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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
“Everywhere I go, people say, ‘Did you pay for this abortion, did you pay for that abortion?’ ” the Republican Senate candidate told supporters. “How are you supposed to remember every single abortion? This is why people no longer trust the media.”
Speaking hypothetically, Walker added, “Let’s say you paid for ten abortions, or twenty, thirty, forty. You mean to tell me you’d remember every last one, clear as day? The answer is no, you wouldn’t.”
“There’s no way a man could remember every single solitary abortion unless he kept an abortion journal, and I don’t know anyone who does that,” Walker said, before aides grabbed him and ushered him away from the microphone.
A policeman stands guard as activists take part in a voting rights protest in front of the White House on November 17, 2021. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
Proliferation of new legislation comes in response to false claims about the 2020 election
The proliferation of election crime legislation represents the most intense voter suppression threat in decades and comes in direct response to former president Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
In the last two years, at least 130 bills have been introduced across 42 states that would increase the involvement of law enforcement in the voting process, the analysis shows. Of those bills, 28 have passed in 20 states.
Some of these efforts have grabbed attention individually, like Georgia’s law making it a crime to hand out food or drinks – even water – to voters waiting in line or Florida’s creation of an entirely new law enforcement agency to police elections, the office of election crimes and security, which has already been criticized for bringing flimsy prosecutions.
Reveal’s first-of-its-kind analysis shows those bills are part of a larger movement, mostly led by Republican state lawmakers and fueled by conspiracy theories. While some of those efforts have so far failed, they show no sign of relenting, as the myth of voter fraud has become a central GOP platform.
Three trends from the analysis stand out:
- In 14 states, lawmakers have tried to empower law enforcement officials, such as prosecutors and police officers, to investigate suspected election crimes, arming them with new powers and requiring them to more aggressively pursue alleged offenses. In Tennessee, for example, Republican lawmakers in both legislative chambers filed bills that would have required at least 20% of investigators in the state bureau of investigation’s criminal investigation division to be designated as election crime specialists, along with the same share of prosecutors in every district attorney’s office. While that effort didn’t succeed, others did. Those include Georgia laws giving a statewide investigative agency new subpoena powers and creating a new hotline for the attorney general to receive voter fraud complaints; a New Hampshire law requiring the state attorney general to investigate alleged misconduct by election officials, with power to revoke those officials’ voting rights; and a Utah law requiring election officials to look for possible cases of a person voting more than once, and to report any suspected fraud to police or prosecutors.
- Republican lawmakers have focused in particular on ballot collecting, a practice at the heart of false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. They’ve been inspired by Trump and the conspiracy theory film 2000 Mules, with both falsely claiming that leftist groups rigged the 2020 election by exploiting what they call “ballot harvesting”. Ballot collecting, long legal in many states, allows a person or group to return other voters’ absentee ballots. Nineteen states introduced bills to criminalize it after the 2020 election, and six passed them. Iowa, for example, has made it a crime punishable by up to one year of imprisonment to turn in an absentee ballot for someone else, with a few exceptions.
- In 12 states, lawmakers sought to increase the penalties for existing election crimes, changing the classification of some to felonies from misdemeanors. This could mean the difference, in some cases, between charges punishable by fines and probation versus prison time or loss of voting rights. In April 2021, South Carolina lawmakers introduced a bill that would sharply increase penalties for existing election crimes, including fraudulently voting or registering to vote. “Upon conviction”, the bill read, violators “must be imprisoned not less than thirty years without the possibility of parole”. The bill never gained traction, but in May, lawmakers succeeded in changing those and other voting offenses from misdemeanors to felonies, punishable by up to five years of imprisonment. South Carolina is one of five states that passed such laws.
The bills represent the latest chapter in the long history of US voter suppression. Throughout the Jim Crow era, Black Americans encountered poll taxes, literacy tests, state violence and intimidation if they wanted to vote. In the last decade, as the Voting Rights Act has been weakened, the suppression has appeared in more subtle ways as lawmakers have instituted voter ID requirements and closed polling places. Research shows these things make it more difficult for voters of color – particularly Black, Latino and Indigenous Americans – to cast a ballot.
Leslie Proll, senior director of voting rights at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the nascent criminalization push is more intense than even during the Jim Crow era.
“This criminalization of the vote is a very concerning new form of suppression that certainly has roots in history,” Proll said. “But we’ve not seen it in the way that we’re seeing it now.”
The wave of legislation is being propelled by a phantom problem: study after study has shown that there is no widespread voter fraud, and Republican-led lawsuits and audits have failed to prove the claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
However, with the midterms approaching, conservative groups, militias and sympathetic law enforcement officials are ramping up plans to surveil voters. Those plans, combined with the new laws and enforcement powers, are setting the stage for a prosecutorial campaign this election day and beyond, one that doesn’t root out widespread fraud but instead punishes individuals for mistakes or small infractions.
The criminalization push could also deter people from voting at all.
“They’re tapping into an ancestral fear of the whole process,” said Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, a Georgia-based election law attorney at Lawrence … Bundy.
Reveal used records from LegiScan, which catalogues virtually every bill introduced by state-level lawmakers in all 50 states, to identify and classify every proposal related to election crimes following the 2020 election.
At least 65% of the proposed bills were introduced by Republicans or Republican-majority committees. When Democrats have advanced legislation, it has often criminalized election interference, in response to reports of harassment and threats against voters and poll workers.
In many cases, the proponents of the harshest laws are also purveyors of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
In Arizona, state senator Wendy Rogers introduced a bill this year to create a multimillion-dollar agency devoted to investigating election fraud. The Arizona attorney general’s office already has an election integrity unit that does just that.
Speaking to a crowd last year about the 2020 election, Rogers was clear about her goal.
“I want to see arrests,” she told a cheering audience. “I want to see perp walks.”
Rogers, who has praised white nationalists and said she wants to see her political opponents hanged, is closely allied with the GOP candidates for governor, attorney general and US Senate in her state, all of whom have been endorsed by Trump, are proponents of the big lie and have promised to crack down on alleged voter fraud if elected.
Attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh has said he will “prosecute the crimes of the rigged 2020 election”. That’s despite a GOP-led audit of the 2020 results in Arizona’s largest county that found no evidence of fraud. Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, has encouraged surveillance of ballot drop boxes – and armed men have already been spotted monitoring the boxes at night.
In their zeal to pursue election crimes, Arizona officials have often been ahead of the curve.
The state outlawed ballot collection back in 2016. Earlier this year, lawmakers there considered a bill targeting election workers. It would increase penalties for election officials who send an unsolicited absentee ballot – boosting the potential prison time from two years to 10.
The post-2020 push to crack down on voting
In Wisconsin, the Republican-led legislature got to work almost immediately after the 2020 election, as Trump and his surrogates obsessed over absentee ballots being a vector for voter fraud.
In March 2021, a group of state senators introduced a bill that would have made it a felony to return another voter’s absentee ballot, with limited exceptions for relatives and guardians. State senator Duey Stroebel, the author of the bill, described it as an effort to “safeguard the return of another person’s absentee ballot”.
That summer, legislators sent that and other election-related bills to Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, who vetoed it. “This bill adds no additional security or fraud prevention beyond what our state laws already provide,” he said. “One can easily imagine the ways that the measures proposed in this bill would result in voters being deprived of their fundamental right to vote.”
But the state’s Republicans didn’t relent. Early this year, they introduced another wave of bills that would make it harder to vote.
Among them was legislation that would make it a felony for nursing home employees to force residents to vote or prevent them from voting. The bill was a response to a conspiracy theory about Trump’s 2020 loss in the Badger State: that pandemic-era changes to the administration of absentee voting at nursing homes had led to widespread fraud.
The bill passed within a couple of weeks of introduction. The theory, first propagated by a local sheriff’s office, was then debunked. And again, Evers exercised his veto power.
Evers is now locked in a tight re-election race against Tim Michels, who is endorsed by Trump and as governor would be in a position to enact the GOP’s legislative priorities ahead of the 2024 election. Meanwhile, because of redistricting in Wisconsin, Republicans could gain a supermajority in the state on 8 November. That would give them the ability to override Evers’ veto even if he wins re-election.
While Wisconsin presents a heightened example of the emerging threats to democracy, Reveal’s analysis shows attempts to criminalize voting have been wide reaching across the country.
For example:
- Lawmakers in Minnesota’s divided legislature have considered a half-dozen election crimes proposals over the last two years, many of them introduced more than once. A Republican-sponsored proposal would have given county attorneys the power to investigate alleged “suspicious activity in a voter registration application”. The legislation did not define suspicious activity, but it would have required a county attorney to present charges to a grand jury – or risk losing their office. The state’s Republicans have also tried to criminalize ballot collection by making it a felony to fail to “immediately” return another person’s ballot. Those bills, introduced in 2021, didn’t make it very far, but lawmakers this year made efforts to create different felonies, such as pressuring someone to vote a certain way, which was previously a misdemeanor. Democrat-led bills included efforts to make it a felony to spread lies that would deter another person from voting or to intimidate an election worker.
- In April, Georgia’s Republican lawmakers passed a bill that gives the state’s bureau of investigation subpoena powers over select election crimes. Civil rights groups such as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund criticized the law, saying: “We know that excessive law enforcement presence at the polls or involvement in elections generally can be intimidating to voters, and this is especially true in Black communities that have felt the brunt of well-documented abuse.” That came about a year after lawmakers there made it a crime to offer food or drinks to someone standing in line to vote. The Georgia house of representatives also passed a bill that would have made it a felony to watch someone vote, but it did not make it through the senate.
- In January, Alaska legislators filed a bill that would have required police officers to be trained on election crimes. It would also have established a hotline to report election fraud and official misconduct. This was lawmakers’ fourth attempt over the course of one year to create such a hotline. The state legislature has also considered four proposals to criminalize ballot collecting.
- In Maine, Democrats passed a law this year that increases the punishment for violently threatening or intimidating election officials. The local chapter of the ACLU opposed the measure, saying it would increase penalties for something that was already a crime without evidence that doing so would make workers safer.
In late August, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, called a press conference to celebrate the first prosecutions of his new elections investigation team. A presumed 2024 Republican presidential candidate, the governor said officials arrested 20 Florida residents who voted in the 2020 election despite having felony convictions that made them ineligible to vote.
Surrounded by uniformed officers, DeSantis issued a warning: “Today’s actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting. If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
He revealed scant details about the arrests. But it soon became clear that the prosecutions had problems. It turned out that in some cases, election officials – who were responsible for checking voter eligibility – had sent the voter in question a registration card. (A Miami judge has already thrown out one of the cases.)
DeSantis also touted a different part of the law that created the elections police unit: a provision on ballot collection. State lawmakers had first criminalized the practice in 2021, making it a misdemeanor to deliver more than two ballots on behalf of anyone other than a family member.
In less than a year, it had become a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.
How Arizona’s ballot collection law played out in 2020
For years, election day in San Luis, Arizona, was a festive event. Whenever an election rolled around, parties – with music and carne asada – would pop up outside polling places in the small city tucked into the south-west corner of the state.
Guillermina Fuentes, the one-time mayor of San Luis and a fixture in the community, was always close to the center of the celebration. “In San Luis, people know two things: beans and Guillermina,” said Pastor Manuel Castro, who runs the local Gethsemani Baptist church and has known her for more than three decades.
If the 66-year-old Fuentes was not running for office – she’d been a local city council and school board member, too – then she was out helping others vote, friends and family members said. In San Luis, which is 95% Latino, absentee voting can be particularly difficult. There is no home delivery mail service, and residents have a long tradition of assisting friends and neighbors with voting.
That’s how Fuentes spent primary election day in 2020.
It was Tuesday, 4 August, and Fuentes was stationed just outside the polling place at the Cesar Chavez cultural center, supporting a slate of city council candidates, answering voter questions and handing out campaign literature.
“Juntos saldremos,” read the blue shirts of the other volunteers: we’ll get out of this together.
Unbeknown to Fuentes and others, they were being surreptitiously recorded by a man in his car, Gary Snyder, a Republican write-in candidate for the San Luis city council.
He had been dispatched by fellow Republican David Lara, a perennial candidate for local office who knew Fuentes through his involvement in the local political scene. Lara, who owns a water and ice supply company, had run for city council, mayor and county supervisor numerous times. He ran for constable once. “Every two years, I was losing elections,” he said.
The reason, he said: voter fraud, specifically vote buying and absentee ballot fraud. Lara often complained about this, filing multiple reports with local and state officials, he said.
Nothing ever came of these grievances. But on the day of the 2020 primary, he decided to try something different. He asked Snyder to secretly record Fuentes and the others to collect evidence of a conspiracy.
“You are going to witness fraud like you’ve never believed before,” Lara said he told Snyder, who declined to be interviewed. “You wouldn’t believe it. But I’m going to disappear. I’m gonna pull away, because these people know me well. And if I’m around, they’re careful. You’re the newbie, so they’re gonna drop their guard. And just take as many pictures and videos as you can.”
As the day progressed, Snyder shared pictures and video with Lara.
Then, a potential hit: at one point, Fuentes’ neighbor Alma Juarez approached the table of volunteers. Dark sunglasses shielded her eyes from the bright August sun. She was there briefly, just long enough to hand a ballot to Fuentes. Fuentes looked at it closely, appeared to write something on it, then handed it back to Juarez, along with a few other ballots that were sitting on the table.
Almost as quickly as she arrived, Juarez walked into the polling place with the ballots.
The interaction appeared unremarkable. It took less than 20 seconds. But to Lara and Snyder, it was evidence that Fuentes was part of the wide conspiracy they’d been trumpeting.
And now there was a law in Arizona to do something about it. Four years earlier, before Trump popularized “ballot harvesting” as a conservative talking point, Arizona lawmakers had passed a bill that prohibits anyone from collecting and returning someone else’s ballot, with limited exceptions. People who violate the “ballot abuse” law, as it became known, could face felony charges, punishable by up to two years in prison and a $150,000 fine.
The law was “designed to go after large-scale, knowing, massive collection of ballots that threatens the integrity of the system”, said Eric Spencer, then the election director at the secretary of state’s office. It was engineered to target criminal syndicates attempting to cheat the vote, not individual voters, he added.
The Democratic National Committee immediately challenged it in court, arguing that the law was meant to suppress the vote in Native American, Latino and Black communities. A federal appellate court agreed and struck down the law.
However, the supreme court’s conservative majority decided to uphold the law in 2021, further weakening the protections of the Voting Rights Act.
The first person to be targeted under the new law: Guillermina Fuentes.
The sheriff gets the video
The “Snyder video”, as it became known, quickly made it to the office of the Yuma county sheriff, Leon Wilmot.
Two days after the 2020 primary election, his armed officers launched a door-to-door investigation into alleged vote tampering.
In body-worn camera videos from the investigation, obtained by Reveal through public records requests, officers peppered residents with questions about how they voted and whether anyone came to collect ballots from them.
At one woman’s home, officers asked how she had returned her early voting ballot.
“Are we in trouble for something?” she nervously asked. No, the officers said; they were “just making sure everybody’s vote actually gets counted”.
In a separate interaction, officers asked a man if he knew what was happening in San Luis with regard to voter fraud or ballot harvesting. “Do you have any knowledge of Guillermina Fuentes?” one of the officers asked.
The man, who did know Fuentes, said he believed that the people filing complaints were “targeting” San Luis voters and that police visiting residents at home would be “making those people fear for even voting”.
“I am shocked,” he told the officers. “There’s so much more that you guys should be doing.”
All told, police knocked on 40 doors, Fuentes’ defense lawyer Anne Chapman later said during a court hearing. Wilmot declined to be interviewed for this story.
Eventually, the office of the Arizona attorney general, Mark Brnovich, took over the case. Investigators tried to figure out whose ballots Fuentes had been handling, even sending her fingerprints to the FBI for analysis at its Quantico, Virginia, headquarters. But they couldn’t find evidence that she had handled any ballots in a box from the polling location. One of the ballots belonged to Hilda Juarez, Alma Juarez’s sister, court records show.
In the end, investigators didn’t appear to find any evidence of a wider conspiracy and built their case around the Snyder video. In early December, the state charged Fuentes and Juarez with ballot abuse for handling four ballots.
Neither woman was accused of voting illegally or of buying or selling ballots, according to court records.
Officials had scrutinized the ballots, comparing the signatures to the ones in the voters’ registration files. The votes were ultimately counted.
Earlier this year, both women pleaded guilty, admitting to having touched and later deposited the ballots. Juarez pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor offense of ballot abuse.
Fuentes’ plea, meanwhile, was for a felony. Both Fuentes and Juarez declined to comment.
But in court records, Fuentes told state investigators that she had not completed a ballot for any of the voters and said she never forced community members to give her their ballots. She dismissed claims that she was a “ballot harvester” as politically motivated.
“I’m not a criminal,” she said. “For so long, I would help people with their right to vote.”
Lead prosecutor Todd Lawson said Fuentes abused her prominent position in the community to illegally collect the four ballots.
Fuentes “appears to have been caught on video running a modern-day political machine seeking to influence the outcome of the municipal election in San Luis, collecting votes through illegal methods, and then using another person to bring the ballots the last few yards into the ballot box”, Lawson wrote in a sentencing memo. He sought a one-year prison sentence for Fuentes.
Her lawyers have pointed out that the one-year sentence was harsher than penalties Lawson sought for some others in the state charged with illegal voting.
In 2020, Tracy Kay McKee voted on behalf of her dead mother. Lawson’s recommendation: 30 days in jail. That’s a fraction of what he recommended in Fuentes’ case.
McKee is a white Republican. Fuentes is a Latina Democrat.
Chapman, Fuentes’ attorney, raised the disparity in an October hearing ahead of her client’s sentencing.
“The attorney general asked for 30 days of jail time in a case involving a white woman who voted an actual fraudulent ballot for a Republican candidate,” Chapman said.
“In this case, all of the ballots were signature verified and voted. There was no fraudulent ballot voted,” she added. “What are the differences in these cases that would call for a sentence requested by the attorney general’s office that is 12 times harsher than that requested for a white woman who voted a false ballot of a dead person?” (The court ultimately sentenced McKee to two years’ probation.)
Lawson did not respond to Reveal’s request for comment. In court, he said it was “patently untrue” that the state was seeking steeper penalties for Fuentes for “racist purposes”.
“This is a case about integrity of campaigns, integrity of the ballot and the handling of ballots,” Lawson said.
For his part, David Lara said in an interview with Reveal that the state should use capital punishment to deal with people who violate election laws.
“If it was up to me, voter fraud should be death penalty, because people should not mess with a vote,” Lara said. “That is sacred to me.”
When pressed on whether Fuentes deserved a penalty that strict, he walked it back. A year’s incarceration would be an appropriate sentence in her case, he said.
A chilling effect in the Arizona desert
As part of her plea agreement, Fuentes lost her voting rights and is barred from holding public office. She had to give up her school board seat earlier this year.
At her sentencing hearing on 13 October, Judge Roger Nelson called Fuentes a criminal. “You committed a criminal offense,” he said. “I don’t think you recognize that.”
He sentenced Fuentes to 30 days in jail. Some people in the courtroom started to cry.
Lizette Esparza, Fuentes’ daughter, said in an interview that the last two years had been especially taxing for her family. “It’s very heartbreaking to see what my mom has to go through for something that has been a common practice,” said Esparza, a local elementary school superintendent.
“To me, it’s not only unfair, but I really think that this is political – I even wanna say it’s a persecution,” she said. “It’s gonna trickle down to the community.”
Luis Marquez met Fuentes when they both worked the fields as teenagers. A retired San Luis police officer, he testified in support of Fuentes. He said the case has seeded fears about voting in San Luis.
“Every time you talk about a ballot, people are like – they get nervous about it,” he said.
“It deterred a lot of people from helping anybody else,” he added.
The surge in new election crimes bills is troubling for communities like San Luis, said Andy Gaona, an elections attorney at Coppersmith Brockelman, a Phoenix law firm. He handled an appeal in Fuentes’ case and is a member of the Arizona Voter Empowerment Task Force.
“As someone who operates in this space, it’s very concerning and it sets a dangerous precedent going forward,” Gaona said. “What it demonstrates is that the big lie has intensified the efforts in certain states to criminalize voters and to discourage them from voting.”
Meanwhile, the local sheriff and state attorney general are continuing to investigate election cases in San Luis. This past spring, the sheriff announced that his office was investigating 16 cases of alleged voting fraud involving ballots cast in 2020 and voter registrations ahead of this year’s August primary election.
Wilmot’s office has provided limited information about the investigations, but public records obtained by Reveal show that none of the cases point to widespread fraud.
In one case, a sergeant visited an elderly woman. He told the woman that the signature on her ballot did not match her voter registration and that officials suspected the signature was forged. Her response: “I’m an old lady and I’m shaky.”
The sheriff’s office has not yet filed any criminal charges in relation to the open investigations.
But Wilmot’s been recognized by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association – a nationwide movement of sheriffs who assert that they are the ultimate authorities on US law – for his investigations in Yuma county. The association has teamed up with the non-profit True the Vote, which has a history of making baseless voter fraud claims and questionable financial transactions, to draw up plans to police the upcoming election.
“We’re gonna make sure that we have election integrity this year,” Mark Lamb, an Arizona sheriff, said at a July Trump rally in the state. “Sheriffs are going to enforce the law. This is about the rule of law. It is against the law to violate elections laws – and that’s a novel idea, we’re going to hold you accountable for that. We will not let happen what happened in 2020.”
A week after Fuentes’ sentencing, Brnovich announced new indictments in San Luis, charging two more women with illegally handling ballots during the 2020 primary. Lara and Snyder celebrated the indictments on social media.
The cases have energized Lara in his decades-long crusade against voter fraud. He told Reveal that he collaborated with True the Vote early this year, providing the non-profit with information on the San Luis prosecutions. Fuentes’ case ended up in the film 2000 Mules.
Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, has amplified the Snyder video and his claims about Fuentes’ case on social media, giving his political profile a boost. Snyder is now running for state senate.
As for Lara, he intends to be back out there on election day. “Same gameplan,” he said.
Anton, 26, fears for the safety of his pregnant wife, who returned to Russian-occupied Kherson. He sits by his bed at a shelter for internally displaced Ukrainians in Zaporizhzhia on Oct. 24. (photo: Heidi Levine/The Washington Post)
They fled to Kyiv, where Anton got a job driving a taxi and soon Nastya became pregnant. But she missed her mother, who had been left behind. So, last month, newly married Nastya did the unthinkable: She went back.
Back into Russian-occupied territory. Back into a city teetering on the edge of chaos, where both sides are preparing for what could be one of the fiercest battles in the now eight-month-old war. Back into the maw of a Russian military accused of committing atrocities.
Anton could not follow. And it was the Ukrainian side that blocked him.
“They won’t explain why,” he said Monday in a camp for internally displaced people in Zaporizhzhia, 200 miles from Kherson. “They just keep turning me around.”
Anton spent last weekend trying to reach Nastya, who suddenly stopped answering her phone.
“Sweetheart, I’m worried,” he texted. “Write me call me immediately when you get this.”
He received only silence.
Almost 15 million Ukrainians — a third of the population — have been forced from their homes since Russia invaded in February, according to the United Nations, many leaving loved ones behind. Among the displaced are the Kherson residents now desperate to return home despite the danger and uncertainty of life under Russian occupation and the acute risk of being trapped in heavy fighting.
The seemingly crazy decision to go back, by Anton, Nastya and others like them, highlights the impossible choices that war throws at ordinary people, who are caught in a conflicting swirl of allegiances and emotions. Is it better to be safe while friends and relatives remain in harm’s way? Or should all be together in the line of fire?
In Zaporizhzhia, an industrial city now infamous for the nearby nuclear power plant and for being the capital of a region that Russia claims to have annexed but does not fully control, countless people who fled Kherson or surrounding towns and villages are queuing to return for their relatives.
Their mission is growing more desperate, and also more dangerous, as Ukrainian forces prepare an expected assault to retake Kherson, the first key city seized by Russia after the start of the invasion on Feb. 24. Ukrainian troops have been advancing on the city from the north and west, and the Russians have been in retreat, and consolidating positions on the east bank of the Dnieper River, which splits the city.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said “Russian terrorists” were planning to blow up the dam at the nearby Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant to flood Kherson and the surrounding area. Russia claims that Ukraine is planning to sabotage the dam, and over the weekend, occupation officials announced they were relocating as many as 60,000 people — roughly one-fifth of Kherson’s prewar population.
For months, people fleeing Kherson and nearby towns have arrived in Zaporizhzhia, often after harrowing, multiday journeys through dozens of checkpoints and across contested territory. They are welcomed at a converted big box store and then housed at a former hotel complex. Theoretically, they are supposed to stay for a few days before moving on. Some, however, remain for weeks — not because they can’t find other accommodation but because they are waiting for permission to go back.
Konstantyn Buhlyai, a 38-year-old potato farmer from the town of Chaplynka, roughly a two-hour drive from Kherson city, had just marked a month in Zaporizhzhia. Buhlyai had previously sent his wife and two children to live in Utah via a religious group his wife found online. But as a man of military age, he cannot leave Ukraine. Nor can he return to his town to retrieve his parents.
Ihor Samoylychenko, 45, also has spent the past month waiting to return, in his case to Kherson city, where a neighbor had been taking care of his two children, ages 8 and 10. He has put his name into an electronic queue for permission to return but has no clue how long it will take.
Samoylychenko, a truck driver, had used his 4.5-ton vehicle to take three families out of Kherson before returning with humanitarian aid. But when he tried to ferry a second batch of families, he was stopped in Zaporizhzhia. Regional Ukrainian officials would not let him return to Russian-occupied territory.
Samoylychenko wrote a letter to the Zaporizhzhia governor and to a local official at the crossing point, asking to be allowed to go home to his children and ailing mother. But the local official denied his request, citing martial law that restricts the movement of civilians.
Regional officials blamed the travel restrictions on the National Guard, which did not respond to a request for comment. It was unclear whether the restrictions were in place to prevent people’s willingly or unwittingly providing the Russian authorities with information, or a result of safety concerns, or were merely a feature of wartime bureaucracy.
As the fighting around Kherson intensified, Samoylychenko has grown more desperate.
“Zaporizhzhia says we can’t go because they fear for our lives,” he said as he leaned against his bunk in the converted hotel complex. “But I’ll sign anything, I’ll waive any risk; just let me go back.”
On the bed across from him, another angry parent stirred uneasily.
Svetlana Yeremenko said she had arrived in Zaporizhzhia more than a month earlier after a 24-hour trip from her occupied town of Velyka Lepetykha, across the front line, so that her older son, 22-year-old Ivan, could have an operation. But she had left behind her elderly mother, husband and younger son, age 12.
“We can’t get permission to go back,” Yeremenko said. “They say there is a waiting line, but it’s so long it never gets to us.”
It was a bitter irony, the two parents said, that it wasn’t the Russians but fellow Ukrainians who were keeping them from their families. They said they had no sympathy for the Russian occupiers, or illusions about what awaited them if they were allowed back. Living under Russian control, they said, they had felt like second-class citizens in their own homes. People who refused to work under Russian occupation were fired, and those who agreed to take Russian passports were given cushy jobs and lump sum payments, they said.
“What they are trying to implement is that you’re either with us or you’re not,” Samoylychenko said. “If you’re with Ukraine, then it’s, ‘Dosvidaniya.’ ”
Yeremenko and Samoylychenko said they had also heard rumors of Russians raping, torturing and killing local people, stories that echoed accounts now being investigated in newly liberated towns.
The road back is also dangerous. Last month, a convoy of cars waiting to return to Russian-occupied territory was hit by a suspected Russian missile, killing more than two dozen people and injuring scores.
Yet, life in Zaporizhzhia has its own risks. There have been explosions near the welcome center. Consequently, internally displaced people are no longer allowed to gather there, volunteers said. And just a week ago, a suspected Iranian drone was shot down above the hotel serving as a shelter. The explosion shattered some windows, and glass still littered the parking lot outside. “We are kind of safe here, but our families back home are not,” Samoylychenko said. “We’re living on the edge.”
Without word from his pregnant wife, Anton was at risk of going over that edge. The couple had met about a year earlier at their job building small airplanes. Nastya worked on designing the planes, and Anton built them. They began flirting, then dating, and on New Year’s Day this year, he proposed.
“What, are you an idiot?” she said before hugging him and saying yes. Russia invaded less than two months later, sweeping into southern Ukraine from occupied Crimea. Within a few days, the Russians had taken Kherson.
Anton and Nastya fled to the capital, where they found an apartment and he found a job. Soon, they learned she was pregnant.
But Nastya worried about her mother, and wanted to get her out of Kherson. “She was saying, ‘I want to go home, I want to go home,’ ” Anton recalled. He thought it was such a bad idea that he took her to Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel: suburbs near Kyiv where Russian soldiers were accused of committing atrocities.
“I showed her the mass graves,” he said. “And I told her it could be repeated.”
Nastya was undeterred. So last month, the couple traveled to Zaporizhzhia by train. But they could not go home together; Anton was told he could not accompany her. When he said goodbye, he thought he would quickly win permission and rejoin his pregnant wife. But now it has now been almost a month, and he is living and volunteering at the hotel turned shelter: 200 miles from his wife and soon-to-be first child.
On Saturday, she sent him a photo of her baby belly.
“Oh my god,” he replied. “Amazing.”
And then the photos stopped.
Anton called her once, twice, nine times, but there was only silence.
“My sunshine I love you endlessly,” he texted. “Please you and mom be careful, when you read my message please call me immediately and write.”
He tried not to think of all the things that could have happened. And then, on Sunday, a text.
“Bunny, hello,” she wrote.
“Everything okay???” he replied. “I was worried. Almost didn’t sleep.”
As with many in Kherson, her internet service had been cut. Anton scrambled to find a way to call her, but neither cellphones nor Facebook nor other apps worked. Finally, he remembered using Skype years ago and gave it a try. Suddenly, her phone began to ring and Anton could feel his heart leap.
“Hello?” he said. “Are you alive?”
Nastya’s reply was the same one as 10 months earlier, before the war and their separation and the baby he prayed he would one day get to see.
“What, are you an idiot?” she said, and burst into tears.
Dr. Catherine Romanos poses for a portrait in Ohio. Romanos, an abortion provider, went from working in a Dayton office that performed 40-50 abortions a day, to seeing less than a handful of patients daily. (photo: Maddie McGarvey/The Guardian)
Four months after Roe v Wade was overturned, some providers have left states restricting abortions or changed careers
Doctors are on the frontlines of this chaotic landscape, fearful of running afoul of ever-changing law, in some cases struggling to provide life-saving care. In most cases, doctors have stayed in abortion-restrictive states, because despite restrictions on their medical practice, they have ties to their patients, their communities, their families.
But others have decided to leave. What do they leave behind? In a country where, according to an analysis from the March of Dimes, nearly half of all counties lack a single obstetrician, what care will remain? And what do their predicaments tell us about what it is like to work in reproductive health in much of the US?
Here are five of their stories.
Alireza Shamshirsaz, 48
Alireza Shamshirsaz had a house in Houston, Texas. In the backyard was a small pool, where his kids learned to swim. He met his wife in Texas, built his family there, and felt it was his home. But after Texas passed its six-week abortion ban late last year, a decision he faced at work would sour things for him.
A couple whose pregnancy was not going to be viable came to him for care, but because of Texas’s abortion ban, he had to send them hundreds of miles away.
The mother was 21 weeks pregnant with identical twins, which shared one placenta. One of the twins was almost certainly going to die, which would most likely have killed the other twin without intervention.
Shamshirsaz wanted to use a selective, lifesaving procedure: by stopping the blood flow to the unhealthy twin, he could save the other’s life.
In Texas, he didn’t have that option.
“They were just crying, crying in the middle of my office,” says Shamshirsaz.
The worst bit for him was knowing how urgent the situation was.
“They needed to get all the way to the east coast or west coast before they would find a doctor who could help them, and they needed to do it in the next 24 or 48 hours. Even in the best scenario I don’t think 99% of people could have made that trip in the time they had,” he says.
Shamshirsaz doesn’t know what happened to the couple, but their case deeply affected him.
“Most people don’t have the option to travel to other states. The rich people can travel,” he says, but others can’t.
Waiting is the new norm in abortion-restrictive states: even in cases where foetal survival is an impossibility, doctors often must wait to intervene until the last moment, at huge risk to pregnant people.
“If we wait to the edge, we have more near misses. In medicine, when you have too many near misses, eventually, you actually miss. That means ending up with a dead mother,” says Shamshirsaz.
Shamshirsaz now works in Boston. Since Roe fell, he is relieved not to be in an abortion-restrictive state surrounded by other restrictive states. But he fears for Texas.
“If you can’t do a termination, who will support these kids after the birth? Who will pay the bills they will need for medical care? Nobody. We destroy these families,” he says.
Catherine Romanos, 43
When Catherine Romanos was 28, she fell in love with the idea being an abortion provider. In medical school, she signed up to train as part of a movement to get younger people trained in providing abortions, and after her first job at a Planned Parenthood, she decided to stick with it. She loved the way she was able to build trust with patients, supporting them at an intimate moment in their lives, sometimes soothing their shame.
But in June 2022, Ohio’s six-week ban went into effect. Romanos, now 43, went from working in a Dayton office that performed 40 to 50 abortions a day to seeing less than a handful of patients daily.
“I went from feeling really needed, to almost three months where I really couldn’t do my job at all. It was very demoralizing,” she says. “It was worst for people answering the phones. They were taking hundreds of calls a week from people trying to figure out where they could go.”
The day the Dobbs decision came down, Romanos ordered licenses to practise elsewhere – in Michigan and Illinois. Ohio’s abortion ban has since been blocked.
Nearby, Indiana’s near-total ban is also on hold due to legal challenges. In November, Michigan will decide whether to protect abortion in its state constitution or to ban it using a 1931 law.
“It’s really hard to plan your life when the judge’s orders come in 14-day increments,” says Romanos.
Romanos sees the impact of these seesawing laws on her patients: in late September, she helped a Hoosier patient, who found out she was pregnant on the first day abortion was illegal in Indiana. In the time it took the patient to drive to Ohio, then back to Indiana for her mandatory 24-hour waiting period, and back to Ohio again for the abortion, the ban in Indiana had been temporarily lifted.
“It’s so insulting to her,” says Romanos.
Zevidah Vickery, 51
Zevidah Vickery was never supposed to be an OB-GYN. She studied feminist theory, and thought she’d be an academic or a sociologist one day. Then she started working as a medical assistant at an abortion clinic in Seattle, and everything changed.
Her first cases were difficult. She saw patients forced to engage in sex work, leave their children with neighbors, or travel from Alaskan villages without support from their families to find an abortion provider .
That’s when she decided she on her career . “I was just blown away by the courage and the desperation of patients,” says Vickery. “Suddenly, writing some feminist take on social phenomena seemed less immediately useful.”
What followed was 15 years of study to be the kind of provider she dreamed of: Vickery took night classes in math, went to med school, and did another four years of residency and two more years in fellowship to become an expert in abortion and contraception.
In 2020, she landed her dream job in Ohio as a full-time abortion provider who also taught students. She finally had weekends to herself, which meant she could spend time with her son.
“I loved the people. I loved the organization, I loved my boss,” she says.
Then, Vickery saw the leaked draft judgment suggesting the constitutional right to abortion would soon fall. She knew abortion bans would come quickly in Ohio, an already restrictive state. So she made a decision. After years of moving her son around for her career, she was going to stay put.
“I’m his only family really,” she says. “I couldn’t move him any more,” she says.
Now, Vickery is a retraining to be an addiction specialist. She describes leaving the job she loved as a long process of mourning.
“It really is exactly like grief. [I’m doing] all of the things you have when you’re grieving – like suddenly you’re sobbing on your way home,” she says. “I’m not married, my career is my husband. I invested everything into getting where I was.”
The most difficult thing for Vickery to think about is what her patients have lost.
“There aren’t enough of us as it is,” she says. “People don’t even want to practice in red states any more. So it’s not just the loss of one person who’s an expert in abortion care. It’s the ripple effect of that.”
Leilah Zahedi-Spung, 34
Leilah Zahedi-Spung has spent her career zigzagging around abortion-restrictive states. She started out in Georgia, just before a 22-week abortion ban went into effect in 2019. She moved to Missouri later that year, when the state passed an eight-week ban (which didn’t go into effect as Roe v Wade’s protections still stood). Last year, she moved to Tennessee, where the state recently banned abortion without any exceptions. That was the last straw.
Zahedi-Spung is exhausted. She is fed up with sending every patient who comes to her for an abortion out of state and wondering if she is putting their lives at risk. One patient she sent out of state had to travel in deteriorating condition. After crossing a border five hours away for care, the patient’s kidneys had started to fail. The patient was OK, but Zahedi-Spung wished she could have intervened earlier.
“I am now complicit in a system that is making me harm people,” she says. “It’s a gut punch every time I have to tell someone, ‘I’m sorry, your foetus and this child you so desired is not going to survive outside of this pregnancy, because it has some awful anomaly. And there are no exceptions to the law in Tennessee, and you now need to travel out of state to get the care that you deserve.’”
She is a maternal foetal medicine specialist and is horrified by the number of women who will be forced to give birth – especially considering the states with the tightest abortion restrictions are those with the worst maternal mortality rates. (Tennessee ranks fourth worst in the country.)
“There’s guilt that I’m leaving patients in a community that I care about deeply,” she says.
But she looks forward to practicing in Colorado, where she will be moving. She feels relief to be starting over in a new state “where I’m not under a microscope. That someone isn’t gonna turn me in to the cops, or show up at my house and arrest me for doing my job,” she says.
Anne Banfield, 44
Anne Banfield is glad she left Elkins, West Virginia, in April 2022 to practice as an OB-GYN in Maryland. Shortly after she left, the state brought in a near-total abortion ban. She thinks often about the decisions she won’t have to face now she doesn’t live there any more. She doesn’t have to worry about whether her patients will be able to access care or whether she can provide appropriate advice to them without running afoul of the law. She doesn’t have to worry about them getting needlessly sick or maybe even dying from preventable issues.
In 2013, while she was still in West Virginia, she saw a patient in the emergency room who was 17 weeks pregnant when her water broke. The patient’s partner, a US army vet, was out of the country while she grappled with terrible news: without a termination, her baby was unlikely to survive, and if it did, it would probably have significant problems. The patient was at risk of a life-threatening infection, kidney damage, even death.
She was able to terminate the pregnancy with Banfield as her doctor. In a post-Roe America, she would have needed to travel out of state or wait until her own condition deteriorated.
“I don’t want to tell [people] in a horrible situation, they can’t receive the healthcare they need in their home state, because of the law,” says Banfield.
Having practiced in the state for almost 14 years, she still has friends working in West Virginia under the abortion ban. Every time one tells her about another patient they had to send across state lines, Banfield is relieved she no longer works there.
But she worries about her two nieces and what the future will look like for them.
“I don’t want them ever to be in a situation where they don’t have choice,” says Banfield.
Now, her biggest concern is that people in the state she loves will suffer from avoidable conditions, and die avoidable deaths from ectopic pregnancies or haemorrhaging because they would be scared to get treatment for a miscarriage that may fall under suspicion.
“If you’re afraid your local emergency department is going to investigate you for a miscarriage, or to turn your information in to the police because of some crazy restriction in your state, then people are going to delay care. That scares me,” she says.
Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk appears at a meeting in Stavanger, Norway, August 29, 2022. (photo: Carina Johansen/AFP)
The very first hours of Musk’s stewardship of Twitter have been dominated by users relishing their ability to use profane slurs and racial epithets.
The very first hours of Musk’s stewardship of the social media platform have been dominated by his supporters relishing their ability to use profane slurs and racial epithets, and a torrent of racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and transphobic hate speech continued Friday morning.
“Since Elon Musk made Twitter free speech haven, I'll say this: FUCK N*****S,” one account tweeted. “Fuck n*****s and fuck the jews,” another tweeted alongside a picture of Pepe the Frog, a far-right symbol.
Other Twitter users documented other examples of hate speech proliferating on the site Thursday evening and into Friday morning.
Musk’s first act as owner of the company was to fire its top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal and Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s longtime head of legal, police, trust and safety. Many read this as a sign that Musk will be taking a much more laissez-faire approach to the type of content allowed on the platform.
Many of the earlier tweets have been deleted and some of the accounts suspended, indicating that Twitter’s moderation policies remain in place. However, those systems are being harshly tested on Friday morning as a search of the latest tweets for a variety of hateful phrases shows a seemingly unending stream of toxic content.
Musk on Thursday tried to reassure advertisers that Twitter would be “warm and welcoming to all,” adding that it would not descend into a “free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.”
One account that’s expected to be reactivated under Musk’s leadership is that of former President Donald Trump. But on Friday morning, Trump said he was happy posting on his own network, Truth Social, which he claimed had “become somewhat of a phenomena.”
Comparing it to Twitter and other social networks, Trump said Truth Social “also looks and works better to my eye. I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country. Twitter must now work hard to rid itself of all of the bots and fake accounts that have hurt it so badly. It will be much smaller, but better. I LOVE TRUTH!”
Users celebrating Musk’s Twitter takeover have also felt emboldened to directly target others. A number of users, predominantly women, have said that the level of abuse they’re receiving has shot up in the hours since Musk’s takeover.
Others appear to see Musk’s takeover as the final straw and have claimed they’ll be deleting their Twitter accounts, something those on the far-right are also celebrating.
Migrants, mostly Venezuelans, walk across the Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama hoping to reach the US, on Saturday, October 15, 2022. (photo: Fernando Vergara/AP)
As the US maniacally fortifies its borders, that sociopathic policy plays out over migrant bodies a thousand miles away.
The trek can take more than a week, with perils ranging from precipitous ravines and flash floods to vipers and ultra-poisonous spiders. There are also man-made contributions to the landscape, such as unexploded ordnance courtesy of the US military, which practised dropping bombs over the Darién as part of its Cold War mission to make the world safe for capitalism.
Then, as now, a world safe for capitalism is a pretty dangerous one for humans. And, as the US continues to maniacally fortify its borders to ensure that poor people will never have the same freedom of movement as corporate capital, that sociopathic policy plays out over migrant bodies more than a thousand miles away in the Darién Gap.
Because the global downtrodden are, for the most part, denied a legal and safe path to migration to the US, there is a flourishing market for human traffickers. Criminal outfits can prey with ease on desperate folks. In the Darién, rape and other violence are rampant; a six-year-old child was reportedly shot recently “for screaming as gang members sexually assaulted his mother”.
I had the opportunity to hear first hand of the horrors of the Darién when, in July 2021, I was briefly imprisoned for visa irregularities in the women’s section of Mexico’s notorious Siglo XXI migrant detention centre — which means “21st century” in Spanish and is located in the southern Mexican border city of Tapachula.
With my US passport, I was quite the anomaly in Siglo XXI, an overcrowded and abuse-ridden facility. In keeping with the US habit of forcing Mexico to perform its anti-migrant dirty work, the jail functions to thwart northward movement by Central and South Americans as well as migrants from as far afield as Africa and Asia. As I note in my forthcoming book Inside Siglo XXI, my fellow inmates were simultaneously amused and mystified by my deathly fear of being deported home to the US, the very country they were risking their existence to reach.
Still, they offered me compassion, solidarity, and half of a floormat to sleep on — an attitude of hospitality that stood in marked defiance of the 21st-century systemic inhumanity to which they were being subjected. Little did my companions know that, had they, in fact, made it to my inhospitable homeland, they might have had to endure additional inhuman absurdity by being bussed between states in the runup to midterm elections this year as US politicians vied for the heartlessness prize.
In jail, I listened as women compared notes on their respective journeys through the Darién Gap. They spoke of the ever-present fear of starvation and dehydration, of people who had gone in one side and never come out, of a 13-year-old girl who had been raped repeatedly along the way. They recalled all of the corpses they had encountered en route, which had underscored the need to keep moving. A Cuban detainee relayed an episode from a Darién ravine, in which a group of her countrymen had rescued other migrants from becoming corpses themselves.
Indeed, as was the case in Siglo XXI, it appeared that the exceptionally hostile terrain of the Darién constituted the backdrop for exceptional magnanimity, as well — not that any of this made it worth it. Another detainee reckoned that, at least in the Darién, you were focused on forward motion and general survival — whereas the indefinite limbo of migrant detention only allowed your trauma to catch up with you.
Shortly after my expedited stint in prison — from which I was released in accordance with gross imperial privilege, and was not even deported from Mexico — the Voice of America reported on the extensive psychological trauma and other detrimental health effects of traversing the Darién Gap as a migrant. A US State Department spokesperson had responded to a Voice of America inquiry about Washington’s “role in the Darién Gap” with some standard lines about working to “improve Panama’s national asylum capacity [and] ability to address irregular migration”.
These non-solutions fail to address the crux of the matter — which has nothing to do with Panama and everything to do with the US. And US responsibility for death and trauma in the Darién runs deeper than its policy of criminalising “irregular” northward migration. United States foreign policy — and decades of ransacking the hemisphere militarily and economically — created the very conditions that force many migrants to flee in the first place.
From backing right-wing dictators and death squads in Latin America to promoting subtler neoliberal hemispheric pillage, the US has never been in the business of cultivating landscapes that make people want to stay put. At the time of my detention in Siglo XXI, the most prevalent nationalities among those who had crossed the Darién Gap were Cubans, whose country was going on 60 years of an asphyxiating US embargo; and Haitians, who had spent more than a century at the mercy of intermittently violent US meddling.
Under the Barack Obama administration, the US conspired to block an increase in the minimum wage beyond 31 cents per hour for assembly zone workers in Haiti. It’s no wonder Haitians try to leave.
Now, the surplus of Venezuelans endeavouring to navigate the Darién has more than a little to do with US sanctions on the country, which affect its most vulnerable inhabitants.
Unfortunately for the human race, there is no end in sight to US violations of other people’s borders, or to the pompous conception of the US border as inviolable.
As rape and other violations of migrant bodies continue to mount in the Darién Gap, the stretch of jungle serves as a fittingly hostile extension of the US border and a reminder of Washington’s continuing depredations across the Americas.
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Shell and Total, like other energy companies this year, are benefiting from high oil and natural gas prices partly stoked by the war in Ukraine, as Russia squeezes gas flows to Europe. (photo: Matthew Horwood/Getty)
The two European companies reported earnings totaling nearly $20 billion, partly on higher energy prices as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues.
For both companies, the profits were more than double what they earned in the same period a year ago.
Shell and Total, like other energy companies this year, are benefiting from high oil and natural gas prices partly stoked by the war in Ukraine, as Russia squeezes gas flows to Europe.
For Shell, the profit was a step down from the record-breaking $11.5 billion it reported for the second quarter, when it received an average of just over $100 a barrel for oil, compared with $93 in the third quarter. Natural gas prices, however, increased in the third quarter.
Shell is returning a large chunk of this bounty to shareholders. The company said that it planned to increase its dividend to shareholders for the fourth quarter by 15 percent, to about 29 cents a share. The company also pledged to buy back $4 billion worth of its shares, bringing total buybacks announced this year to $18.5 billion, or 10 percent of the company’s share capital.
Shell’s share price jumped 4.5 percent in trading in London on Thursday.
In what may provoke a political storm in Britain, Shell said it had not yet been obliged to pay the “windfall” tax on oil and gas profits enacted earlier this year by the British government. The tax allows companies to deduct capital expenditures.
Shell has not paid windfall taxes to Britain yet because its capital expenditure on oil and gas projects in the British North Sea reduced profits, the company’s chief financial officer, Sinead Gorman, said on a call with reporters. The capital spending “has meant we haven’t had extra tax coming through in this quarter yet,” she said. Ms. Gorman said the company expected the tax to come into play early next year.
Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, said on the call that he accepted that higher taxes might be placed on oil companies to partly finance programs that help vulnerable people pay their energy bills. “I think we should be prepared and accept that our industry will be looked at for raising taxes in order to fund the transfers to those who need it most,” he said.
Shell announced last month that Mr. van Beurden would step down at the end of the year, to be succeeded by Wael Sawan, a veteran executive at the company.
Both Shell and Total are major players in liquefied natural gas, fuel that is chilled then transported on ships. There has been enormous demand for L.N.G. from Europe to replace Russian gas, and prices for the fuel have soared.
Some of Total’s L.N.G. comes from a Russian project called Yamal. Total also owns a nearly 20 percent stake in a Russian gas company called Novatek, Yamal’s main owner. Total said it was writing down the value of its Russian businesses by $3.1 billion, leaving $6.1 billion in Russian assets.
Total, which has been hit by a strike by refinery workers in France, also said that it would reward all employees worldwide with a bonus equivalent to one month’s salary.
Its share price rose nearly 3 percent.
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