02 July 22
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"The president is making a deal with the devil and once again" and "the people of Kentucky are crushed in the process," Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker tweeted after The Courier Journal broke the story Wednesday night.
"At a time when we are fighting to protect human rights, this is a complete slap in the face."
U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Louisville, who confirmed Biden is poised to nominate Chad Meredith to U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, called it a "huge mistake."
"Why you would pick him to fill a federal vacancy when you're a Democratic president is beyond me."
Yarmuth said the nomination is bad not only because Meredith is anti-abortion but because of his actions in the general counsel office when he helped former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin issue hundreds of controversial pardons at the end of his term that spurred outrage and a federal investigation.
Gov. Andy Beshear, said Thursday he also strongly opposes the pick, saying his team was informed last week that Biden intended to nominate Meredith.
Beshear said his understanding is that Biden has not yet submitted the nomination, “which I hope means in the very least it's on pause.
“If the president makes that nomination, it is indefensible.”
What Trump did on Jan. 6:On Jan. 6, Trump was out of public view as aides urged him to act. A breakdown of those 187 minutes.
A GOP candidate in exchange for no more blocked nominees?
Biden was poised to nominate Meredith presumably as the result of an undisclosed deal with U.S. Mitch McConnell, Yarmuth told The Courier Journal.
McConnell has blocked the nominations of two lawyers for U.S. attorney positions there were recommended by Yarmuth. The presumption is that with Meredith's nomination, McConnell would agree not to hold up future federal nominations from the Biden White house, Yarmuth said.
"We were informed by White House staff that this nomination was coming," Yarmuth said. "I expressed my objections to it in the strongest terms I use."
Robert Steurer, a spokesman for McConnell, said he would have no comment until Biden makes his nomination.
There are currently no open federal judgeships in Eastern Kentucky. However, Eastern District Judge Danny C. Reeves is eligible for senior status when he turns 65 years old Aug. 1, while Judge Karen Caldwell is already eligible.
Neither Reeves nor Caldwell could be reached for comment.
Yarmuth said "clearly someone has agreed to resign and we don't know what deal has been made with that person, and I think that's something to media needs to try to figure out."
Beshear: Bevin pardons should be disqualifying
Beshear said Meredith should be disqualified from a nomination for his work on Bevin's controversial pardons and commutations, saying Meredith “aided and advised on the most egregious abuse of power by a governor in my lifetime.”
The Courier Journal reported in 2020 that Meredith was one of the staff attorneys involved in string of controversial acts of clemency Bevin doled out at the end of his term in 2019.
Bevin administration documents showed Meredith was one of Bevin's general counsel staff to give recommendations to the governor on whether certain applicants deserve clemency.
One spreadsheet of clemency applicants from those records showed "Chad working" written next to the name of Patrick Baker — one of the most controversial pardon recipients, who was convicted of killing a man in a robbery and whose family hosted a fundraiser for Bevin at his home.
“If you are a lawyer that advised on that and went along with it, you should be disqualified from serving in a role where you would hand out sentences," Beshear said. "I mean, these are individuals who are pardoned who are walking free today, despite committing terrible violent crimes.”
Meredith’s personal lawyer, Brandon Marshall, has told The Courier Journal Meredith had "no meaningful involvement with any of the most controversial pardons about which the media has made much.”
Directing his attention back to Biden, Beshear added: “I don't know how the president could say he's for public safety if he makes this nomination.”
'A deal with the devil'
Booker, who is challenging Sen. Rand Paul for his seat, reacted with even harsher criticism to news of Meredith's pending nomination on Twitter, writing, "This is some bulls---."
"The president is making a deal with the devil, and once again, the people of Kentucky are crushed in the process," Booker tweeted. "At a time when we are fighting to protect human rights, this is a complete slap in the face."
A White House spokesman declined to speak on the nomination, saying "we do not comment on vacancies."
Yarmuth said the Meredith nomination is obviously "some kind of effort to appease Mitch McConnell, which is something this state and country should be very upset about."
"Mitch McConnell was not elected by anyone outside of Kentucky, yet he is imposing his individual will on the federal judiciary and the president of the United States just because he has the power to do it, not because it makes sense good sense for our country."
Nicole Erwin, the spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates-Kentucky, issued a statement that did not directly address the Biden nomination but expressed concern.
"We need judges in place that prioritize the health and wellbeing of people in Kentucky and reflect the diversity and progressive values of the nation now more than ever — that means nominating qualified and unbiased judges to the bench,” Erwin said.
Nominee a Federalist Society member
Meredith is a Federalist Society member who served as deputy counsel to Bevin and more recently solicitor general for Attorney General Daniel Cameron.
Cameron is now a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor in 2023.
He defended a 2017 Kentucky abortion law requiring doctors who perform abortions to first perform an ultrasound and describe the image to the patient, losing first at a trial in federal court before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later upheld the statute.
As the top appellate lawyer for Cameron, Meredith also successfully defended a state law in the Kentucky Supreme Court that stripped Gov. Beshear of his emergency power to implement COVID-19 restrictions.
Meredith was being vetted for a federal judgeship in 2020 by President Donald Trump’s administration but was later dropped from consideration for that position.
He is a longtime member of the Federalist Society, from which Trump drew nominees for the Supreme Court and other judgeships.
Meredith previously practiced as a litigator with Frost Brown Todd in Louisville and Ransdell & Roach of Lexington. Since leaving the attorney general's office in January, he has worked at Cincinnati law firm Squire Patton Boggs.
Volodymyr Ivashchenko shows the basement where he sheltered in the initial days of the war, together with his wife, mother-in-law, daughter, and 3-year-old grandson, in Yahidne, April 17, 2022. His 70-year-old mother-in-law, Nadezhda Buchenko, died in the school basement during the internment by Russian forces. (photo: Human Rights Watch)
In 17 villages and small towns in Kyiv and Chernihiv regions visited in April, Human Rights Watch investigated 22 apparent summary executions, 9 other unlawful killings, 6 possible enforced disappearances, and 7 cases of torture. Twenty-one civilians described unlawful confinement in inhuman and degrading conditions.
“The numerous atrocities by Russian forces occupying parts of northeastern Ukraine early in the war are abhorrent, unlawful, and cruel,” said Giorgi Gogia, associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “These abuses against civilians are evident war crimes that should be promptly and impartially investigated and appropriately prosecuted.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 65 people between April 10 and May 10, including former detainees, torture survivors, families of victims, and other witnesses. Human Rights Watch also examined physical evidence at the locations where some of the alleged abuses took place as well as photos and videos shared by victims and witnesses.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Russian forces have been implicated in numerous violations of the laws of war that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch previously documented 10 summary executions in the town of Bucha and several other northeastern towns and villages during Russian forces’ occupation in March.
In 1 of the 22 newly documented killings, in the Kyiv region, Anastasia Andriivna said that she was at home on March 19 when soldiers detained her son, Ihor Savran, 45, after they found his old military coat. On March 31, the day after Russian forces withdrew, Anastasia Andriivna found her son’s body in a barn about 100 meters from her house after recognizing his sneakers sticking out the barn door.
Civilians described being held by Russian forces for days or weeks in dirty and suffocating conditions at sites such as a schoolhouse basement, a room in a window manufacturing plant, and a pit in a boiler room, with little or no food, inadequate water, and without access to toilets. In Yahidne, Russian forces held over 350 villagers, including at least 70 children, 5 of them infants, in a schoolhouse basement for 28 days, severely limiting their ability to leave even briefly. There was little air or room to lie down, and people had to use buckets for toilets.
“After a week everyone was coughing violently,” said someone formerly held at the school. “Almost all the children had high fevers, spasms from coughing, and would throw up.” Another said some people developed bedsores from constant sitting. Ten older people died.
In Dymer, Russian forces held several dozen people, the men blindfolded and handcuffed with zip-ties, for several weeks in a 40 square-meter room in the town’s window manufacturing plant, with little food and water, and buckets for toilets.
Human Rights Watch documented seven cases of torture in which Russian soldiers beat detainees, used electric shocks, or carried out mock executions to coerce them to provide information. “They put a rifle to my head, loaded it and I heard three shots,” said one man who had been blindfolded. “I could hear the bullet casings falling on the ground, too, and thought that was it for me.”
Human Rights Watch documented nine cases in which Russian forces fired on and killed civilians without an evident military justification. On the afternoon of March 14, for example, as a Russian convoy passed through Mokhnatyn village, northwest of Chernihiv, soldiers shot to death 17-year-old twin brothers and their 18-year-old friend.
All of the witnesses interviewed said they were civilians who had not participated in hostilities, except for two torture victims who said they were members of a local territorial defense unit.
All parties to the armed conflict in Ukraine are obligated to abide by international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, and customary international law. Belligerent armed forces that have effective control of an area are subject to the international law of occupation found in the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions. International human rights law, notably the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, is applicable at all times.
The laws of war prohibit attacks on civilians, summary executions, torture, enforced disappearances, unlawful confinement, and inhumane treatment of detainees. Pillage and looting of property are also prohibited. The internment or assigned residence of civilians is permitted exceptionally for “imperative reasons of security.” A party to the conflict occupying territory is generally responsible for ensuring that food, water, and medical care are available to the population under its control, and to facilitate assistance by relief agencies.
Anyone who orders or commits serious violations of the laws of war with criminal intent, or aids and abets violations, is responsible for war crimes. Commanders of forces who knew or had reason to know about such crimes but did not attempt to stop them or punish those responsible are criminally liable for war crimes as a matter of command responsibility.
Russia and Ukraine have obligations under the Geneva Conventions to investigate alleged war crimes committed by their forces or on their territory and appropriately prosecute those responsible. Victims of abuses and their families should receive prompt and adequate redress.
As a general matter, Ukrainian authorities should take steps to preserve evidence that could be critical for future war crimes prosecutions, including by cordoning off gravesites until professional exhumations are conducted, taking photos of bodies and the surrounding area before burial, recording causes of death as possible, recording names of victims and identifying witnesses, and looking for identifying material that Russian forces may have left behind.
“It’s increasingly clear that Ukrainian civilians in areas occupied by Russian forces have endured terrible ordeals,” Gogia said. “Justice may not come quickly, but all steps should be taken to ensure that those who suffered see justice someday soon.”
Summary Executions
Human Rights Watch has documented 32 apparent summary executions by Russian forces in Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, including 10 in a previous report on Bucha. Summary executions, irrespective of the victim’s status as a civilian, prisoner of war, or otherwise as a captured combatant, are serious violations of the laws of war. Anyone who orders or commits summary executions is responsible for war crimes.
Kyiv Region
Andriivka
Anastasia Andriivna, 66, the mother of 45-year-old Ihor Savran, lives in the village of Andriivka, 40 kilometers northwest of Kyiv. She said that when Russian forces took control of the area on February 26, they came to her home, confiscated her and her son’s cellphones, and threatened to kill anyone who kept a working phone. She gave them an old phone and hid her newer, working phone. On March 19, a commander and a soldier came to her door, demanding that she let them inside. They said they had a device that had sensed cell phone usage coming from the area. The commander took her into one room to search for the phone, while the soldier dragged Savran to a summer kitchen in the yard. Anastasia Andriivna heard the soldier find Savran’s old military overcoat, from his 1993 National Guard service, and start shooting at it. The commander ordered her to stay in the house for the next 30 minutes, “without moving,” and left with the soldier, taking Savran.
On the night of March 30, Russian forces withdrew. The next morning, Anastasia Andriivna left home for the first time in weeks, hoping to find her son. About 100 meters from her home, she recognized her son’s sneakers, with a red stripe, sticking out of a barn door. She said:
He was lying there in a fetal position, with his hands tucked under his head, and his jacket draped over his shoulders. He had been shot in the ear, with blood covering his face. His best friend [Volodymyr Pozharnikov] was lying next to him; he had also been shot. His legs were bent in an unnatural position.
The stepfather of Anton Ischenko, 23, said that Russian forces came to their home in Andriivka and took Ischenko on March 3. Anton had been in the Ukrainian armed forces years earlier. The family found his body in a field in the suburbs of the village on March 31, the morning after Russian forces left the area. The stepfather declined to detail the state of Anton’s body but said that they had to identify him by his clothes.
Motyzhyn
On April 4, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Motyzhyn, a village about 50 kilometers west of Kyiv, saw the body of a woman whom the authorities identified as the mayor, Olha Sukhenko, 51, along with the bodies of her husband, Ihor, and son, Oleksandr. There was a fourth body, an unidentified man, who had tape covering his eyes and zip-ties lying next to him, indicating he may have been bound. His head had a large hole in it.
The four people appear to have been summarily executed, but Human Rights Watch was not able to confirm the circumstances of their deaths. A fifth body, an unidentified male with bruises and other marks, was found in a well nearby the mass grave on the same property. Human Rights Watch found evidence on the property and in the area in which the bodies were found that suggested that Russian troops occupied the area for an extended period, including discarded and partially consumed food and clothing consistent with that worn by Russian forces.
Chernihiv Region
Novyi Bykiv
A Novyi Bykiv villager whom Russian forces had held with about 20 others in a boiler room said that on March 30, a day before the Russian forces withdrew, several soldiers came to the boiler room saying that they had an order to execute 8 detainees and asked if there were any “volunteers.” When no one stepped forward, they took away eight men. The following day, after Russian forces withdrew, the villager found the bodies of two of the eight men about 50 meters from the boiler room, their heads smashed. He said he heard that the body of a third detainee was also found a bit further away. Human Rights Watch has no information about what happened to the other five men.
Staryi Bykiv
Russian forces in the village of Staryi Bykiv rounded up at least six men on February 27. Viktoria Hladka, the mother of one of the men, said she was sheltering in the family basement when Russian forces took her son Bohdan, 29, and brother-in-law Oleksandr Mohyrchuk, 39, from their yard. They had been smoking cigarettes, having just come up from the basement. Bohdan was a post office employee while studying management in Kyiv, and Mohyrchuk was a construction worker. Hladka saw their dead bodies and four others in a field the day after the men were taken.
Human Rights Watch documented these killings through a telephone interview with Hladka just after Russian forces withdrew from the village. Human Rights Watch on April 16 went to Staryi Bykiv and spoke with Hladka, who said that following the Russian forces’ departure, Ukrainian law enforcement officers exhumed the bodies. An examination showed that some of her son’s ribs had been broken, and he had a knife wound to the heart and a shot in the head. Mohyrchuk had a knife wound near the heart and his neck had been slit. Hladka also provided the names of the other men found dead: Oleksandr Vasylenko, 39; Volodymyr Putiata, 46; Ihor Yavon, 32; and Oleh Yavon, 33.
Yahidne
In Yahidne, Russian forces held over 350 villagers in a schoolhouse basement for 28 days, severely limiting their ability to leave, even for brief periods. Valerii Polrui, a local councilman from Yahidne, said that a village resident, Viktor Shevchenko, was shot on March 3, the day Russian forces arrived in the village. Polrui said that one of the soldiers told him that Shevchenko was shot because he was a major in the Ukrainian armed forces, which he said was untrue. Shevchenko’s body was found a month later, buried in his own backyard. Ukrainian law enforcement officers exhumed Shevchenko’s body and conducted a forensic exam. Polrui said that the forensic exam showed that Shevchenko was shot in the head.
The bodies of two men who had been visiting Yahidne were found in a cellar on March 6 or 7. A villager who saw the bodies said their hands were tied behind their back and that each had two bullet wounds, in the head and in the back. Both were in their 40s.
Petro Tolochyn, in his 50s, was believed to be a retired lieutenant colonel who had a holiday home in Zolotynka, about 6 kilometers from Yahidne. One of the women held in the school basement and who sat close to the door, which had cracks in it, described seeing an armored vehicle bringing Tolochyn, covered in a blanket, to the schoolyard. She saw Russian soldiers put him on his knees and question him, and then throw him into the boiler room on the other side of the schoolyard.
The following day, the soldiers brought him to the basement, but took him away next morning, allegedly to take him to a hospital. Another villager in the basement who said he knew Tolochyn well and recognized him there, said Tolochyn’s body was discovered after Russian forces withdrew on March 31. Human Rights Watch visited the school on April 17 and saw a body bag. A villager who had identified Tolochyn’s body said it had gunshot wounds to the temple and left leg.
Mykhailo-Kotsiubynske
On March 4, Russian forces detained Oleh Prokhorenko, 38, in the town of Mykhailo-Kotsiubynske. He was allegedly using his phone to film Russian troop movements and provide the information to Ukrainian forces. Witnesses said they saw Prokhorenko, after he was detained, digging trenches for the Russian soldiers, a laws-of-war violation. Then no one saw him for weeks. His body was found on April 8 in the nearby woods, shot and buried. The forensic exam on file with Human Rights Watch says that he had gunshot wound to the head with skull fracturing and brain destruction.
Unlawful Killings of Civilians
Human Rights Watch documented nine cases of apparently unlawful killings of civilians by Russian forces in the Chernihiv region. Parties to an armed conflict, including occupying forces, may not attack civilians unless they are directly participating in the hostilities. Parties must do everything feasible to verify that targets are military objectives, such as soldiers, weapons, and military equipment.
On March 14, between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., as a Russian convoy passed through Mokhnatyn village, soldiers shot to death 17-year-old twin brothers Yevhen and Bohdan Samodiy and their friend, Valentin Yakimchuk, 18. Yevhen and Bogdan were in vocational training to become electricians, while Yakimchuk was a first-year university student in Chernihiv.
The twins’ sister, Tanya, and other witnesses said that Russian forces had not occupied Mokhnatyn. Tanya said by phone that a Russian convoy earlier that day had been attacked near Mokhnatyn, and vehicles had scattered to various villages, including Mokhnatyn.
Tanya, who lived on the main road, said that her brothers and Yakimchuk had left for a friend’s house early that afternoon. She was at home when she heard the rumble of a convoy heading from the village center on the main road toward her house. After shots were fired, she immediately ran toward the village center and saw about 10 Russian military vehicles on the road, including armored personnel carriers, vehicles hauling rockets, and a gasoline supply truck.
When she arrived at the site of the incident, neighbors told her to get her parents. When she returned with them, they saw the bodies of the three on the ground. Yevhen and Yakimchuk were dead. Witnesses said half of Yakimchuk’s head was gone and Yevhen had been shot in the chest. Bohdan was wounded in the abdomen and still alive. His mother and her partner drove him to the Chernihiv children’s hospital, but Bohdan died before they arrived.
On March 4, in Nova Basan village, Russian soldiers shot dead Dmytro Solovei, 14, who was kicking around a football on a playground near his house. His brother, Serhii, 30, who saw Dmytro playing, went outside to bring him in, but also got shot at and wounded in the leg. Serhii managed to crawl to a neighbor’s house and get first aid. He could not seek professional medical assistance until Ukrainian forces regained control of the area on March 31. Their mother, Anzhela Solovei, said on May 10 that Serhii remained hospitalized, and his recovery was expected to take several months.
On February 28, also in Nova Basan, Russian soldiers apparently shot Mykola Kucherina, about 40, in the head as he passed by their post. The village administration chief said that although the family knew about Kucherina’s death, his body remained there for a month, as the Russian forces did not allow his parents to collect it.
Three residents of Levkovychi village said that around 6 p.m. on February 28, Russian forces entered the village and shot dead four men – Oleksandr Oryshko, Oleksandr Derkach, Yaroslav Varava, and Serhii Nimchenko – in the village center. The residents said that the men were unarmed and that each suffered multiple bullet wounds.
Enforced Disappearances
Human Rights Watch documented six cases in which Russian forces detained civilians, but their families could find no information about their circumstances or whereabouts. During an international armed conflict, failure to acknowledge a civilian’s detention or to disclose their whereabouts in custody can constitute an enforced disappearance, a crime under international law. The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has since February 24 documented 204 cases of enforced disappearances involving 169 men, 34 women, and a boy, the overwhelming majority of them attributed to Russian armed forces and affiliated armed groups.
Russian soldiers detained Anatolii Shevchenko, a Yahidne resident in his 40s, on March 4. His next-door neighbor saw him being apprehended and again later sitting handcuffed on the concrete near the schoolhouse where other residents were arriving to shelter in the school basement. For a month, Russian forces used the school as their base. Shevchenko’s family members told the neighbor, who sees them regularly, that they had received no news of Shevchenko’s whereabouts.
On March 4, around 3 p.m., five Russian soldiers detained Nykyta Buzinov, a 24-year-old taxi driver in Chernihiv city, at his house in the town of Mykhailo-Kotsiubynske. His uncle, Borys Buzinov, who was at home at the time, said that the soldiers checked everyone’s phones and saw that Nykyta had provided information to the Ukrainian forces. The soldiers first took Buzinov and his girlfriend, Katya, and then his mother and uncle to a nearby veterinary clinic, where the Russian forces were encamped.
Later that evening, the soldiers released everyone except Buzinov, saying they would talk to him and release him later. The encampment relocated the following day and Buzinov has not been seen since then. Borys Buzinov has been trying to locate Nykyta since his detention and spoke to members of various Russian units stationed throughout Mykhailo-Kotsiubynske in March, but he could not obtain any information about his nephew’s whereabouts.
Natalia Tarashenko, 48, and her husband, Mykola Sadovyi, 47, residents of Krasne, Chernihiv region, moved to her mother’s house on the other side of the town because their house was close to Ukrainian positions on the main road. Her husband stayed to take care of the household and domestic animals. On March 9, their neighbor’s child came to Natalia to say that her husband had not been seen for two days.
Sadovyi had told the neighbor on March 7 that he had run out of his heart medication and was planning to bicycle to Chernihiv to buy it. He was with his friend, Kostya Sivko, who also disappeared the same day. They are concerned that Russian forces took them into custody. Although Krasne remained under Ukrainian control, to get to Chernihiv, the men would have had to ride on roads controlled by Russian forces, through Russian checkpoints, and also pass through Yahidne, which was under Russian control at the time.
On March 10, Serhii Molosh, 39, and his friend, Vitalii Kulik, were missing from the village of Ryzhyky, about 22 kilometers north of Chernihiv, and there are concerns that they were taken into custody. Serhii’s mother, 69, said the men set off by foot during daylight hours to buy meat in the village of Riabtsi, 2.5 kilometers away. They never reached Riabtsi and were not heard from since. Villagers knew of no shelling in either village or on the road between them. Russian forces were in full control of the area where Ryzhyky and Riabtsi are located, and Russian armored vehicles were patrolling the road between both villages as well as other neighboring villages.
Unlawful Confinement and Inhuman, Degrading Detention Conditions
Human Rights Watch documented numerous cases in which Russian forces rounded up and unlawfully detained civilians in dirty and suffocating conditions, restricting their access to food, water, and toilets. The Fourth Geneva Convention applies to all civilians, who are considered protected persons when under the control of belligerent or occupying forces. The Geneva Conventions permit the internment or assigned residence of protected persons only for “imperative reasons of security,” as a measure of last resort. In the cases investigated, Human Rights Watch found no basis for detaining civilians. The ban on torture and other ill-treatment is absolute under both the laws of war and international human rights law.
Chernihiv Region
Yahidne
Russian forces entered Yahidne, a small village 15 kilometers south of Chernihiv city, early March, after days of shelling. For 28 days, they held over 350 civilians, almost the whole population, in the basement of the village schoolhouse without ventilation in extremely cramped and unsanitary conditions. They severely limited people’s ability to leave the basement, even for brief periods, arbitrarily depriving them of their liberty. Seventy were children, including five infants. During this time, 10 died, all older people.
On March 3, Russian forces rounded up the villagers or otherwise ordered them to the school basement ostensibly for their own safety. Some refused and were allowed to remain in their homes because they were sick or were providing someone health care.
Russian forces turned the school into a military base, thereby endangering the villagers detained there.
Human Rights Watch interviewed 13 people detained in the basement, which consisted of two large rooms and a warren of six smaller rooms. They said that during the first few days Russian soldiers did not open the door at all, and subsequently opened it no more than once a day, allowing people to leave irregularly to use the outdoor toilet and to cook over outdoor fires, and at times allowing some detainees to go home to bring food back to the basement. They described the suffocating lack of air, the absence of space to move around or lie down, and having to use buckets for toilets. Many fell ill.
Some villagers went voluntarily to the basement, fearing the continued shelling. Some were directly coerced. Olha Volodymyrivna said that on March 3, three Russian soldiers came to her house, beat and kicked her husband, Volodymyr, 63, in her presence, smashed his phone, and locked both in their stand-alone cellar for two days, while the soldiers lived in their house. On the third day, they ordered the couple to go to the school basement.
On March 3, Volodymyr Ivashchenko was sheltering in the basement of his home with his wife, mother-in-law, daughter, and 3-year-old grandson, when five soldiers banged on the basement door and ordered everyone out. Ivashchenko’s 70-year-old mother-in-law, who walked with a cane, remained inside. Ivashchenko explained to the soldiers that she had difficulties walking. She left the basement only after one of the soldiers threatened to drop the grenade he was holding if she did not leave. The following day, Ivashchenko and his family walked to the school basement. He described the conditions there:
It was damp and everyone was coughing. There was not enough air…. There were hundreds of people [and] nowhere to sleep, we were locked there for days at a time, used buckets as toilets. Imagine sitting on a chair for weeks, no place to even lie down.
A woman from Yahidne said:
The room had no light. We could only sit on small children’s chairs or narrow benches. Our baby was sitting and sleeping on laps. The air was filled with dust and the smell of lime from the walls. … After a week everyone was coughing violently. Almost all the children had high fevers, spasms from coughing, and would throw up. We tried not to walk unnecessarily, because people were sitting so densely that it was only possible to move sideways…
We tried not to drink much because there was not enough water, and we were anxious that the soldiers would not allow us to use the … small outdoor toilet. They … [soldiers] didn’t give us food during the first days. … After that, they allowed some of us to go home for food supplies. They allowed us to make a fire near the exit and cook for ourselves. We were able to provide a half liter of [cooked] food per two people.
She also said the soldiers would not allow a 63-year-old man with cancer, for whom sitting was painful, to go home. They said he could “hang himself” to alleviate the pain. Some people developed bedsores from constant sitting. Around March 20, several children and adults came down with chickenpox and secondary infections from scratching the blisters.
Halyna Tolochyna, who spent nearly a month in the Yahidne school basement, said that to keep track of days, together with another woman, she drew a calendar using chalk on one of the basement doors. On the right side of the door, she kept a list of people who died, 10 in all, including their date of death, and on the left, a list of people, totaling 7, who were shot or were forcibly disappeared.
Tolochyna said 2 of the 10 people had died at home a few days after the soldiers let them leave because of their rapidly deteriorating health. Among the eight who died in the basement was Ivashchenko’s mother-in-law, Nadiia Buchenko. Ivashchenko said:
Imagine sitting on a chair for weeks. Nowhere to lie down, and not enough air. Her legs got swollen and her blood pressure would drop a lot. We had no medications and could not leave. She died on March 28. Her body was moved to the boiler-room and two days later, Russian soldiers allowed me to … bury her at the cemetery.
Some former detainees were still hospitalized when Human Rights Watch visited on April 17 for various ailments they contracted during their confinement.
Among them was Ivashchenko’s wife, Liubov, 50, who went to the hospital on March 31, the day they were released. Her legs had become swollen, and she was having difficulty walking.
Nova Basan
Mykola Diachenko, 63, head of the village administration in Nova Basan, spent 26 days in Russian custody, in five locations, including a post office building, a warehouse, a summer kitchen, and a cellar.
Russian soldiers detained Diachenko on March 5 at home, together with his deputy. Diachenko said that the Russian soldiers rounded up every man on his street as the soldiers were establishing control over the village. He said:
They demanded that we put on some clothes and follow them. I asked if I could take my eyedrops, [they said] I would not need them anymore. I thought they knew I was the head of the village administration, and they were going to shoot me.
One of the detention places was in a stand-alone underground cellar, which was no more than nine square meters, with 20 detainees, all men from 22 to 65. They spent two days there, with the door sealed shut. People started to suffocate. Diachenko said, “We started banging on the door, pleading [for someone] to open it and let us breathe. Eventually, the soldiers left the door slightly open to let some air in.” The men inside were given no food, only two liters of water for the 20 to share.
Novyi Bykiv
On March 24, seven or eight Russian soldiers came to the home of Volodymyr Zhadan in Novyi Bykiv, started shooting in the air, and demanded that he hand over his phone. Zhadan, 64, said:
I was in my underwear. … They started to beat me [with rifle butts], pushed me to the ground and started to kick me in the stomach, legs, back, demanding my phone. …Then they blindfolded and handcuffed me from behind and took me away. They only allowed me to put on my slippers and a jacket, no pants.
Zhadan said he was taken, together with two neighbors, to the basement of the village preschool. “They took the blindfolds away, but it was completely dark,” he said. “We spent the night there, freezing in complete darkness.” In the morning, the Russian soldiers gave him pants, blindfolded him again, and took him for questioning next door at the village school. After Zhadan was released, later that evening, he found his house had been trashed and looted.
On March 24, soldiers detained a 66-year-old Novyi Bykiv villager because they found he had a cell phone. They took him to a small boiler room in the village center, which was holding about 20 people. In the far-right corner was a pit several meters deep. Soldiers put him in the pit, where he spent five nights together with four other detainees. He said he was allowed to use the toilet only three times during the five days, that they were given no food and just one bottle of lemonade a day for all five men. “One of the detainees was in handcuffs all the time; his hands were swollen,” the villager said.
Kyiv Region
Dymer
After the Russian offensive began on February 24, Ihor Zyrianov, a 58-year-old hair stylist from Kyiv, fled to his summer house in Bohdany, a village about 80 kilometers north, together with his wife and 12-year-old daughter. On the morning of March 21, Zyrianov and five friends, including two women, got together at the home of his neighbor, Pavlo Rudyk, 47, because he had internet reception. Soon six Russian soldiers, wearing masks, arrived in an armored vehicle. They ordered everyone out, checked their documents, and stole US$11,000 that Zyrianov said he had in his passport folder.
The soldiers confiscated the two vehicles parked in the yard, took off the license plates and sprayed a “V,” one of the Russian symbols for the Ukraine conflict, on them. They blindfolded the four men, handcuffed them behind their backs with plastic zip-ties, and bundled them in the trunks of the two cars. They put the two women in the back seat of one of the cars and drove all six about 30 minutes to the window manufacturing plant complex in the town of Dymer.
There, they were taken to a 40 square-meter room that Zyrianov described as a compressor station with a big industrial air pump in the middle of the room. The six friends spent three days in custody there. At least 30 others were already in the room when they arrived, and the number grew to 49 by the end of the day. Zyrianov said the detainees ranged in age from 17 to 73, and that at least eight were 17 and 18, and that one young man had been detained there for two weeks before they arrived.
Zyrianov and Rudyk, interviewed separately, each said there was very little light in the room. There were two buckets instead of toilets, one 20-liter bottle of water and one hose for drinking and that everyone, except the women, was kept blindfolded and handcuffed with zip-ties.
Zyrianov said:
The door had a small hole, which allowed enough light for us to know whether it was a day or night. People slept and sat on the ground, on plastic buckets, or on some cloths, no beds… There was not enough space for us to lie down, so we slept in shifts. Food was given once a day... Once there was barley, once pasta, and once some kind of boiled rice. We… learned how to loosen the zip-ties when the door was closed and would lift the blindfolds when Russian soldiers were not there.
On March 23, a Russian officer told the detainees that they would be released in groups. Zyrianov, Rudyk, and their four other friends were in the second group, together with three others. They were taken, blindfolded and handcuffed, to the center of Dymer at around 4 p.m. Zyrianov said that the Russian soldiers told them that they would be killed on the spot if they were detained again.
When they returned home, both men discovered that their houses had been looted. Rudyk said that among the items stolen were a car, his wife’s wedding ring, a generator, tools, Bluetooth speakers, about $30,000 in cash, and a watch worth US$22,000.
Torture and Other Ill-treatment
Dymer
Zyrianov and Rudyk described the abuses they endured during their three days of detention at the window manufacturing plant. Zyrianov said that on the first day, March 21, Russian soldiers confiscated their phones and demanded access codes. Each day, soldiers interrogated them, one by one, for 10 to 15 minutes each, in a nearby room. He said that the soldiers had nicknames for all detainees, and they called him “American” because of the US visas in his passport.
He was interrogated, while blindfolded, three times about where he served in the military and why he had traveled to the United States. Soldiers hit him twice with a rifle butt when they did not like his responses. Zyrianov said that he was spared compared to others: “They used ‘electric shockers’ and beat some detainees. We could hear the screams.”
Rudyk said soldiers interrogated him twice and subjected him to a mock execution:
I sat blindfolded and handcuffed. They told me that it was over for me. They put a rifle to my head, loaded it and I heard three shots. I could hear the bullet casings falling on the ground too. …They told me that they would not miss next time if I don’t tell them everything… whether I participated in the Maidan events [2013 protests in Kyiv] or whether I fought in the 2014 war. Second time they interrogated me, they used an electric shocker on me. They shocked me on the back of my head. It was very painful.
Rudyk said that as of mid-April, more than 40 people detained at the window manufacturing plant were still missing. Rudyk and Zyrianov said that on April 14, two other detainees – a Red Cross volunteer driver and a nurse – were missing after the ordeal. In an April 27 CNN report about the window manufacturing plant industrial site, reporters interviewed Volodymyr Khrapun, a former detainee whom Russian forces forcibly transferred to Russia, together with dozens of other window manufacturing plant detainees. Khrapun appears to be the Red Cross driver whom other detainees had described, and who told CNN he was released as part of a prisoner exchange.
Nova Basan
Mykola Diachenko, the Nova Basan village administration head, said that at one of the five sites where he was held, Russian soldiers took him outside with other detainees. They blindfolded them and demanded that they cooperate if they wanted to survive. Diachenko then heard rifle shots, thinking that someone had been executed. They also threatened to hang him by his feet, stab his fingers, and impale him on a wooden pole so he “would die in a lot of pain.” At the fifth detention site, a small summer kitchen packed with detainees, the soldiers threatened to throw in a grenade. “I was sure that I would not survive the detention,” Diachenko said. He and others detained with him were freed after Russian forces withdrew from the area.
In Nova Basan, Human Rights Watch spoke with a villager who participated in the local territorial defense unit, the quasi-military resistance groups in Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. On March 9, about 15 Russian soldiers arrived on an armored vehicle and took the villager and his 25-year-old son, also an active resistance member, at gunpoint. They pushed them to their knees, while firing their rifles in the air, tied their hands behind their back and ordered them to show where they had hidden their guns.
The soldiers took the son to their basement and made him dig out buried guns. The soldiers blindfolded the villager, put him in an armored vehicle and took him to a farmhouse. “They put me on a chair,” he said. “I told them that I had given them all the weapons I had, but someone then kicked me in the back of the head, and I fell off.”
The soldiers released him the next day, detained him again on March 12 and held him until March 31. They took him back to the farmhouse and threatened to cut his hands off or run over him with a tank if he did not tell them more about the resistance.
The villager said that one soldier tied his hands together in front with a zip-tie and hung a cable from the ceiling roof, pulling his hands upward, the tips of his toes touching the floor. He said the only way to avoid pain was to stand on tiptoes. He was kept in this position for two or three hours. He was set free after Russian forces withdrew from Nova Basan.
Hostomel, Kyiv region
Oleksandr Novichenko, 35, evacuated his mother from Hostomel, but stayed behind to feed his and his neighbors’ domestic animals. On the afternoon of March 27, as he was closing the neighbors’ gates, a Russian soldier took him into custody, tied his hands behind his back with a zip-tie, blindfolded him, and pushed him down into a basement, where for two days soldiers repeatedly questioned and electroshocked him.
“The zip-tie was so tight that my wrists were swollen,” he said. “I had an open wound on my knee, and they would shock me right there … I was screaming from pain, telling them that I knew nothing, but they would go on shocking me.” After two days, the soldiers put a black bag over his head and released him in the village.
Rioters attempt to enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Eric Lee/Getty)
The former president’s security detail has long talked about the incident Cassidy Hutchinson recounted to the committee on Tuesday, according to a new report from CNN
Sources within the Secret Service now tell CNN that a description of an incident involving President Trump angrily demanding to be taken to the Capitol on Jan. 6, and lunging at agents within the president’s vehicle, circulated amongst staff for months following the events. Two Secret Service sources told CNN they heard the story from multiple agents, including the driver of the presidential vehicle where the events allegedly took place.
The public first became aware of the incident through testimony from Hutchinson, an aide to former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who detailed a conversation with Secret Service official Anthony Ornato. Ornato described to Hutchinson an irate Trump yelling at Secret Service agents attempting to transport him back to the White House. “I’m the f-ing president,” Trump allegedly demanded. “Take me to the Capitol now.” Hutchinson also said that Ornato described to her how Trump tried to grab the vehicle’s steering wheel before “lunging” toward Secret Service agent Bobby Engel.
One source, a longtime Secret Service employee, told CNN that agents had described to him how the president “sort of lunged forward … Nobody said Trump assaulted him; they said he tried to lunge over the seat. For what reason, nobody had any idea.” The source also relayed that agents often spoke of outbursts from Trump in which the president would throw or break things.
Following Hutchinson’s testimony, The Washington Post reported that, according to two law enforcement sources, three unnamed Secret Service agents who accompanied Trump disputed claims “that he assaulted or grabbed at the leader of his security detail or that he grabbed for the steering wheel.” Engel and Ornato have both been privately interviewed by the panel, and according to sources are both willing to testify under oath before the committee.
Investigative reporter Hunter Walker appeared to lend credence to CNN’s report on Friday, tweeting that in April, a source in law enforcement told him that D.C. Metropolitan Police officers affiliated with the presidential motorcade shared stories with him about Trump “demanding to be [driven] to the Capitol and getting into an altercation with Secret Service on January 6.”
The tug of war between sources, some attempting to discredit Hutchinson’s testimony in its entirety, has only upped the intrigue around what exactly took place behind the scenes of the presidency on Jan. 6. The Jan. 6 committee is expected to continue interviewing witnesses following the congressional recess, and there’s reason to believe members of the Secret Service may find themselves added to the roster.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Getty)
The Court on Thursday ruled that the EPA does not have the authority to set limits on carbon emissions from existing power plants.
Regan labeled the move a setback and said it made the U.S. less competitive globally.
"Over the past 18 months or so, [the EPA] has done a really good job of focusing on the full suite of climate pollutants," he said. "Power plants play a significant role in this larger picture and that's why the Supreme Court's ruling is disappointing, because it's slowing down the momentum of not only curtailing climate change impacts, but the globally competitive aspects that this country can seize to create jobs and grow economic opportunities."
President Biden has set a goal for an emissions-free power sector by 2035 and yesterday said the ruling was "another devastating decision that aims to take our country backwards."
"While this decision risks damaging our nation's ability to keep our air clean and combat climate change, I will not relent in using my lawful authorities to protect public health and tackle the climate crisis," he said in a statement.
Regan said the EPA was taking time to review the ruling and he called on Americans to speak out.
"When we see the setbacks, we will take these punches, absorb them, but then come back with a counterpunch," he said. "We're going to move forward with every legal authority to regulate climate pollution and protect communities that we have."
"Rulings like yesterday prevent us from moving forward as quickly as we would like. So Americans should use their voices as much as possible to ensure that we can move forward and do the things that the American people would like for us to do."
The Biden administration came into office with the most ambitious climate agenda of any president, including the pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of this decade, based on 2005 levels.
Regan wouldn't be drawn on whether there could be ripple effects on the rest of the world's ability to fight the effects of climate change if the U.S. failed to meet its own targets, and instead focused on the work the EPA had already achieved.
But he did say the court's ruling was a hurdle on meeting those targets.
"The Court's ruling, obviously, puts a speed bump in the path of the important work that this agency and other agencies would like to pursue. We will continue to keep our eye on the Court now and in the future."
A boy scout troop spotted the targets while on a recent tour of the Farmington Hills police department. (photo: Dionne Webster-Cox)
Boy Scouts discovered the targets, some of them pierced with bullet holes, while touring a police department headquarters just outside Detroit.
The troop spotted the targets, some of them pierced with bullet holes, when it was touring the headquarters of Farmington Hills Police Department in April.
In one photo from the tour, six white Scouts are looking at the targets—the same image of a Black man with a menacing look and pointing a gun—while a Black boy Scout stands behind them.
An unidentified person who attended the visit, represented by attorney Dionne Webster-Cox, first reported the use of the images.
“When those children were exposed to those images, to me it was the potential detrimental effects on how they view Black men and Black people that was indescribable,” Webster-Cox told VICE News. “It’s literally profiling for the Black man. You've got young police officers and this is what they're being trained on?”
The targets, which have since been removed, are now the subject of a legal review, Mayor Vicki Barnett said at a public city council meeting on Monday.
At the meeting, Farmington Police Chief Jeff King apologized. “I’ll take this one on the chin,” King said. “I apologize to each and every person in this room, this community, my department, my city council, my city manager. I can’t overlook this.”
He also told the meeting the images were purchased but didn’t say where from, or if they are of actual people.
But King told VICE News the use of the images of Black men was taken out of context.
“A diverse group of targets were on display the day of the tour—not just targets featuring Black people,” King said. “Unfortunately, this was not accurately depicted in the photographs, as the photographs only depict a small area of the department’s firing range and a select number of the targets that were presented and discussed during the group tour.”
He said the department uses images of a dozen different people, 10 of whom are white and two Black, in line with Michigan’s Commission on Law Enforcement Standards, as well as the city’s demographics. (Farmington Hills is 18.5 percent Black and 62 percent white, according to the 2020 U.S. census.)
Assistant Chief Jon Piggott told VICE News that officers normally train on silhouettes and bull’s eyes when measuring accuracy, and only use images of people once they start training officers on threat assessment. While the default targets are all holding guns, their hands can be swapped out to hold a beer can, a cellphone, or nothing at all.
“Because now, it’s not a question of whether or not the officer can hit the target,” Piggot said. “The question now is… whether or not the thing that they’re looking at is a danger to them or not.”
For Webster-Cox, however, the explanation doesn’t change the fact that Black men were primarily presented as targets the day kids got to see the shooting gallery.
“This is not acceptable. You don't want your children to just start off hating,” she said.
This wasn’t the first time the department has been under scrutiny for the targets it uses for shooting practice. Last July, the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union filed a freedom of information request asking the police department to disclose images of “any gun range targets used by the police department from January 2020,” according to Webster-Cox. The organization received images of other, non-Black targets that were not on display at the time of the Boys Scouts tour.
The Michigan ACLU did immediately confirm to VICE News what prompted the filing of the records request.
The city of Farmington Hills has been working to address its diversity problem. In October 2021, the Michigan Diversity Council agreed to assess the city’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to hiring workers, including Black cops. In return, the city agreed to create a diversity council that would help make its hiring practices more inclusive.
Uyghur ethnic minority employees work at the production line of a textile mill in Aksu, Xinjiang, March 31, 2012. (photo: Reuters)
Merth was pleased with the result, and she wrote a follow-up post a year later, as the coronavirus pandemic was spreading throughout the world and professionals with spare cash were overhauling their homes. Middle-class Americans were entering an era of immense choice in the workplace; at many companies, it was possible for the first time ever to work from practically anywhere. They just had to figure out where to put the home office.
In two blog posts on her flooring project, Merth linked to Home Depot’s Lifeproof page over a dozen times. But she didn’t realize at the time that the simplicity promised by Home Depot comes at an immense environmental and human cost. Vinyl flooring is seeing a surge of growth, boosted in part by pandemic-era renovations. The industry calls it “luxury vinyl tile.” In reality, it is layer upon layer of thin plastic, a heavily polluting concoction made with fossil fuels. Very often, a new report shows, that plastic is produced using forced labor.
The story of vinyl flooring begins 6,600 miles away in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, where it is intertwined with the persecution of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs. The same month that Merth wrote her 2020 blog post, in a village in southern Xinjiang, 30-year-old Abdurahman Matturdi was herded onto a bus emblazoned with the words “Zhongtai Chemical.” That’s short for Xinjiang Zhongtai Chemical Company, a Chinese government-owned petrochemical firm that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a type of plastic that is a critical ingredient in vinyl flooring. The World Health Organization had just declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and factories across China were shutting down to protect workers and prevent the coronavirus’s spread, but Zhongtai’s PVC plants were humming. Matturdi, whose story is detailed in a post on the company’s WeChat account, left behind his wife, newborn baby, and ailing mother. Hours later, he arrived in the regional capital of Ürümqi, where people in his group were assigned dormitory beds and given military fatigues to wear. Instead of watching his baby learn to walk or caring for his mother, he would spend his days laboring in Zhongtai’s facilities, exposed to both toxic chemicals and a frightening new virus.
Zhongtai did not respond to a detailed list of questions from The Intercept.
Merth and Matturdi are connected by a troubling supply chain. At one end is Zhongtai, a mammoth state-owned enterprise with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party that is among the top users of forced labor in Xinjiang. By its own account, Zhongtai has brought in more than 5,500 Uyghurs like Matturdi to work at its factories under a government program that human rights advocates say amounts to a grave injustice. To make the plastic resins that go into the flooring under Americans’ feet, Zhongtai belches greenhouse gases and mercury into the air. Its executives uproot lives, tear families apart, and expose workers to coal dust and vinyl chloride monomer, which has been linked to liver tumors.
At the other end of the chain are many major flooring companies, small contractors, and Home Depot. “The Home Depot prohibits the use of forced or prison labor in its supply chain,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “This is an issue we take very seriously, and we will work to review the information in the report and to take any additional steps necessary to ensure that the product we sell is free from forced labor and fully compliant with all applicable regulations.”
The new report, by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice in England and at the Maine-based toxic chemical investigative outfit Material Research, details the toll taken by the flooring industry, painting a devastating picture of oppression and pollution in the Uyghur region, all to help consumers in the United States and other wealthy countries cheaply renovate their homes. The report calls on the industry “to identify its risk and extract themselves from complicity in Uyghur forced labor.” It also asks all companies that source from China — including Home Depot — to scrutinize their supply chains.
The report is “very significant,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor monitoring group that was not involved with the research. “It has major implications for the retailers and marketers of flooring. And there are a lot of people walking around their homes right now on floors that are virtually certain to be made in part with forced labor.”
Fully 10 percent of global PVC comes from the Uyghur region, the majority of it from Zhongtai. From Xinjiang, Zhongtai’s PVC resin is transported to eastern China, India, and Vietnam, where it is turned into flooring before being exported to the U.S. and other parts of the world. PVC is also used to make everyday products like shower curtains and credit cards; the Sheffield Hallam and Material Research team says it is likely that Zhongtai plastics are used to make PVC piping for global buyers.
The researchers focus in part on a flooring factory in Vietnam called Jufeng New Materials that supplies Lifeproof tiles to Home Depot, via a Georgia-based company called Home Legend. Over one-third of Jufeng’s imports of PVC resins come from Zhongtai, shipping records show. Another half come from Jufeng’s parent company in eastern China, which itself sources heavily from Zhongtai. All of this leads the researchers to conclude that the Lifeproof line is at “high risk of being made with Xinjiang Zhongtai PVC.”
The Home Depot spokesperson sent The Intercept a letter from Home Legend, dated June 10, claiming that Jufeng’s parent company had assured it that Xinjiang PVC was not used to produce flooring for the big box retailer. The spokesperson also directed The Intercept to a Home Depot report stating that it audits suppliers to ensure compliance with “human rights, safety and environmentally sound practices,” including a ban on forced labor. Home Depot did not answer questions about when it last audited Home Legend or its downstream factories. Home Legend did not respond to requests to comment.
Researchers, customs officials, and journalists have previously documented a disturbing array of products linked to Uyghur forced labor, including surgical masks, laptops, cotton, solar panels, and wigs. But PVC flooring adds another dimension: severe health and environmental effects. The report details how workers involved in its production breathe in several toxic substances, including carcinogens, and how massive amounts of climate pollutants are released in the process of creating plastic resin for flooring.
Tainted Supply Chain
PVC production occurs in countries around the world, including the U.S., and creates pollution wherever it happens. But in Xinjiang, the process uses mercury, which has been phased out of PVC production in the U.S., and generates more waste than in many other parts of the world, the report notes. Uyghur workers living in dormitories near the plants bear the costs. “In those conditions, at that scale, where the state is in control of production and there’s no accounting for the impacts, it’s almost unimaginable what’s happening,” said Jim Vallette of Material Research, one of the report’s authors. “There’s nothing like it on Earth in the combination of climate and toxic pollution. And workers are living there 24/7.”
Lifeproof is Home Depot’s in-house flooring line. But the problem extends far beyond Home Depot. The researchers trace PVC from Zhongtai to over two dozen other flooring brands. They also highlight Zhongtai’s long list of investors in the U.S. and Europe, among them the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, Dimensional Fund Advisors, and Vanguard. None of the funds responded to questions from The Intercept about their investments in Zhongtai; in an email to the researchers, Vanguard confirmed an investment of $7 million in Zhongtai.
Consumers in the U.S. are shielded from vinyl flooring’s dark backstory. Flooring companies promote vinyl flooring as ideal for families and environmentally friendly because it doesn’t rely on lumber and, manufacturers claim, lasts longer than wood flooring. Some brands even portray their products as liberating for women because they are easy to install and clean — and enlist female influencers to promote their floors. (Merth said Home Depot did not compensate her for her posts in any way and that she hasn’t made significant money from the affiliate links in them.)
Merth said she carefully researched vinyl flooring before settling on the Lifeproof brand. She said she ran across people online who warned against the general use of plastics in the home, but she wasn’t sure whether to trust them. Otherwise, she said, she did not find any information that concerned her.
Home Depot uses multiple manufacturers for Lifeproof floors, and the particular Lifeproof style that Merth installed does not appear to have a direct tie to Xinjiang. But several other Lifeproof styles that she recommended to her followers are sourced from Jufeng, the Vietnamese factory that imports large amounts of PVC from Zhongtai. The researchers identified these tiles by comparing the product codes and flooring thickness listed on Home Depot’s site with those in shipping records. The products have whimsical names, like Sundance Canyon Hickory and Maligne Valley Oak, making it sound as if the tiles originated in a serene forest.
“It’s certainly shocking to hear that,” said Merth of Lifeproof’s supply chain, adding that she would consider appending a note to her posts. She said that the findings raise questions about Home Depot. “It’s something that I would be very concerned about, if they knew and still were selling it.”
Next week, U.S. customs officials will start enforcing a key provision of a new law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which requires companies to vet their supply chains for any use of labor in Xinjiang. President Joe Biden signed the act into law last December following a campaign by workers’ rights and Uyghur activist groups; it allows Customs and Border Protection to assume that all goods from Xinjiang are made with forced labor, putting the onus on the importer to prove otherwise. But because PVC products often pass through multiple countries before arriving in the U.S., many vinyl floors wouldn’t automatically face scrutiny. The Sheffield Hallam and Material Research investigators hope to change that. “A lot of businesses have resisted looking beyond the veil that they put up in their supply chains,” said lead author Laura Murphy, who studies forced labor at Sheffield Hallam. “From my desk and from the desks of my research team, we figure this out every day.” Increasingly, she said, there is no excuse for such myopia.
A Coal-Blackened Wasteland
Around a decade ago, factories in eastern China introduced the tiles that had so entranced Merth, the DIY influencer. Water-resistant, cheap, and lightweight, the innovation revolutionized the flooring industry. Laying down a floor became as simple as building with Legos; suddenly anyone could do it, no contractor required. American companies soon brought the Chinese-made flooring planks to market as luxury vinyl tile, calling the new assembly method “click and lock.” HGTV gushed that the new tiles were “Not Your Father’s Vinyl Floor.” Guests plugged them on the “Today” show and on “This Old House.” Between 2010 and 2020, according to shipping figures compiled by Material Research, U.S. imports of vinyl floors from China quintupled.
American flooring factories couldn’t compete. Vallette, who has tracked the environmental effects of plastic flooring for years, has counted 18 factories that closed as manufacturing shifted overseas. The combination of cheap fossil fuels and forced labor in the production of Chinese PVC proved impossible for American flooring companies to match. More than 2,500 American workers lost their jobs. The U.S. brands remained, but only because they reinvented themselves as distributors in a complex global supply chain.
Into this upturned market came Zhongtai. Like many state-owned enterprises in China, Zhongtai has a web of subsidiaries. It produces chemicals used in polyester, spandex, and polyurethane, and it grows tomatoes, grapes, peppers, and cotton. But its main business is plastics. Zhongtai’s four factories in Xinjiang churn out more than two million tons of PVC resin per year.
Making PVC requires both abundant energy and toxic inputs. In the U.S., companies pipe in natural gas from hydrofracking sites and use asbestos imported from Russia and South America to make chlorine, a critical ingredient; they also use industrial chemicals known as PFAS. (The Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed banning the use of asbestos for this purpose.) In Xinjiang, PVC producers use an even more polluting process involving coal and a mercury-based catalyst. To get easy access to energy, Zhongtai sets up its PVC factories next to coal mines and coal-fired power plants in which it owns a stake. Satellite photos show industrial facilities surrounded by a ghastly, coal-blackened wasteland.
In 2017, Zhongtai began bringing in Uyghurs to work at its factories. Many of these laborers were, like Matturdi, from poor villages in southern Xinjiang. Their journeys start when Zhongtai representatives show up at their door. “Companies like Zhongtai recruit workers through state-sponsored programs, and people are not allowed to refuse,” said Murphy, the forced labor scholar. In one instance reported by Chinese state news agency Xinhua, Zhongtai representatives repeatedly visited the home of a young woman named Maynur on the edge of Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert. Her parents balked at the thought of her leaving, but their protests were ultimately ignored. Before long, Maynur was operating packaging machines at a Zhongtai PVC factory.
The Chinese government euphemistically calls this a “labor transfer” program and claims that it is aimed at alleviating poverty in the region. But it has been rolled out against a backdrop of escalating repression. Since 2016, the Chinese government has interned more than 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in inhumane camps. The government has separated Uyghur children from their parents, carting them away to boarding schools reminiscent of institutions in the U.S. and Canada to which Native American kids were taken beginning in the mid-19th century. It has locked up Uyghurs for imagined transgressions and seized their land. One of the report’s authors, Nyrola Elimä, has a cousin in prison and parents under house arrest. “They don’t like us,” she said of the Chinese government. “In their eyes, we don’t look like them. We’re different, so we’re the enemy.” Human Rights Watch says that the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghurs amounts to crimes against humanity, making it a violation of international law.
Zhongtai’s executives are active participants in broader government repression in the Uyghur region, according to the report. In 2017, the company held an event devoted to “social stability” in which representatives encouraged Uyghurs to bring their thinking in line with that of the Communist Party. Zhongtai’s employees have helped the Chinese government surveil Uyghur villagers by collecting their personal details and entering them into a widely criticized policing app, according to a WeChat post by a local propaganda department. And Zhongtai executives often publicize their participation in the labor transfer program, allowing state news reporters to film Uyghurs as they arrive by bus or join in military drills. Such workers have reason to fear anyone affiliated with the company, which, as a state-owned enterprise, implicitly represents the Chinese government. When Uyghurs arrive at Zhongtai’s facilities, the company’s corporate communications show, Communist Party officials are often there to receive them.
After undergoing training at Zhongtai, Uyghurs are put to work feeding furnaces, mixing and crushing materials for PVC production, and handling caustic soda, a byproduct of the production process. They face respiratory hazards from coal and PVC dust in the air, neurological effects from mercury, and carcinogens from coal reacting with chlorine.
Forced study is another part of the program, both at Zhongtai and at other plants in the region that use Uyghur labor. Elimä collected state press news clips about Zhongtai that show Uyghurs in military garb, studying Chinese. Some talk woodenly about how happy they are, as if reading from a script. “Thanks to the Party and Zhongtai for giving us this good opportunity!” says one.
“Zhongtai sees it as a corporate success because they’ve managed to turn Uyghurs away from being farmers, away from their homogenous culture, away from their Islamic piety and toward a culture that is more industrialized, urbanized, and ideologically appropriate in the government’s view,” said Murphy.
State media reports claim that the workers are paid enough that they can send money home to their families. According to Xinhua, Maynur earned 4,000 yuan a month, equivalent to around $580 at the time of the article. But the Xinjiang Victims Database, an independent project that compiles accounts from victims of persecution in the region, has collected many stories from former Uyghur laborers and their relatives who paint a very different picture of working conditions in the region. “First-person testimony tells us that people are typically not paid or are even in debt to the companies they work for,” said Murphy. Companies often deduct money for food and housing — or they promise to pay salaries and don’t deliver. The article featuring Matturdi’s case says that each worker in his group had 1,000 yuan ($145 at the time) of their first monthly paycheck applied toward meals.
The workers suffered anew as a novel coronavirus spread through the world in 2020. Over a two-week period in March, as factories in other parts of China remained closed, Zhongtai boasted that it had brought in over 1,000 Uyghurs from poor villages to work on its assembly lines. Some, like Matturdi, were bused in. Others arrived by train, flooding into halls where it was impossible to maintain social distance, wearing only surgical masks for protection from the virus.
Zhongtai profited by keeping its factories open. As home decorating supply sales surged in the U.S., the company was poised to rake in further gains.
From Vietnam to America
In America, meanwhile, middle-class workers had more flexibility than ever before. Even after companies started reopening their offices, many chose to continue to work from home. The change ushered in a renovation boom. Basement dens became offices. Bathrooms got an overhaul. Bedrooms were split in two. As labor costs rose, people often made these alterations themselves, rather than shell out money for a contractor. In 2020 and 2021, Home Depot broke records, adding $40 billion to its overall sales.
Merth, the DIY influencer, was not alone in turning to vinyl flooring for her Covid home reboot. Pandemic-related concerns about hygiene drove a shift toward hard-surface flooring, particularly vinyl. A recent report from the nonprofit Center for Environmental Health found that in 2020 alone, the vinyl flooring that was shipped from China to the U.S. would cover over 1 million miles if laid out end to end. That’s long enough to stretch from Earth to the moon four times over.
And that’s not even the full picture. Other flooring very likely made with Chinese raw materials — including some of Home Depot’s Lifeproof floors — was arriving in the U.S. via Vietnam. Much of it came from a single factory: Jufeng New Materials.
In 2018, as part of his trade war with China, President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on Chinese-made floors, making it costly for U.S. flooring companies to import directly from China. The industry’s solution was to ship PVC from China to a third country and manufacture the flooring there before exporting it to the U.S. In 2020, an executive at Zhongtai told Chinese state media that the company was turning to Southeast Asia because “conditions there are more stable.” That same year, Zhongtai began working with a company in eastern China called Zhejiang Tianzhen, according to a prospectus that Zhejiang Tianzhen recently released in a bid to go public on the Shenzhen stock exchange.
Zhejiang Tianzhen had just set up Jufeng as a subsidiary, building a series of warehouses in an industrial park north of a bend in the Cau river. The sprawling complex resembled a series of airplane hangars with blue roofs. A sign outside featured Chinese characters, and three flags flew overhead: Vietnamese, American, and Chinese. Jufeng held regular job fairs, eventually employing around 1,000 workers, according to Vietnamese media.
Jufeng became a critical destination for Zhongtai’s plastics. From March 2020 to February 2022, the Vietnamese factory received enough PVC resins from Zhongtai to make over 16.3 million square meters of vinyl flooring, according to Vallette of Material Research.
In an email, Zhejiang Tianzhen said it bans the use of forced labor by its suppliers and places “great emphasis on supply chain compliance,” requiring suppliers to adhere to a code of conduct on labor rights. “We haven’t found any forced labor in our suppliers during regular visits,” the manufacturer wrote. “Our company will continue to keep an eye on the situation. If any evidence of forced labor is found, we will take quick action.”
From Vietnam, Jufeng exports finished floors all over the world, including to Home Legend, the Georgia-based company. Home Legend markets its flooring as “earth minded” and claims on its website to manage forests in China and to source wood and bamboo from sustainable sources. It outlines a commitment to social responsibility and to protecting people at every stage of the floor’s life cycle. The website says nothing about the pollutants released during the creation of its vinyl floors or about how the workers who make components of those floors are treated.
Home Legend, in turn, supplies Home Depot with flooring for its Lifeproof line. It was Home Depot that sent The Intercept a letter from a vice president at the Georgia floormaker stating Zhejiang Tianzhen had assured the company that “no PVC from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has been used in any Home Legend products sold to the Home Depot.”
The letter further claimed that on January 24, Jufeng’s parent company had instructed all of its PVC sourcing agents to stop buying PVC from Xinjiang.
The researchers say that’s a weak defense. Vallette noted that shipping records show that Jufeng received at least 12 shipments of PVC from Zhongtai after January 24, most recently on February 21. “The easiest way to protect consumers and these companies’ reputations would be to get all floors that are potentially containing resins produced by forced labor out of the country and return them to sender,” he said.
A Zhejiang Tianzhen representative declined to answer questions about why Jufeng had continued to import PVC from Xinjiang. “We apologize for not being able to answer your inquiry because it involves business secrets and confidentiality agreements between the company and the customer,” the representative wrote.
Staggering Toxicity
The fire that broke out in November spread quickly. Black smoke billowed into the night sky. Loud booms echoed through the air. Hundreds of soldiers and firefighters rushed to the scene. Within minutes, flames had consumed a Jufeng warehouse in Vietnam that stored PVC resins. Videos captured by witnesses show the structure burning to the ground.
The next day, the site was still smoldering. Exhausted firefighters stood by, wearing gas masks, weakly spraying the remains.
There is no evidence that workers were harmed in the fire, but the blaze released cancer-causing dioxins into the air and put firefighters and bystanders at risk. It could also have long-term effects. After a 1995 fire at a plastics warehouse in Binghamton, New York, dioxin levels in the soil were over 100 times higher than at other locations in the same community. In general, the disaster shows just how dangerous working with PVC can be. The chemicals involved are highly flammable. In this case, according to the Zhejiang Tianzhen prospectus, the fire was caused by an electrical problem. A Vietnamese government report subsequently found that Jufeng had not taken proper precautions, like conducting fire drills.
Workers and the people who live in surrounding neighborhoods are at risk even when factories aren’t burning. “All plastics carry significant toxic risks of one kind or another,” said Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, who is not affiliated with the organizations that produced the report. “But PVC is remarkable in the staggering toxicity that occurs at every stage of its lifecycle. We see massive quantities of hazardous air pollutants being released into surrounding communities, which are disproportionately poor and marginalized.”
The fire at Jufeng’s Vietnamese plant slashed $11.5 million off Zhejiang Tianzhen’s profits, according to the IPO prospectus. But satellite images show that Jufeng’s other warehouses remained untouched. Zhejiang Tianzhen claimed that its Vietnamese plants were humming again the next day. In the months following the fire, the company’s shipments to the U.S. actually increased.
In the first quarter of 2022, the Sheffield Hallam and Material Research report says, Jufeng sent 5,200 shipments of PVC flooring to the U.S., worth a total of $80 million. Nearly one quarter of that flooring — $17.2 million worth — went to Home Legend and bore product codes matching those sold by Home Depot.
Once the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act comes into full effect next week, the researchers worry that manufacturers will find other workarounds. Last month, four members of Congress asked the House and Senate appropriations committees for expanded funding to enforce the law.
But on Home Depot’s responsibility, Murphy is resolute. Consumers, she said, have a right to know. “We need to know that the things we’re buying aren’t cheap simply because someone else is being forced to work.”
Zhongtai, for its part, recently announced plans to build a fifth, even bigger plant in Xinjiang. When the new facility is complete and running at full capacity, Zhongtai’s PVC factories will spew an estimated 49 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. More difficult to measure is the human toll: the children separated from their parents, the workers who contract cancer decades later, the Uyghurs who lose the most productive years of their lives, all so that Americans can cheaply redo their home offices.
It would seem that a product that's that TOXIC would continue to OUT GAS in your home.
And if you had even a small fire, the flames are TOXIC.
HOME DEPOT has contributed generously to tRump and Insurrectionists:
OPEN SECRETS:
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/home-depot/summary?id=D000000419
OPEN SECRETS: Page 1 0f 26:
https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/C00284885/candidate-recipients/2020
Home Depot is the top corporate donor to 2020 election objectors
excerpts:
After Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a host of major corporations vowed to halt donations to Republicans who objected to certifying Joe Biden as president-elect that night.
Somewhat predictably, the corporate backsliding began within months with groups like Accountable.US tracking the giving ever since. Well, the latest numbers are in.
Home Depot (HD) became the new leader through the end of February thanks to a surge of $140,000 last month alone. The company has now reportedly donated $265,000 in total to these lawmakers, dubbed the "Sedition Caucus" by political opponents. All told, 48 of the 147 lawmakers in this group have received money from the company’s PAC.
“No corporation can truly claim to be on the side of democracy while they throw money at the election objectors in Congress who tried to finish what violent insurrectionists started,” Accountable.US president Kyle Herrig said in a statement after the latest numbers came out.
Another January report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) pegged the total giving higher because it counts donations directly to lawmakers as well as the money flowing to their leadership PACs and party committees. The group says 717 corporations and industry groups sent a full $18 million towards these members of Congress in the year since the insurrection.
CREW also more recently spotlighted three companies — Capital One (COF), Cox Enterprises, and Exelon (EXC) — that stopped giving in the immediate aftermath but recently restarted their donations.
https://www.aol.com/finance/home-depot-now-biggest-corporate-185705549.html
Home Depot Facing Boycott Calls After Donating to Some Jan. 6 Apologists
ome Depot is facing calls for a boycott following a report that the company donated thousands of dollars each to dozens of January 6 apologists and Republican politicians who voted to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a group calling itself a nonpartisan watchdog.
More than 15 months have passed since the U.S. Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, in which hundreds of people stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. More than 300 people have been accused of taking part in the riot, and the events have sparked an ongoing House investigation into former President Donald Trump, his family, his businesses and his allies.
Directly after the insurrection, the Senate held a vote to certify the 2020 presidential election results, with 147 Republican lawmakers objecting, claiming wide-scale voter fraud claims pushed by Trump.
The center-left watchdog group Accountable.US compiled data revealing that Home Depot made $360,000 in donations to at least 60 recipients, many of whom were lawmakers that objected to the election's results.
Now, calls to boycott Home Depot have made Lowe's a trending topic on Twitter.
Many spoke out on social media, with one user tweeting, "Home Depot is now the biggest corporate donor to Trump's & GOP's 2020 election deniers. Shop Lowes which has a loyal American president and organization."
Another Twitter user wrote, "I need a large purchase from Home Depot or Lowes. Which one is less trumpy?"
Another replied, "I don't shop at Home Depot because they donate to an a**hole. I go to Lowe's because they give me a military Discount. It's not much money it's the respect matters most."
In a statement to Newsweek, a spokesperson for Home Depot said, "Our associate-funded PAC supports candidates on both sides of the aisle who champion pro-business, pro-retail positions that create jobs and economic growth. For example, our associate-funded PAC is also one of the largest donors to members of the New Democrat Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus."
In a recent Vice article, the publication reported that several Fortune 500 companies besides Home Depot also donated money to Republicans who voted against the election results. Deere & Company, which manufactures large agricultural equipment, reportedly donated more than $800,000 to lawmakers in March.
Virgilio Trujillo Arana, a 38-year-old indigenous Uwottuja man, was shot in the head three times in the city of Puerto Ayacucho (photo: Getty)
Virgilio Trujillo Arana, a 38-year-old indigenous Uwottuja man, was shot in the head three times in the city of Puerto Ayacucho
Virgilio Trujillo Arana, a 38-year-old indigenous Uwottuja man, was a defender of the Venezuelan Amazon and had set up community groups to act as guardians of the Autana municipality of Amazonas.
Arana was shot in the head three times by a gunman who fled to a waiting vehicle in Thursday’s attack in the city of Puerto Ayacucho. He had reportedly received threats relating to his work.
“In life, Trujillo Arana strongly opposed the presence of foreign groups and illegal mining exploitation in the indigenous territories of the Uwottuja people, in the Alto Guayapo area,” indigenous rights NGO AC Kape Kape wrote on Twitter.
The Uwottuja community is made up of about 15,000 people.
Non-governmental organizations and a United Nations report have denounced the presence of violent criminal groups that control gold mines in the jungle.
The ministry of communication and information and the prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Communities from the town of Uwottuja announced last February their decision to defend their territory against a “silent invasion” by criminal groups, rejecting illegal mining exploitation as well as the use of their land for illicit activities.
Mining has been prohibited since 1989 in Venezuela’s southern Amazonas state, which is not part of the so-called Arco Minero, or Mining Arc, a gold exploitation zone 111,000 sq km created by decree in 2016 by the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
The office of United Nations high commissioner for human rights Michelle Bachelet has asked the government to regularize mining activities and guarantee that they are carried out under international and environmental standards.
Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
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