply rooms and benches. One of my responsibilities was to regularly check on one of these bunkers to make sure it could operate properly – the 40-kilowatt generator, lighting and ventilation. The generator had a filling capacity of 10 to 12 liters.
There was a large diesel tank that was always filled with around 100 liters of fuel. I also remember five or six large, filled water tanks, each with a capacity of one ton.
I remember that next to this bunker, there was also an underground auditorium, a meeting place for those inside the bunker. The bunkers hardly received any maintenance until 2014, but then there was fighting in Mariupol. That’s why the bunkers started being maintained again. My son told me that this is why he continued working at the plant after I left.
I know that workers at the plant were all evacuated on Feb. 24. Later, when the shelling of the city intensified, the factory gates were opened and people flooded into the site. Perhaps too much attention is being focused on the bunkers – after all, the underground areas of Azovstal are much bigger, with many, many kilometers of cable shafts and water pipes, stacked in layers, each two to three meters high and wide.
Mikhail Vershinin
Head of the patrol police in the Donetsk district
Are you injured?
My left shoulder is. I was operated on and given stitches here in the Azovstal hospital.
How many civilians are there?
We can’t say because we don’t keep tabs on them. They live independently in several communities. It doesn’t make any sense to run around and make lists of civilians during the shelling. There are children and little babies here. And the number of wounded is unclear at the moment.
Specifically, what share does the Azov Regiment have in the overall fighting strength of the defenders?
That information is secret.
What kind of people are hiding in the compound?
Among them are relatives of members of the military, residents of the Left Bank, factory workers. Basically, everyone is here.
Do you have a list of demands for the intentional community?
We are not in a position to make demands. But what is happening here at Azovstal, in the 21st century, in a European country, is blasphemy against all principles of democratic states. It is a violation of all constitutional norms, of all moral principles. We’re not making demands; we’re just asking the community to get people out of here, now.
How are you feeling right now?
Like someone hitting a wall, a very thick wall, and I just can’t break through. I punch and punch and bounce back. We have sent many messages, but so far there has been no response. Nothing. If we could at least start the evacuation of civilians, the evacuation of the wounded. That must happen. Wounded people aren’t considered combatants, and there are so many of them here. When that happens, we will be a big step closer to what we want. That would be great.
Is it possible to speak with civilians at Azovstal?
There is no connection to the internet at all. Only at certain places. Civilians have no connection at all. Taking a civilian to a place where there is mobile phone reception is extremely dangerous because there is shelling and shooting around the clock. Brief moments of silence are interrupted by aerial bombardments. That’s why we can’t arrange that. You’ll be able to talk to these people when they get out of here, God willing.
Lesya
Computer programmer
"Sometimes my mom has internet for a moment, and she writes immediately when she does. The last time, she was totally desperate. She wrote: 'Everyone here is like a zombie! It’s horrible!’
I asked a psychologist how to calm my mom down, even if we only write to each other. He advised me to give her small tasks to focus on. For example, find three red things in the room or find four square objects. I then gave her the task of photographing her bunker. She willingly did so. I put the photos on Facebook so the world can see how bad things are for the people in the Azovstal plant.
Mom is constantly asking when they will save her or whether there are plans to break the siege of the steel works. She says that right now, the steel plant is being bombarded nonstop – she can hear it clearly. She’s also afraid of chemical weapons. She fears they will evacuate the civilians – and kill the remaining military personnel.
For the Russians, the Azov Regiment in the plant is like a trophy. They view it as the 'core of the Nazism,' and they won’t rest until the fighters are dead. My mother knows that. Since Monday or Tuesday, the shelling has once again increased sharply. The Russians began dropping heavy bombs from the air. My mother and her colleagues have been ordered to wear helmets and protective vests around the clock now.
Every message from my mother is important to me. But the best was when she wrote to me in March after a week of silence, saying only: 'I’m alive.' She even wished me a happy birthday on April 5. That meant a lot to me."
OLENA
Military medical orderly
Lesya’s 57-year-old mother, Olena, was detached to the catacombs of the Azovstal steel works on Feb. 26, more than 60 days ago. She communicated with DER SPIEGEL on Wednesday.
"We still have water right now, but very little food. The streets are in ruins, and Russia is bombing everything. There’s no internet because the phone masts have been hit. The mood is at rock bottom. There’s still light in our bunker, but not in others. They are also out of food and medicine. It’s stuffy and humid. I don’t have enough air to breathe.
I’m afraid of the nights because that’s when the shelling is the worst. We can no longer defend ourselves. I feel fear and hopelessness."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
On Wednesday, after President Joe Biden had indicated to some Democratic lawmakers that he is open to forgiving at least $10,000 in student debt, Romney called the relief a "bribe" for voters. Sanders — an advocate for complete student-loan forgiveness — didn't agree.
"Mr. Romney supports 'bribes' in the form of tax cuts for the wealthy and billions in welfare for corporations, but is shocked by the idea that working Americans might get help paying off student debt," Sanders wrote on Twitter on Thursday. "I know he thinks corporations are people, but does he know people are people?"
Romney later told an NBC News reporter that Sanders "needs to go to Econ 101. And I keep suggesting that's a good idea, that it'd be helpful for him to understand that money does not grow on trees."
The student-loan forgiveness debate has been buzzing this week, with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers on high alert. After a speech on Ukraine aid on Thursday, Biden told reporters that he will "have an answer" on student-debt relief in the coming weeks. He noted that $50,000 in relief is off the table, but he's considering some form of debt forgiveness prior to the resumption of student-loan payments after August 31.
Republicans have consistently slammed the notion of student-loan forgiveness due to its cost to taxpayers and the economy. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine criticized the potential Biden move on Thursday, arguing any debt relief would be unfair to people who paid it back.
Sanders and his Democratic colleagues have maintained forgiving student debt will be an economic stimulus and benefit those who need it the most. "This is a problem in our society," Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii told Insider. "We should fix it."
Ukrainians shout toward Russian army soldiers during a rally against the Russian occupation. (photo: Olexandr Chornyi/AP)
After Russian forces withdrew from occupied areas around Kyiv in early April, they left behind scenes of horror and traumatized communities. But in Kherson — a large city with a major ship-building industry, located at the confluence of the Dnieper River and the Black Sea near Russian-annexed Crimea — the occupying forces have taken a different tack.
“The soldiers patrol and walk around silently. They don’t shoot people in the streets,” said Olga, a local teacher, in a telephone interview last month after the region was sealed off by Russian forces. “They are trying to give the impression that they come in peace to liberate us from something.”
“It is a little scary,” said 63-year-old Alexander, who like other residents gave only his first name for fear of reprisals. “But there is no panic, people are helping each other. There is a very small minority of people who are happy that it is under Russian control, but mostly, nobody wants Kherson to become a part of Russia.”
While the city has so far been spared the atrocities committed elsewhere, daily life is far from normal. After Russia occupied Kherson and the surrounding region, all access was cut off. Kherson now suffers from a severe shortage of medicine, cash, dairy and other food products, and Ukrainian officials warn the region could face a “humanitarian catastrophe.”
Russia has blocked all humanitarian assistance except its own, which troops deliver before Russian state TV cameras, and which many residents refuse to accept. With no cash deliveries to Kherson’s banks, the circulation of Ukraine’s hryvnia currency is dwindling, and damaged communication networks mean credit card payments often fail to go through. Access to Ukrainian TV has been blocked and replaced by Russian state channels. A strict curfew has been imposed.
Residents believe Russian troops have not yet besieged or terrorized the city — as they did in Bucha and Mariupol — because they are planning to hold a referendum to create a so-called “People’s Republic of Kherson” like the pro-Russia breakaway territories in eastern Ukraine. Ballots are already being printed for a vote to be held by early May, Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova warned this month.
In an address to the nation on Friday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke directly to residents of occupied Kherson, accusing Russia of planning an orchestrated referendum and urging residents to be careful about personal data they share with Russian soldiers, warning there could be attempts to falsify votes. “This is a reality. Be careful,” he said.
Kherson Mayor Igor Kolykhaiev joined the chorus of warnings, saying in a Zoom interview on Ukrainian TV that such a vote would be illegal since Kherson remains officially part of Ukraine.
Russia has been silent about any plans to hold a referendum in Kherson, with Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko saying this week he knew of no such proposal.
But there is reason for concern. In 2014, a disputed referendum in Crimea amid the Russian annexation was widely believed to be falsified, with results showing nearly 97% of voters supported joining Russia.
A series of Russian actions this week have added to the growing sense of panic in Kherson. The mayor reported on social media on Monday that Russian troops had seized City Hall, where the Ukrainian flag no longer flew. On Tuesday, the Russians replaced the mayor with their own appointee.
A prominent Russian commander, Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekayev, announced plans to take “total control” of southern Ukraine and the Donbas, eastern Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland, with the aim of setting up a land corridor to Crimea. And Ukrainian military intelligence reported that Russia intends to forcibly mobilize the local population, including doctors, in the southern occupied territories to support the Russian war effort.
Kherson is a strategically important city and the gateway to broader control of the south. From Kherson, Russia could launch a more powerful offensive against other southern cities, including Odesa and Krivy Rih.
The occupation of the Kherson region would also maintain Russia’s access to the North Crimean canal. After the annexation, Ukraine cut off water from the canal, which flows from the Dnieper River to Crimea and previously supplied 85% of the peninsula’s needs.
Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst at the Penta Center think tank in Kyiv, says the Russian military’s softer behavior in Kherson is because units from Crimea and separatists from Donetsk and Luhansk, who are either ethnic Ukrainians or have close connections to the region, are deployed there. “Therefore, there have been no atrocities,” he said.
The situation in the surrounding Kherson region, however, tells a very different story — with daily reports of kidnappings, torture, killings or rape. Thousands of people have been deprived of electricity, water and gas.
“The situation in the Kherson region is much worse and much more tragic,” said Oleh Baturin, a local journalist. “Kherson is a big city and there aren’t that many soldiers. It is easier for them to take control of the villages; they are defenseless.”
On April 19, Russian forces opened fire on the villages of Velyka Oleksandrivka and Rybalche, killing civilians and damaging homes, the Kherson Region Prosecutor’s Office reported. A week earlier, Russian troops shot dead seven people in a residential building in the village of Pravdyne. “After that, intending to cover up the crime, the occupier blew up the house with the bodies of the executed people” inside, the report said.
Russian soldiers have also kidnapped local activists, journalists and war veterans, according to Kolykhaiev, the Kherson mayor, who said more than 200 people have been abducted.
Among them was Baturin, who was seized near his home in Kakhovka, 60 miles (90 kilometers) east of Kherson. The journalist was meeting an acquaintance from another village when a group of Russian soldiers attacked him at the train station. They held him in isolation for a week, Baturin said, interrogating him every day; the soldiers asked for the names of organizers of anti-occupation protests, as well as local soldiers and veterans. From other cells, he could hear sounds of torture.
After his release he fled the occupied territory with his family.
“If I had stayed, I am absolutely certain they would come for me again,” Baturin said, speaking by phone last week from Ukrainian-controlled territory after his escape.
Fesenko, the analyst, says the referendum plan indicates Russia’s intention to occupy the region long-term.
“In Crimea and Donbas, Russia had the support of the local population, but this is not the case in the south of Ukraine, where Ukrainians want to live in Ukraine. And this means that in the event of a long-term occupation, Russia risks facing a broad partisan movement,” Fesenko said.
Despite the great risk, thousands of protesters gathered daily on Kherson’s main square during the first weeks of the occupation, draped in Ukrainian flags and holding signs proclaiming, “This is Ukraine.” Videos on social media showed people screaming at Russia’s tanks and heavily armed soldiers. The protests are now held weekly and on Wednesday, Russian troops used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse them.
Olga, the teacher, regularly takes part. Previously a Russian speaker, she now refuses to utter the language. “I will never be able to communicate with Russians ever again. How can I feel about people who bomb maternity hospitals and children?” she said. “We were flourishing — and now they have ruined our lives.”
There has also been some Ukrainian resistance as well. In what appeared to be a Ukrainian counterattack, a series of explosions rocked the television tower late Wednesday, temporarily knocking Russian channels off the air, both Ukrainian and Russian news organizations reported.
Still, there is a palpable sense of growing trepidation among the city’s residents. Mayor Kolykhaiev said that after the warnings about a Russian referendum and mobilization there’s been a panicked rush to leave. “The queues of people who want to leave our city have grown to five kilometers,” he said, adding that around a third of the city’s pre-war population of 284,000 has fled.
Following Zelenskyy’s address to the nation, Olga sent a WhatsApp message to the AP: “The situation in Kherson is tense. My family and I want to leave ... but now the Russian soldiers don’t allow it at all. It’s becoming more and more dangerous here.”
Late Monday night, Kolykhaiev wrote on Facebook that armed Russian soldiers had entered the Kherson City Council building, took away the keys and replaced the guards with their own.
On Tuesday, the mayor posted again, saying he had refused to cooperate with the new administration appointed by the Russian regional military commander, Oleksandr Kobets.
“I am staying in Kherson with the people of Kherson,” he wrote. “I am with you.”
A woman uses her phone. (photo: Getty Images)
The “queries” were made between December 2020 and November 2021 by Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel as they looked for signs of threats and terrorists within electronic data legally collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to an annual transparency report issued Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The surge came as the FBI made a push to stop hacking attacks. But the American Civil Liberties Union called it an invasion of privacy “on an enormous scale.”
“Today’s report sheds light on the extent of these unconstitutional ‘backdoor searches,’ and underscores the urgency of the problem,” Ashley Gorski, senior staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said in a statement. “It’s past time for Congress to step in to protect Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.”
The authority the FBI used in this case was under Section 702 of FISA, which is set to expire at the end of next year unless it’s renewed by Congress.
Renewing Debates
The report doesn’t say the activity was illegal or even wrong. But the revelation could renew congressional and public debates over the power U.S. agencies have to collect and review intelligence information, especially data concerning individuals. In comparison, fewer than 1.3 million queries involving Americans’ data were conducted between December 2019 and November 2020, according to the 38-page report.
The DNI also provided updated statistics reflecting a sharp increase in the number of times government officials sought to learn the identity of an American -- a practice commonly referred to as “unmasking” that became a talking point for former president Donald Trump and his conservative allies.
The report sought to provide a justification for the increase in FBI queries during the last year.
“In the first half of the year, there were a number of large batch queries related to attempts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure by foreign cyber actors,” according to the report. “These queries, which included approximately 1.9 million query terms related to potential victims -- including U.S. persons -- accounted for the vast majority of the increase in U.S. person queries conducted by FBI over the prior year.”
The exact number of U.S. residents who potentially had their information reviewed isn’t known because there’s no precise way to measure the data, according to the report.
Wyden’s Warning
Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the intelligence committee, said the FBI and other agencies must be more forthcoming with accurate information if they want to retain their authority.
“For anyone outside the U.S. government, the astronomical number of FBI searches of Americans’ communications is either highly alarming or entirely meaningless,” Wyden said in a statement. “Baseline transparency is essential if the federal government wants to hold such sweeping surveillance powers.”
Under unmasking, the DNI reported about 10,700 requests to reveal a U.S. person’s identity in 2021, compared with fewer than 7,000 requests in 2020. Of those requests, agencies approved doing so about 9,800 times in 2021 versus 6,000 in 2020.
Intelligence reports normally shield the identity of U.S. individuals whose communications are swept up in surveillance, referring to them as “Individual 1” or the like. U.S. officials can request that actual names of people be provided when necessary, and that’s not unusual as officials try to understand the significance of the information they receive.
Unmasking a name isn’t the same as making it public or leaking it to the news media, which can be a crime.
A protest against rising rent costs in New York City. (photo: Scott Heins/Getty Images)
Recently proposed 9% hikes for rent stabilized apartments stoke panic as residents call on Eric Adams to roll it back
But after a back injury forced him to retire from construction work in 2018, Renping can only afford rent if he works multiple part-time jobs – and that’s with his unit being rent stabilized.
“Once I pay the rent, life is very hard,” Renping said, through a translator.
Recently proposed rent increases of up to 9% prompted Renping to join a coalition protesters calling on New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, to roll back rising rent.
“A lot of us can’t pay the rent and we can’t even buy food,” Renping said at a rally organized by the Rent Justice Coalition group at New York’s city hall park on Thursday.
For the millions of New Yorkers living in rent stabilized buildings, many of whom are still financially recovering from disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, recently proposed rent hikes are stoking panic and widespread pushback throughout the city.
New York’s Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), a nine-person, mayor-appointed board, votes annually on how much landlords can raise the rent of the city’s more than 900,000 rent stabilized units.
For the past five years, the RGB has voted – at most – for a rent increase of 1.5% for one-year leases and 2% for two-year contracts, increases that New Yorkers say have already put added pressure on tight-squeezed paychecks.
But, staff of this year’s RGB, with three new members appointed by Adams, have proposed hikes of 4.5% for one-year leases and up to 9% for two-year leases. Elected officials and tenants argue the added costs will displace a staggering number of residents.
“Is the mayor’s goal to have hundreds of thousands of homeless people? Because if that’s his goal, he’s heading in the right direction,” said Pilar DeJesus, a senior advocacy coordinator at the organization Take Root Justice.
DeJesus, who spoke at Thursday’s protest, said that is because many tenants are still grappling with income loss and financial stress amid the pandemic.
“First, they were worrying about dying. Now they gotta worry about being homeless and dying on the street,” DeJesus said, adding that increased rent will exacerbate crime and mental health problems in the city.
Julius P Bennett, a Bronx tenant who also spoke at Thursday’s rally, seconded the concerns of Renping and DeJesus.
Bennett, whose income primarily comes from his pension and social security, said that he and other tenants in his building would have to move amid proposed rent increases.
Bennett also said past rent increases have not prevented his building from falling into disrepair.
“Nine per cent would be exorbitant,” said Bennett, who leads his building’s tenant union.
Chi Ossé, a city council member who spoke at the protest, said that constituents in his district, which includes the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and parts of Crown Heights, often report excessive rent increases that Ossé believes are unlawful.
“We’ve been getting calls from tenants saying that their landlord was gonna increase the rent by $700 by the time May 1 comes around and we’re hearing even crazier prices,” said Ossé, adding that Bedford-Stuyvesant lost the most amount of Black residents out of any New York City neighborhood .
Bennett, DeJesus and others who spoke at the rally also noted that tenants facing eviction often do not receive the competent counsel to which they are legally entitled. That would be only be worsened in light of higher rent and possible wave of new evictions.
“Is that because we are the poor? You don’t have to provide for us, whatever the law says?” Bennett said.
In response to a request for comment on how proposed rent increases would impact New Yorkers, the mayor’s office forwarded an answer Adams had given at a previous press conference: the RGB would only approve a proposal that wouldn’t increase evictions.
Adams also added that rent increases were meant to support small-building landlords who were falling behind on their bills because the pandemic halted payments.
“We don’t want to aggravate the eviction process, but we also got to look at small property owners,” Adams said at a 21 April press conference. “And sometimes when we think about landlords, we think about the mega guys … but these small mom and pops have been decimated.”
But a 2018 analysis from the non-profit JustFix.nyc calls into question who the suggested increases would serve. The majority of rent-regulated apartments are owned by large landlords, defined as those who own more than 20 buildings, the analysis found.
Adams’s office also noted that board members wouldn’t make a final decision until June and weren’t bound by their staff’s recommendations. But many have questioned if newly appointed members of Adams’s RGB, which include both a landlord lawyer and an avowed skeptic of rent control, would weigh tenants’ concerns over rent hikes.
“You need to understand the impact on working-class people,” Renping said.
Flowers on the facade of the attorney general's office surround images of Debanhi Escobar, right center, and other missing women, during a protest against femicide, in Mexico City, Friday, April 22, 2022. (photo: Eduardo Verdugo/AP)
The driver who was the last person to see her alive told local news that Escobar “was drunk or something.” Her female companions said she was “acting crazy.”
Juan David Cuellar, who was Escobar’s driver on the night that she disappeared, told Mexican television that he “only tried to help” but she “was drunk or something.”
Cuellar took the last known photo of Escobar standing alone on an eerie highway in the early morning on April 8th - a picture that went viral and drew Mexico’s sharp attention to the case of the girl, who was missing for 13 days before her body was found.
“I asked her friends what she drank that night or if they gave her something else because her words didn’t make any sense,” Cuellar said. “The authorities reviewed my case and haven’t found anything against me.”
Mario Escobar, Debanhi’s father, has publicly accused Cuellar of sexually abusing his daughter after he said he reviewed security camera footage taken from the road Cuellar took Escobar down before dropping her on the highway.
“Juan David [Cuellar] reached out to grab my daughter’s breasts and she couldn’t take the assault … but the Attorney’s General Office said there is nothing to prosecute,” Escobar told local press.
After Escobar’s body was found, Cuellar was arrested but then released by the authorities.
A few hours after Cuellar’s interview was aired, Ivonne and Sarahi, two other girls who were with her the night she disappeared, talked about their last hours with Escobar on local television news. Sarahi said during the interview that Escobar was “was acting crazy and she even attacked us.”
“Some people we don’t know tried to take Debanhi from us because she was too drunk. They were carrying her and when I noticed, they let her go and she went and hid in the bathroom,” Sarahi said. “After that she ran away from the party”.
Authorities also made public a video from the party where Escobar and her friends were at around 3 am. In the short clip from a street security camera, Escobar is seen running away from a man who caught up with her and grabbed her before at least another six men surrounded her. They stay around Escobar for a few minutes and then the white car, allegedly driven by Cuellar, shows up and Escobar Gets into the back seat. A man and what appears to be one of Escobar’s friends talk briefly with Cuellar, before he drives away with her in the car.
“This is a strategy orchestrated by the government to change public opinion around Debanhi’s case,” Claudia Muñiz from FUNDENL, a non-profit that works with the families of missing people, told VICE World News in reaction to the declarations of both Cuellar and Escobar’s female companions from that night. She called it an “orchestrated shame campaign” that is an attempt to reduce public sympathy for Escobar.
“These interviews are set up by the government. They want to make us think that women go missing because they were high or drunk,” she said.
Nuevo León state authorities said Wednesday that Escobar accidentally fell into the water tank and managed to stand up before dying.
“She didn’t die from drowning but from a blow to the head, but we think she managed to stand up after falling in,” said Nuevo León’s Forensics Director, Eduardo Villagomez, at a press conference.
The government’s initial version of events suggested that Escobar had fallen into the tank accidentally and drowned.
Authorities also announced that two investigators had been fired after “finding details that suggested deficiencies in the investigations,” Nuevo León’s General Attorney, Gustavo Adolfo Guerrero said.
Investigators had searched the motel on at least four occasions before without finding Escobar’s body. It wasn’t until the fifth search that they found her corpse at the bottom of an unused cistern.
“They searched this place [the motel] four times and only on the fifth time they found the body of my daughter,” Mario Escobar, Debanhi’s father, said during a press conference this week. “How is that even possible?”
The abduction and murder of Escobar has shone a light on the number of missing women in the state of Nuevo León, and is of national interest. Her case has brought attention to the problem of missing people in Mexico generally - there are some 95,000 people officially missing - as well as the high rates of femicides.
A number of girls went missing before Escobar in the weeks approaching her abduction, and their cases remain unsolved. Escobar is the 20th woman to be reported missing in the last four weeks in Nuevo León, a state that’s been host to a bloody war between the Sinaloa and Northeast cartels.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has downplayed her murder, and when her body was discovered said that women shouldn’t worry because such cases “happen everywhere.”
A healthcare worker and a patient. (photo: ABC News)
Climate change is forcing animal migrations at an unprecedented scale, bringing many previously disconnected species into close contact and dramatically raising the likelihood of viruses leaping into new hosts and sparking future pandemics. That’s according to a new study in the journal Nature, which predicts that climate-driven disruptions to Earth’s ecosystems will create thousands of cross-species viral transmissions in the coming decades. We speak with The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, who says this new era can be thought of as the “Pandemicene,” a time defined by the power of viruses over humanity and the wider world. “In a warming world, we’ll get lots of these spillover events in which viruses find new hosts, mostly transferring between animal to animal but increasing the odds that they will eventually then spill over into us,” says Yong.
As the U.S. COVID death toll approaches 1 million, we turn now to look at how the climate emergency could spark the next pandemic. A new study published in Nature shows the climate crisis and urban sprawl is forcing many wild mammals to relocate to new habitats where they interact with new species, including humans, leading to more viruses spilling over from one species to another. The researchers say this shuffling of viruses in mammals has already started and will increase as the Earth continues to warm.
We’re joined now by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong. He writes about the study in his new piece for The Atlantic headlined “We Created the 'Pandemicene.'”
Welcome back, Ed, to Democracy Now! Why don’t you start off by just explaining: What do you mean by the Pandemicene? This is a terrifying article.
ED YONG: Yeah, so, the idea is actually pretty straightforward and intuitive. As the world warms, the world’s animals are being forced to relocate into new habitats to track their preferred environmental conditions. As they do this, species that never before coexisted will suddenly find themselves close neighbors. And that gives the viruses that those species carry opportunities to hop into new hosts. So, in a warming world, we’ll get lots of these spillover events in which viruses find new hosts, mostly transferring between animal to animal but increasing the odds that they will eventually then spill over into us.
This new study, led by Colin Carlson and Greg Albery, shows that the extent of these events is huge and that they — crucially, that they have already been going on in a very substantial way and in a way that is going to be very difficult for us to address. So, we’re used to talking about the Anthropocene, this era of the planet’s history where it’s dominated by human influence. We are also then living through the Pandemicene, this era where our lives are going to be repeatedly affected by new and reemergent diseases that will come more frequently because of the climatic changes that we have also unleashed upon the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain the simulation that the scientists of this study created to show the potential hot spots of future viral sharing, as they put it?
ED YONG: So, what they did was to look at maps of where some 3,000 mammal species are now and where they’re likely going to be in warmer worlds under various conditions of projected warming. And then they will take different pairs of mammals and look at where those ranges overlap in ways that they currently don’t, and then predict how often those overlaps will lead to the kinds of spillovers that I’ve talked about. It’s a huge effort. No study like this has been attempted before, and it took them three years, over the course of the current pandemic, to do it.
But the results are very stark and quite grim. So, for example, it turned out that the hot spots for future spillovers are going to lay in the tropics, areas that are diverse in species and tend to be quite mountainous, so a lot of tropical Africa and Southeast Asia. They’re going to proportionately happen in areas that are basically in humanity’s backyard, areas that are going to be heavily settled by people, that are already sites of human cities, or will be in the near-term future.
And I think the most worrying part of this is that the simulation showed that these trends have already been going on and that even if all greenhouse emissions — even if all carbon emissions cease today, that this is a train that, once set in motion, cannot be halted, that we have already started this, and it’s already underway in this world that has warmed by 1.2 degrees. Of course, there are many other great reasons to try and mitigate climate change as much as possible, but the Pandemicene, once released, cannot be easily unbottled, which means that we are now in a position where we have to expect more of what we’re currently going through and try and prepare for it and adapt for it.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Ed, if you can use the example of Ebola and talk about bats and how they are affected by climate change, and what it means for just Ebola?
ED YONG: So, bats are very good at — so, bats fly, obviously, and that allows them to travel over much longer distances than other mammals, which means that they are particular drivers for the kinds of spillover effects linked to climate change that I’ve talked about. No one really knows the exact reservoir species for Ebola in the wild, but it’s likely to be a bat, and there’s 13 possible species. Those species in the future are going to travel, and they’re going to create lots and lots of opportunities for their viruses to spill over into a lot of other mammals.
And what that means for Ebola, which is currently a problem mostly for western Africa and a little bit for the east, is that it’s likely going to be a problem for other parts of the continent, too. It might well become a problem that — a significant problem that eastern Africa also needs to worry about. And, you know, this is — this is Ebola. It’s one disease. This is likely going to be the case for every animal-borne virus that bothers us, including the many tens of thousands that we haven’t even discovered yet. This is a global problem. It is a problem not just driven particularly by bats, but not just of bats. It’s going to be in hot spots in places like Africa and Southeast Asia, but not just there. It’s a planetary problem. We really have rewired the network of animals and viruses in a very dramatic way and in a way that’s going to be to our detriment.
The way I think about this is, you know, for a virus — for a new virus to spill over into humans, a lot of things need to line up, all of which are quite unlikely. The viruses need to find intermediate hosts. Those intermediate hosts need to be near people. The viruses need to be compatible enough to affect us. All of these have quite low odds, so it’s like playing Russian roulette with a gun that has a million chambers in it. But because we’ve altered the climate, because we’ve warmed the world, we have effectively loaded bullets into more of those chambers, and we’re now starting to pull the trigger more frequently. We do that enough, we’re going to get shot.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what added to the terror in your piece, I mean, these guys, the scientists who did the Nature study, assumed the changes they simulated will occur in the later half of this century, but instead their simulations suggested — and they did it over and over — we could be living through the peak era of spillovers right now. So, talk more about that, and specifically about COVID.
ED YONG: Right. So, it’s very hard to take any particular virus, like SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID, and say this is a climate-related thing. It’s very hard to take the present and then backtrack into the past. But what the simulation shows is that these kind of events are just going to be more likely. So, whether or not climate was the thing that — whether or not climate influenced the emergence of COVID as a disease, it’s going to influence the emergence of many similar kinds of events now and in the future.
And as we said, these events have been going on. The risk has been growing beneath our noses, which means that we’re now in a situation where we simply have to deal with it. The moment for averting this was a few decades ago. What we have to — what we’re forced to do now is to cope with the consequences.
And that means a few things. We can do predictive and preventive work. There are things that we — we can try and better understand and predict which kinds of viruses are going to spill over into us. We can prepare vaccines ahead of time. We can set up surveillance systems in the kind of future hot spots that this study identified. But no amount of that is going to mean that we — no amount of that will negate the risk of pandemics fully. We must expect new diseases to hit us, and hit us in the imminent future. The fact that we’re going through one society-upending crisis that we all want to get past right now doesn’t give us a pass. We could start the next pandemic tomorrow, or it could have happened already.
And that means that we need to prepare in ways that we seem to be loath to do. We need to shore up our public health infrastructure. We need to make sure that our healthcare system is ready. We need social safety nets, so that the most marginalized and vulnerable people don’t get disproportionately hit by whatever comes next, as they have by every epidemic in the recent past. We need to do all those things. And we need — if we are blessed enough to get a lull from COVID, we need to use that time to prepare for future onslaughts of other epidemics, because what this study makes very abundantly clear is that those will happen. People have always predicted that we’re going to live through an age of more and more epidemics and outbreaks. This study confirms that that is true. And I think what it absolutely does is show that many of the greatest existential threats to our world right now, like climate change, the rise of new diseases and the sixth mass extinction of wildlife, are really all facets of the same problem. And we need to think of that in that same interconnected way.
AMY GOODMAN: Ed Yong, we want to thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer at The Atlantic. We will link to your piece, “We Created the 'Pandemicene.'”
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