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There’s fighting underway across frontline Ukraine, says Lt-Gen (rtd.) Ben Hodges, but the decisive moment will come when we see hundreds of armored vehicles hitting Russian lines.
But when assessing what’s actually happening, it’s useful to understand some key facts. There is a big difference between starting an offensive, and the main attack or main effort of the operation. The offensive has clearly started, but not I think the main attack.
When we see large, armored formations join the assault, then I think we’ll know the main attack has really begun. To date, I don’t think we’ve witnessed this concentration of several hundred tanks and infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) in the attack.
A Ukrainian tank battalion normally has 31 tanks. An armored infantry battalion would have about the same number. Add in armored vehicles carrying engineers, air defense, logistics, and so on. An armored brigade would likely have three tank battalions and one or two mechanized infantry battalions. In total, then, an armored brigade is going to have 250-plus armored vehicles of different types.
I estimate that the Ukrainians have put together anywhere from seven to 12 armored brigades. Some may have only Ukrainian or captured Russian equipment, and others will have a mix of Western-provided kit.
When we see two or three of those brigades (around 500-750 armored vehicles) focused on a narrow front, it will then be possible to say that the main attack has probably started and where it’s happening. But even then, be careful. The Ukrainian General Staff will want to keep the Russians guessing about the location of the main attack for as long as possible, and they won’t be too bothered (and will probably welcome) Twitter getting it wrong.
If the West provides everything the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) need, especially long-range precision weapons, then I still anticipate that Ukraine can liberate Crimea, the decisive terrain of this war, by the end of this summer, that is to say, by the end of August. This is one of the aims of the offensive, I believe. At that point, the UAF’s long-range precision weapons could reach Sevastopol, Saky, Dzankoy, and other key Crimean targets, and that would allow them to make the peninsula untenable for Russian forces. That’s why the UK’s delivery of Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles with a range of 155-plus miles, was such an important contribution.
I hope the Biden Administration will finally relent and give short-range (up to 300km or 186 miles) ground-to-ground ATACMS ballistic missiles to Ukraine. That would mark a decisive contribution to what Ukrainian forces can achieve on the ground by giving the offensive an enormous boost.
Some have dated the start of this campaign to June 4, two days before Russia’s sabotage of the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River on June 6. That was likely the moment when General Valerii Zaluzhny, the UAF commander-in-chief, decided — in my view — that his three preconditions had been met and that he could therefore give the green light. He would have asked:
- Is there enough combat power (armored brigades with tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, engineers, artillery, air defense and logistics) to be able to penetrate the Russian linear defenses and achieve their assigned tasks, which probably includes cutting the “land bridge” from Russia to Crimea, and also securing the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant?;
- Have Russian defenses and logistics been sufficiently degraded; has the Russian rear area and transportation network been adequately disrupted; and are the Russian leadership confused enough as to the aim and timings of the UAF offensive?; and
- Is the ground dry enough to support the movement of hundreds of heavy, tracked, armored vehicles?
Lined up in defensive positions before the UAF assault units are the Russians, sitting behind hundreds of miles of trenches with bunkers, minefields, anti-tank ditches, and “Dragons Teeth” obstacle belts. But these defenses are only as good as the soldiers occupying them and covering those obstacles. I’m not impressed with the fighting capabilities of the Russians in most places, and the vicious in-fighting we see between the various Russian leaders, (e.g., warlords like Prigozhin and Kadyrov) highlights the lack of cohesion on the Russian side. I imagine the UAF will exploit this.
So far, it seems that the Ukrainians are still probing, pressing, looking for vulnerabilities to exploit, reinforcing local tactical success where they find or create it. That's one of the benefits of their adoption of Western-style tactical command and control where lower-level leaders can make decisions on their own. And some of what we are seeing is intended, perhaps, to confuse the Russians as to where the main attack will eventually be delivered. To show a Leopard on the battlefield at such an early stage was probably, in my view, intended to draw a lot of attention to that area, perhaps as a decoy. I cannot know that, but it's something I would have done, given all the attention in the media about these excellent tanks.
As always, those taking part in the fighting face not only enemy deception but also the sheer confusion of combat. The fog of war really does affect commanders in the field. I always had great difficulty visualizing and understanding what was going on during a fight — as a brigade commander and corps chief of operations in Iraq, and later as Director of Operations in Kandahar, Afghanistan — even though we had the latest command and control systems. A commander is still dependent on the reports from forward commanders actually engaged at the battle area’s forward edge. Drones help give some overview, but it's still a challenge. That's why it is essential to trust subordinate commanders to understand the overall plan and continue making good decisions in the heat of battle.
Even so, there are going to be losses. The destruction of a single Leopard caused a lot of excitement on Twitter, but it was actually recovered from the battlefield so that it could be repaired and put back in the fight. That's impressive. It's what we practice in the US Army, and it’s worth noting the UAF’s achievement in doing the same.
There is much uncertainty, but of one thing we can be sure — the Ukrainian General Staff has done a superb job protecting information in order to prevent the Russians from knowing what's happening and enabling them to prepare for the attack.
The uncertainty in Russian minds may have been one reason for their sabotage of the Kakhovka Dam. Quite apart from its horrific humanitarian and ecological consequences, the flooding of low ground and widening of the Dnipro may have delayed UAF offensive operations in that area for a time. But there are expert voices saying the floodwaters will subside within the next five to seven days, and the ground will rapidly begin to dry in the summer heat. So the likely intended effect hoped for by the Russian side — of making crossings of the Dnipro harder — is probably going to be relatively short-lived.
Meanwhile, I have no trust whatsoever about any report from the Russian side on the dam’s demolition or about anything happening on the line of contact. The Ukrainians, of course, are very disciplined in protecting information and are also very good at controlling the narrative. We’ll know more soon.
So what does Ukraine need as it engages in this great national effort? It needs advocates, and it badly needs ATACMS
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Trump arrives at the courthouse in Miami on Tuesday. (photo: Nathan Howard/Bloomberg News)
ALSO SEE: Trump Pleads Not Guilty at Arraignment: What Happens Next?
After scowling through a court hearing, the former president tries to fundraise and hype his candidacy
“We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche said at the arraignment in a small but packed courtroom, where Trump sat at the defense table scowling and with his arms folded for much of the hearing.
Flanked by two of his lawyers, Blanche and Christopher Kise, the former president listened impassively as U.S. Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman said he planned to order the former president not to have any contact with witnesses in the case — or his co-defendant, Waltine “Walt” Nauta — as the case proceeds. Trump did not speak except to whisper to Blanche, seated to his right, and Kise on his left.
Blanche objected to the judge’s proposal, saying that Nauta and a number of witnesses are members of Trump’s staff or security detail who rely on him for their livelihood. The facts of the case, Blanche said, revolve around “everything in President Trump’s life.”
The judge relented somewhat, saying that Trump should not speak to Nauta or witnesses about the facts of the case. As to which Trump employees might be affected by the restriction, the judge instructed the prosecution team to provide a list.
Trump finished signing the bond paperwork about 3:30 p.m., after it appeared it had to be returned to the defense table twice because he and his lawyers didn’t sign or initial every line needed. “Third time’s a charm,” Goodman said.
Both Trump and Nauta were named in a 38-count indictment that was unsealed Friday, setting the stage for a high-stakes public trial in which prosecutors will allege that the 45th president risked national security by stashing secret papers in a bathroom, a ballroom and his bedroom, among other places, months after leaving the White House.
On Tuesday, wearing a dark suit and red tie, Trump arrived at the federal courthouse from his Doral resort shortly before 2 p.m. A few hundred people, most of them Trump supporters, had gathered and were waving flags and chanting. Within 15 minutes, he was processed by the U.S. Marshals Service, which included taking his fingerprints with a digital scanner.
The first former U.S. president to stand accused of federal crimes, Trump could be sentenced to years in prison if found guilty. He publicly attacked special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the investigation, in the hours before his court appearance, calling the veteran prosecutor a “thug” and a “lunatic” in social media posts. Smith, who was tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November, sat in the courtroom on Tuesday but did not speak at the hearing.
Trump, who is again seeking the Republican presidential nomination, faces the remarkable prospect of sitting at a defendant’s table for federal and state trials that may overlap with the presidential primaries or nominating conventions. He was arraigned in April in state court in New York City on fraud charges stemming from a 2016 hush money payment. He is also under investigation in Georgia’s Fulton County, where the district attorney is weighing whether to charge Trump and his supporters with crimes related to their efforts to undo Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory.
Separately, Smith, the special counsel, is also conducting a federal investigation into the events surrounding the 2020 election results and the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump has denied wrongdoing in each case. He suffered another legal setback Tuesday when a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that writer E. Jean Carroll could add new defamation claims to a lawsuit she has filed against him. Carroll recently won a $5 million judgment against Trump in a different lawsuit in New York, after a jury found Trump sexually abused her decades ago and — last year — defamed her.
Even during his arraignment, Trump’s legal strategy continued to be primarily political: A fundraising email from his campaign landed while he was inside the courthouse, vowing he would never drop out of the 2024 race. “They can indict me, they can arrest me, but I know … that I am an innocent man,” Trump wrote in the appeal for money. And he tried as much as possible to turn the potential humiliation of a criminal court date into a publicity tour, staging a surprise campaign stop in Miami at a popular Cuban restaurant and scheduling an evening speech in New Jersey, where he again claimed that the documents were his.
After Trump entered the courthouse, one of his lawyers spoke to reporters gathered outside. “What we are witnessing today is the blatant and unapologetic weaponization of the criminal justice system,” Alina Habba said.
Neither defendant was forced to surrender his passport, as is sometimes required after an indictment, and no limits were placed on their travel, because prosecutor David Harbach said the government “does not believe either defendant is a flight risk.”
During the hearing, Goodman repeatedly referred to Trump as the “former president,” while his attorneys referred to him as “President Trump.” Harbach often called Trump “the defendant.”
Nauta did not enter a plea, because he did not have a local Florida lawyer to represent him. An arraignment for him was scheduled for June 27.
There was no discussion during the 45-minute court hearing of when, or where, Trump must next appear in court.
Nauta served in the White House before and during Trump’s presidency and then followed him to Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s home and private club in Palm Beach. He is charged with conspiring with Trump to hide some of the classified documents from the government agents trying to recover them.
On the campaign trail, Nauta and Trump travel together frequently. On Tuesday they went to court together. As Trump’s motorcade pulled away from the courthouse, he flashed two thumbs up to flag-waving supporters on the sidewalk.
After the arraignment, the president turned defendant dropped by Versailles restaurant, a focal point for Miami’s right-leaning Cuban community, where smiling customers greeted him and posed for pictures. Nauta remained steadfastly by his side.
“Thank you Miami,” Trump posted on social media. “Such a warm welcome on such a SAD DAY for our Country!”
Trump faces 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information. Each count represents a different classified document he allegedly withheld — 21 that were discovered when the FBI searched the property in August 2022, and 10 that were turned over to the FBI in a sealed envelope two months earlier.
The secret papers the FBI recovered from Mar-a-Lago included one about the “nuclear weaponry of the United States” and another describing the “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” according to the indictment.
The charging document accuses Trump of talking about and showing others some of the classified papers. It offers only broad descriptions of the documents he allegedly withheld: a White House intelligence briefing from 2018, communications with a foreign leader, documents concerning operations against U.S. forces and others from January and March 2020, and military activities and attacks by foreign countries.
Trump was not charged with mishandling any of the 197 classified documents that he returned to the National Archives and Records Administration in early 2022, an indication that if the former president had simply handed over all classified material when he was subpoenaed, he might not have been indicted at all.
The case will now move into a pretrial phase overseen by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who had ruled in Trump’s favor during legal skirmishes last year over the FBI search of Trump’s home — decisions that were ultimately reversed by an appeals court.
In announcing the charges, Smith said national security laws “are critical for the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced.”
“We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” Smith declared.
Trump and his supporters, including many Republican officeholders, claim that his prosecution marks a political double standard, and that he is being treated more harshly than Democrats who have come under investigation in other cases.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) announced Tuesday that he will block most nominees to the Justice Department in response to what he called “the unprecedented political persecution” of Trump. “I think that we have to grind this department to a halt until Merrick Garland promises to do his job and stop going after his political opponents,” the senator said.
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Activism in China. (photo: James Lee Chiahan/WP)
People under the age of 21 and arrested for taking part in the 2019 protests are being subjected to a prison deradicalization program aimed at suppressing their political ideals
In their mud-colored uniforms, the prisoners look almost indistinguishable from military recruits. But before they were detained, these inmates were foot soldiers in Hong Kong’s fight for greater democratic freedoms.
Arrested for their involvement in the 2019 mass protests that saw almost a third of the population take to the streets, the detainees are now the latest subjects in China’s decades-long experiment in political control. The goal is to “deradicalize” them, echoing efforts honed by Beijing from the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters up to the forced detention and reeducation of Uyghur Muslims, though the Hong Kong version is not on the industrial scale of the repression in Xinjiang.
The deradicalization program includes pro-China propaganda lectures and psychological counseling that leads to detainees confessing to holding extreme views, and it is accompanied by a system of close monitoring and punishment, including solitary confinement, inside the juvenile facilities, former prisoners and guards said. As of April 30, 871 juvenile inmates had participated in the program, the Hong Kong Correctional Services Department (CSD) said, about 70 percent of them charged in connection with the 2019 protests. Some are as young as 14.
Hong Kong officials have refused to provide any specifics about what deradicalization — or “targeted rehabilitation,” as they call it — entails. But The Washington Post spoke to 10 former juvenile prisoners and three prisoners formerly held in adult facilities, all arrested in connection with the 2019 protests, as well as two former employees at the CSD who described the program and how it has evolved over the past year. All spoke under the condition of anonymity or only wanted their first name used for fear of repercussions, including additional prison time or retaliation from the authorities.
The ultimate objective, according to a former prison guard, is to create a feeling of hopelessness among prisoners, deterring the youngest former protesters from activism or even seeing a future in Hong Kong.
“It was explicitly said to us that by the end of their sentence, the goal is to ensure the desire of these inmates to continue doing political stuff is less and less, and that they instead look for ways to leave Hong Kong,” said the former prison guard.
One former prisoner, Leo, said: “What really slowly wears down your will to fight is the everyday living in prison … [being] targeted, oppressed, silenced.”
“This is the brainwashing that happens 24 hours a day,” he said.
The CSD said in an emailed statement to The Post that it “will not comment on any individual case.” Wong Kwok-hing, the head of the CSD, has said there is no “brainwashing element” to the program.
“These prisoners joined because they saw the plan can help them correct their wrong values,” Wong said at a February news conference. In the CSD’s 2021 annual report, the most recent available, the program is referred to as a targeted rehabilitation program focused on “Disengagement from Radical Thoughts and Instillation of Correct Values.” It has produced “ideal results,” Wong said in a response to questions from Hong Kong legislators, as “participants felt deep regret for past illegal actions.”
Those who study or run deradicalization programs — interventions, for example, to stop young Muslims from joining the Islamic State or White men online from being indoctrinated in white-supremacist thinking — say the concept of deradicalization has been co-opted by authoritarian states.
“For democracy to happen, you need people to confront their government, to be angry … that is sometimes inconvenient, but it is not radicalization,” said Louis Audet Gosselin, the scientific and strategic director for the Center for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, a Montreal-based nonprofit. “Imprisoning and brainwashing is not deradicalization.”
The focus on young detainees is part of a broader suppression in Hong Kong of any political speech that challenges the authorities, advocates for democracy or criticizes China. Dissent has been criminalized as extremist and can lead to sentences of life in prison. The authorities, for instance, have used a colonial-era sedition law to target a group of speech therapists who wrote a children’s book about sheep and wolves, a parable on China’s control, and two men who possessed the children’s book. An ex-editor of an independent news outlet on trial for sedition was cross-examined about an opinion piece that compared Hong Kong to George Orwell’s “1984.” Ahead of the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square, libraries have removed books on the subject — including one that argued the Chinese Communist Party enforced collective amnesia after the massacre.
“The tactics as a whole are directly imported from what the Communist Party has done in other places,” said Perry Link, professor emeritus of East Asian studies at Princeton University. “It is a system that has been used and practiced, sharpened and created many times over since the early 1950s inside China.”
Malicious work
More than 10,000 people were arrested in connection with the 2019 protests and about a third of those were charged with various crimes, including about 250 under a national security law, which was imposed by Beijing in 2020. The law criminalizes four vaguely-worded offenses “subversion,” “secession,” “collusion with foreign forces” and “terrorism.” The colonial-era sedition law, unused for half a century, has been revived in the wake of the national security law to criminalize other speech.
Though public dissent has been neutralized and virtually all opposition leaders are in jail or exile, the authorities have repeatedly raised the prospect of further unrest to justify the continued erosion of freedoms. In a speech on April 15, a day set aside by authorities to promote the security law, the director of Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, Zheng Yanxiong, said the territory’s “anti-China” defenses are not “at a point where vigilance against war can relax.”
“Stubborn people are still putting up stiff resistance; some foreign forces will not disappear and are still stirring the pot,” said Zheng. “Some rioters who have escaped abroad or gone underground are still doing malicious work.”
Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee in May chided a reporter who used the term “2019 protests” to ask a question, insisting that what occurred was “black violence” with the aim of making Hong Kong “independent.” Independence was only a fringe demand among the protesters, and early demonstrations were overwhelmingly peaceful until the police started to use tactics like deploying tear gas, according to advocates and human rights groups.
“We lived through that, and don’t forget it. We have to bear that in mind so as to ensure that in the long run, the system will protect us” from chaos, Lee said.
Beijing-linked think tanks in Hong Kong, including one affiliated with the city’s former chief executive Leung Chun-ying, in 2021 started pushing for the city to work on “de-radicalizing” its youth. Leung compared Hong Kong’s front-line pro-democracy protesters to drug addicts and commissioned an 83-page report that drew parallels between what it describes as violent radicalization in Hong Kong and Islamist militancy in Nigeria and mass murder by far-right figures in Norway and New Zealand.
The number of protest-related arrests has led to a growing population of inmates spread across Hong Kong’s 24 correctional institutes, both on “remand” — awaiting trial and denied bail — and sentenced. Some of the Hong Kong inmates intended to commit violent, potentially deadly crimes, like the few arrested for possessing bombmaking materials. But the overwhelming majority have been charged with lesser offenses such as vandalism, assaulting a police officer, arson, or holding weapons such as sticks or molotov cocktails. Others were sentenced for nonviolent actions at unauthorized assemblies.
In its report, the CSD said the average daily prison population increased by 10 percent to 7,616 people in 2021, posing “formidable challenges.”
From the start of their detention, inmates are subject to Beijing’s narrative that the protests were a product of foreign manipulation, rather than an organic pro-democracy uprising. One former prisoner in a facility for adults said a guard, holding a checklist in his hands with several questions, asked him whether he had received funding to protest. Several others in juvenile prisons said guards also asked them if they had been paid.
Hong Kong authorities have more broadly redirected prison staff — therapists and guards alike — to focus on monitoring political prisoners and share information on them with the Hong Kong Police Force, according to the two former CSD employees.
Every morning, guards are tasked with sending reports on the daily activities of high-profile prisoners arrested under the national security law or for the 2019 protests. These reports, the former prison guard added, reach the top management of the CSD and the police department, and are produced with the help of counterterrorism teams established before the upheaval.
“There was no such watch list before” the protests, he added.
The CSD annual report said the department has enhanced its intelligence network and system of monitoring, a “pre-emptive” strategy to prevent “radicals” from “building up forces.”
Public apologies
The deradicalization program, steadily rolled out since last year, has so far been targeted at detainees under 21. They include a former prisoner who joined the 2019 protests at the urging of his father and who wanted to be referred to by part of his name, Man. He was 17 at the time and marched in the million-strong peaceful mass protests in early June, which, he said, prompted him to learn more about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy struggles. Man said he came to believe he was in a generational fight, and that it was every young person’s responsibility to take a stand.
As that belief intensified, Man and some of his friends felt “standing at the back was quite useless.” They looked into buying hard-hats, gas masks and other protective gear.
“Once we had more, we moved from the back to the middle, and then the front line,” he said.
In July, Man joined a protest that was later classified as a riot. He hit a police officer with an umbrella; carried to protect protesters from the police use of pepper spray, umbrellas became a symbol of resistance in Hong Kong. Man was arrested a few months later as he was about to go to school. He pleaded guilty to assault and rioting, and was sentenced to just over two years in a juvenile correctional facility.
The prison system replaced British-style marching with goose-stepping in 2022, part of a slew of new political propaganda programs. Man and others had to adapt to the new drills and were told to stop calling guards “sir” in English, switching instead to the equivalent in Cantonese.
Inmates were made to watch Chinese propaganda films later that year, including “The Battle at Lake Changjin,” released in 2021. It had a $200 million budget and was commissioned by the Central Propaganda Department as part of celebrations marking the 100th year of the Chinese Communist Party. The movie shows China’s army bravely fending off U.S. troops in a bloody battle during the Korean War, but it has been criticized for whitewashing Beijing’s role in dividing the Koreas.
Some said they watched the film multiple times over the course of weeks and had fill out worksheets to say who their favorite character was.
The CSD has also launched what it describes as an “educational program,” titled “Understanding History is the Beginning of Knowledge.” The program, according to the department, is meant to “assist the young people in custody to learn Chinese history, enhance their sense of national identity … and get back on the right track.” Since July 2022, prisons have also started playing videos each day promoting the national security law.
Photographers were present at the lectures, and the rooms were also fitted with video cameras trained on the inmates. “In promotional videos issued by the [Correctional Services Department] you can see that we just sit there like pieces of wood,” said Leo, a former prisoner.
In addition to the films, the prisons have introduced a group psychological program known as Youth Lab, according to CSD reports. The program resembles cognitive behavioral therapy. After icebreakers like board games, psychologists lead the juvenile prisoners — overwhelmingly those convicted of protest-related offenses — in sessions where they watch television programs and analyze fictional scenarios including conflict between family members.
“They stressed that if we think [twice] we won’t be so impulsive and angry,” Man said. His takeaway was that he was immature before he was imprisoned. “I realized there are many things I cannot avoid, and so I should use a different way to deal with it.”
In separate sessions, inmates can invite a parent to join them in some activities. At one of these, officers made inmates write a letter apologizing — whether to their family or the nation — and had them read it out aloud in front of the prison guards, other detainees and their parents.
A former prison psychologist said evaluations have long been compulsory for young inmates, originally designed to determine whether they show signs of self-harm or suicidal ideation. Rehabilitation was a serious effort to steer inmates away from drug habits or gangs and help them reintegrate into society. With the influx of political prisoners and pressure from the prison authorities, psychological sessions have become “like confession,” said the former prison psychologist who was part of the rehabilitation unit, with the detainees pushed to express remorse over their political actions and acknowledge that their views were extreme.
Link, the Princeton University professor, said the Chinese Communist Party’s “technique of making you feel like you are the minority is very tried and true.”
“At Tiananmen — most of the city was out on the streets, in Hong Kong in 2019, 2 out of 7 million were on the streets, and yet, when they grab you and get you in jail, they psychologically engineer it for you to feel like you are in the minority, and ‘we, the party, we are the mainstream,’ ” he said.
A sense of hopelessness
Being identified as “problematic” can lead to retribution. Former prisoners said the withholding of letters from family and friends was a common punishment, leaving prisoners feeling isolated. Others were put in single cells for infractions like holding up five fingers during court appearances — a reference to “five demands, not one less,” one of the mantras of the protests. One 20-year-old juvenile detainee said some officers hit the soles of their feet with a wooden stick if they could not accurately recite a list of 19 prison regulations. He said he was hit several times and received some 40 strikes in total. He also witnessed guards using their elbows to hit prisoners at an especially sensitive part of their back, a move the guards called “doing the chicken wing,” and kneeing inmates in their thighs.
“I accepted my punishment with a smile,” the detainee said.
Former prisoners said they sometimes told guards what they wanted to hear to avoid additional punishment. All but one of the former prisoners said they did not regret their actions at the 2019 protests — only getting arrested for them. “I am very stubborn, you won’t affect me with any words,” said another former prisoner, arrested for arson. “But for appearances, I will pretend to agree with you to save trouble.”
Yet almost all also expressed a sense of hopelessness and a desire to retreat from politics. Their lives have been altered and redefined by the protests, their arrests and imprisonment — but the people around them have largely moved on. The narratives drummed into them inside jail have been reinforced by propaganda outside that promotes the national security law with board games, competitions and cute mascots directed largely at children and preteens, alongside the shrinking space for criticism.
Man said he despises the Chinese Communist Party more than he did before he entered prison. His feelings, he says, have “deepened.” But he is also fearful of authority now, looking away every time he sees a police officer. He said he found it hard to sleep when he first got out of prison. Man still reads news about what’s happening with democratic rights in Hong Kong, but he tries not to dwell on it.
“There’s nothing I can do,” he said.
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg leaves the West Wing of the White House on June 13. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg vowed to ‘sustain and step up’ support for Ukraine as it faces Russian invasion.
Stoltenberg, who is set to step down as secretary-general in September, said the NATO alliance would work “to sustain and step up support for Ukraine” and “further strengthen our deterrence on defence” at the Vilnius meeting.
He also underscored the need to send a strong message to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has championed his country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since its launch in February 2022.
“It was not only an attack on Ukraine but also on our core values and on free people everywhere,” Stoltenberg said on Tuesday as he sat across from US President Joe Biden.
“And therefore President Putin must not win this war because that will not only be a tragedy for Ukrainians but also make the world more dangerous. It will send a message to authoritarian leaders all over the world, also in China, that when they use military force, they get what they want.”
Other priorities for the Vilnius summit, set for July 11 and 12, include a stronger partnership with countries in the Indo-Pacific region. In his comments on Tuesday, Stoltenberg also said he would push NATO allies to fulfil a 2006 pledge to commit two percent of their gross domestic products (GDPs) to defence spending — a pledge that many of the 31 member nations have fallen short of in the years since.
“I expect allies to agree that two percent of GDP for defence should be a minimum that we should all invest in our defence, in our collective security,” Stoltenberg said.
Reunion with Biden
Tuesday’s meeting came a day later than scheduled, after Biden had an unexpected root canal on Monday, forcing the 80-year-old president to postpone several White House appointments.
It is Biden’s fourth meeting with the NATO chief, a Norwegian politician and former prime minister who assumed the role in 2014. Anticipating Stoltenberg’s departure, Biden congratulated him on his tenure with the military alliance, which the NATO member states extended three times.
“I think you’ve done an incredible job,” Biden told Stoltenberg. “NATO allies have never been more united. We both worked like hell to make sure that happened. And so far, so good.”
“We’ve strengthened NATO’s eastern flank, made it clear that we will defend every inch of NATO territory,” Biden continued.
He also referenced a key tenet of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s founding document: Article 5, which establishes that, if one NATO ally is attacked, it will be considered an assault on the alliance as a whole. Biden emphasised that provision is ironclad.
“I say it again,” Biden said. “The commitment of the United States to NATO with Article 5 is rock-solid.”
New US assistance for Ukraine
Earlier in the day, the Biden administration announced a new security assistance package for Ukraine, its 40th use of presidential “drawdown” authority to garner equipment from the US Department of Defense.
The package, worth $325m, included arms and equipment like artillery rounds, anti-tank weapons and ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).
Tuesday’s assistance coincided with a newly-launched counteroffensive effort by Ukrainian forces as they attempt to expel Russian military members from their territory.
So far, gains have been modest, but Stoltenberg voiced optimism towards the efforts in his remarks from the White House. “The offensive is launched and Ukrainians are making progress, making advances,” Stoltenberg said.
“It’s still early days, but what we do know is the more land that Ukrainians are able to liberate, the stronger hand they will have at the negotiating table. And also the more likely it will be that President Putin, at some stage, will understand that he will never win this war of aggression on the battlefield.”
Support for Sweden at NATO
The war in Ukraine has also increased pressure to boost NATO’s membership, with both Biden and Stoltenberg indicating their support on Tuesday for welcoming Sweden into the military alliance.
Sweden is one of only five European Union members that are not a part of the NATO alliance. A bastion of military neutrality for nearly 200 years, Sweden has moved to join NATO amid rising fears of Russian aggression in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.
Sweden’s Nordic neighbour, Finland, became the 31st member of NATO in April, overcoming objections from Turkey and Hungary.
Though Sweden submitted its application to the alliance at the same time as Finland, it has faced more entrenched opposition from Turkey, which has accused the northern European country of harbouring “terrorists” from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
Negotiations further stalled when, in January, protesters in the Swedish capital Stockholm burned a copy of the Quran and hanged an effigy of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey slammed the incident as evidence of Islamophobia. Swedish officials, meanwhile, have denounced the protests but said they were shielded under the country’s free-speech protections.
Nevertheless, Stoltenberg struck a positive note when addressing Sweden’s possible accession to NATO on Tuesday. He has previously pushed Turkey to overcome its objections.
“We’ll all look forward to welcoming Sweden as a full-fledged member of the alliance as soon as possible,” Stoltenberg said.
Biden echoed that assessment, taking the opportunity to also criticise his Russian counterpart. “Putin is making a mistake even looking for the Finlandisation of NATO,” Biden said, referring to efforts to make the NATO allies neutral on military matters, like Finland once was.
He added: “You’ve got the NATO-isation of Finland and hopefully Sweden shortly.”
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Killer whales are pictured during a storm in the fjord of Skjervoy in 2021 off the coast of northern Norway. Researchers say orcas are stepping up 'attacks' on yachts along Europe's Iberian coast. (photo: Olivier Morin/AFP)
Delivery skipper Dan Kriz, who had to be towed into port after orcas destroyed the rudder on a boat he was on in 2020, had an almost identical experience in April.
"My first reaction was, 'Please! Not again,'" Kriz told Newsweek.
Unlike last time, the orcas made a stealthier approach without the characteristic squeaks they normally use to communicate, he says. They made quick work of the two rudders on the catamaran Kriz was delivering. "Looks like they knew exactly what they are doing. They didn't touch anything else," he said.
Most marine scientists have characterized hundreds of encounters between boats and orcas that have sunk at least three vessels and damaged dozens of others over the years as a "fad," implying that the animals will eventually lose interest and resort to more typical behavior.
But if that's the case, there are few signs this behavior is going out of style anytime soon. According to a June 2022 study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, orcas have stepped up the frequency of their interactions with sailing vessels in and around the Strait of Gibraltar, the busy waterway that links the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean.
Some researchers think it's merely playful behavior
As NPR first reported last August, many scientists who study orca behavior believe these incidents — in which often one or more of the marine mammals knock off large chunks of a sailboat's rudder — are not meant as attacks, but merely represent playful behavior.
One hypothesis put forward by Renaud de Stephanis, president and coordinator at CIRCE Conservación Information and Research, a research group based in Spain, is that orcas like the feel of a boat's rudder.
"What we think is that they're asking to have the propeller in the face," de Stephanis told NPR last year. "So, when they encounter a sailboat that isn't running its engine, they get kind of frustrated and that's why they break the rudder."
In another recent encounter, Werner Schaufelberger told the German publication Yacht that his vessel, Champagne, was approached by "two smaller and one larger orca" off Gibraltar.
"The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the ship with full force from the side," he said.
The Spanish coast guard rescued Schaufelberger and his crew, towing Champagne to the Spanish port of Barbate, but the vessel sank before reaching safety.
The encounters could be a response to past trauma
Since 2020, there have been more than 500 encounters between yachts and orcas in the area, according to one of the study's co-authors, Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal and a representative of the Grupo de Trabajo Orca Atlántica, or Atlantic Orca Working Group.
López Fernandez believes that a female known as White Gladis, who leads the group of around 40 animals, may have had a traumatizing encounter with a boat or a fishing net. In an act of revenge, she is teaching her pod-mates how to carry out revenge attacks with her encouragement, researchers believe.
"The orcas are doing this on purpose, of course, we don't know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day," López Fernandez told Live Science.
It's an intriguing possibility, says Monika Wieland Shields, director of the Orca Behavior Institute.
"I definitely think orcas are capable of complex emotions like revenge," she says. "I don't think we can completely rule it out."
However, Shields is not ready to sign on to the "revenge" hypothesis just yet. She says that despite humans having "given a lot of opportunities for orcas to respond to us in an aggressive manner," there are no other examples of them doing so.
Deborah Giles, the science and research director at Wild Orca, a conservation group based in Washington state, is also skeptical of the hypothesis. She points out that killer whale populations in waters off Washington "were highly targeted" in the past as a source for aquariums. She says seal bombs, small charges that fishers throw into the water in an effort to scare sea lions away from their nets, were dropped in their path while helicopters and boats herded them into coves.
"The pod never attacked boats after that," she says. "It just doesn't ring true to me."
Shields says it's important to remember that whatever the motive is for the behavior of the orcas off the Iberian coast, it isn't being transmitted to pods in other parts of the world.
"We've had folks here in Washington [asking] 'is it safe to go out in the water here with these orcas?'" she says. "While this is kind of an ongoing situation in that specific place, I don't think there's any reason to think it's going to start spreading to other populations of orcas."
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South Sudan. (photo: Sam Mednick/AP)
It had taken years for the mother of seven to muster the courage to return to South Sudan and trust its fragile peace deal ending a civil war. But weeks after she arrived in Atar town in Upper Nile state, fighting erupted between militias aligned with government and opposition forces.
“I thought if there was peace I was supposed to go back to my land,” said Nyanguour, seated under a tree in Kowach village in Canal Pigi county where she now lives with thousands of other displaced people, five days’ walk through swamp water from her home village. “I thought maybe there would be peace in the future, but now, hearing gunshots daily, I think South Sudan will remain in war.”
In 18 months, South Sudan is supposed to hold its first presidential elections, the culmination of the peace agreement signed nearly five years ago to pull the young nation out of fighting that killed some 400,000 people. While large-scale clashes have subsided, violence in parts of the country persists, killing 2,240 people last year, according to the Armed Conflict Location … Event Data Project. Earlier this month at least 20 people were killed and more than 50 wounded during inter-communal clashes in a United Nations protection camp in the north of the country.
Implementation of the peace agreement has been sluggish. The elections, originally scheduled for this year, were postponed until December 2024. Other key elements of the deal have not been implemented, sparking concern that the country could see a return to war instead of a transfer of power.
“We are going to go for (the) electoral process without meeting the benchmarks that create a conducive environment for the conduct of elections,” said Edmund Yakani, executive director for Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, a local advocacy group. “The return of the country to violence is more evident than the country staying in stability.”
A permanent constitution still has not been drafted. A census has not been conducted. Security arrangements, considered the backbone of the agreement, are only partially complete. Some 83,000 soldiers from opposition and government forces are meant to unite in a national army, but so far 55,000 have graduated and are yet to be deployed.
Others languish in training centers with poor conditions and little food. Soldiers say many are rarely paid. Locals involved with the security arrangements say there’s so little trust that the main parties have held back key fighters, sending less seasoned ones or new recruits.
In addition, Joshua Craze, a researcher on South Sudan, says, “The peace agreement signed in 2018 has enabled the government to fragment the opposition by encouraging defections and setting commanders against each other, intensifying violent conflict.”
The opposition accuses the government of lacking political will to hold elections so it can keep plundering the nation’s resources, which include oil. “They don’t have genuine political will to implement the peace agreement because they look at the agreement from the angle that it is crippling their powers,” said Puok Both Baluang, acting press secretary for the first vice president, head of the main opposition and former rebel leader Riek Machar.
South Sudan has billions of dollars in reserves but there is little transparency on where the money goes. The country was voted the second most corrupt in the world last year by Transparency International.
The international community is exasperated with South Sudan’s lack of progress.
At a press conference in May, United Nations representative Nicholas Haysom cautioned that the conditions did not currently exist to hold transparent, free and fair elections. But some diplomats are concerned that another extension to the peace deal would send a negative message to South Sudanese citizens, investors and aid donors.
The government says it’s serious about the peace process and will hold elections on time. During a conference in May on reconciliation and healing, President Salva Kiir vowed that “I will never take South Sudan and its people to war again.”
The capital, Juba, appears peaceful. Billboards of Kiir and Machar shaking hands above the words “peace, unity, reconciliation and development” line the streets. Children of the political elites are returning with money and opening trendy restaurants, and construction is booming.
But outside the capital is a different reality.
The fighting that killed Nyanguour’s family last year also sent tens of thousands fleeing, part of the highest displacement levels since the peace agreement was signed, according to a report by a U.N. panel of experts. It said government and opposition forces played facilitating roles in the violence.
The conflict in Upper Nile cut off access to healthcare, with some severely wounded people having to travel up to four days by canoe to the closest clinic, aid workers said. “The biggest issue was accessibility. It was hard to bring in supplies,” said Kudumreng David, a supervisor for the International Medical Corps in Kowach.
Food has also become scarce as fighting worsens conditions after years of floods and cuts in food aid. In Kowach, some children rip leaves from trees into a pot for their only meal of the day.
Many people outside Juba said they didn’t even know elections were set for next year.
“We heard there’s peace but it hasn’t reached here,” said Roda Awel, a resident of Kowach. “People are still afraid.”
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Matthew Metz, the founder of the nonprofit Coltura, walks in front of an Arco gas station in Seattle. (photo: Jesse Nichols/Grist)
Gas stations caused a $20 billion toxic mess — and it’s not going away.
It was a sunny spring day, and the Arco station in North Seattle looked like any other on a busy street corner, with cars fueling up and a line of bored people waiting to buy snacks and drinks inside the convenience store. Metz knows a lot about gas stations, and it changes what he sees. Looking around, he marveled at the risks that everyone was taking, even if they weren’t aware of it. “This is a hazardous materials facility,” he told me.
Drivers pumped their tanks with gas, breathing carcinogens like benzene, the source of gasoline’s signature sweet smell. On the east side of the property, tall white pipes that vent toxic vapors from petroleum kept underground stood just 10 feet away from the window of a childcare center. Hidden below the station is a tract of contaminated soil that extends underneath a neighboring apartment building.
The Arco station has a long history of leaking, with petroleum products discovered floating in the septic tank beneath it in 1990. After decades of efforts to remove and break down that pollution — a host of contaminants including lead, benzene, and the suspected carcinogen methyl tertiary-butyl ether — trace amounts remain, with some highly polluted patches in the soil. One sample taken late last year showed levels of gasoline-related compounds 72 times higher than Washington state’s allowable limit.
This Arco station is hardly unique. Almost every gas station eventually pollutes the earth beneath it, experts told Grist. The main culprit: the underground storage tanks that hold tens of thousands of gallons of fuel, one of the most common sources of groundwater pollution. Typically, two or three of these giant, submarine-shaped tanks are buried under a station to store the gasoline and diesel that gets piped to the pump. A large tank might be 55 feet long and hold as many as 30,000 gallons; a typical tank might hold 10,000 gallons. Leaks can occur at any point — in the storage tank itself, in the gas pumps, and in the pipes that connect them. Hazardous chemicals can then spread rapidly through the soil, seeping into groundwater, lakes, or rivers. Even a dribble can pollute a wide area. Ten gallons of gasoline can contaminate 12 million gallons of groundwater — a significant risk, given that groundwater is the source of drinking water for nearly half of all Americans.
As a result, time-consuming cleanup efforts are unfolding all across the country, with remediation for a single gas station sometimes topping $1 million. Leaks are such a huge liability that they’ve led to a high-stakes game of hot potato, where no one wants to pay for the mess — not the gas station owners, not the insurance companies that provide coverage for tanks, not the oil companies that supply the fuel. In some states, polluters have shifted tens of millions of dollars in remediation costs onto taxpayers. Roughly 60,000 contaminated sites are still waiting to be cleaned up, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA — and those are just the ones that have been found. Washington state has about 2,500 in line, one of the biggest backlogs in the country.
Much of this pollution has been stagnant for decades. Forty years ago, steel storage tanks began corroding, setting off a slow-motion environmental disaster all over the United States. Leaks often weren’t discovered until long after petroleum had poisoned the groundwater, when neighbors of gas stations began complaining that the water from their taps smelled like gasoline. In 1983, the EPA declared leaking tanks a serious threat to groundwater, and Congress soon stepped in with new regulations. One of the largest spills was in Brooklyn, where a 17 million-gallon pool of oil gradually collected beneath a Mobil gas station — a larger spill than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, when a tanker ran aground in Alaska and poured oil into Prince William Sound.
Fast-forward to today, and more than half a million leaks have been confirmed around the country. The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2007 that the total bill for cleanups would top $22 billion. Those old, decrepit storage tanks have left a legacy: overgrown, empty lots that real-estate developers don’t want to touch. Of the roughly 450,000 brownfields in the country, nearly half are contaminated by petroleum, much of it coming from old gas stations.
As the contamination from these spills lingers, underground storage tanks are becoming a problem again as the next generation of tanks — installed in a rush after the old steel ones started breaking — begin nearing the end of their 30-year warranties, when there’s broad consensus they are highly likely to leak. In Washington state, for instance, the average tank is about 29 years old. The tanks at the Arco station in North Seattle were replaced in 1990, soon after contamination was discovered, putting them a few years past the 30-year cutoff.
Congress passed a series of amendments to the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act in the 1980s introducing federal regulations to find and prevent spills. The law mandated that owners of underground storage tanks demonstrate they can cover $1 million in damages from contamination, a requirement often met by buying insurance from private companies and special state cleanup funds. States are responsible for implementing the regulations, and take different approaches to enforcement, cleanup, and insurance.
But states are discovering that many private insurers, which have long hesitated to provide coverage, are even more reluctant as tanks get older. “I don’t think they’re super thrilled to insure them anymore,” said Cassandra Garcia, the deputy director of Washington state’s Pollution Liability Insurance Agency. “This isn’t generally the most profitable business line for them.”
If gas stations don’t have insurance, states can shut them down. This predicament prompted Washington state to adopt a new law this spring providing fully state-backed insurance for gas stations. But critics like Metz wonder whether stations need to be saved at all. With electric vehicles on the rise, Metz thinks that selling gasoline is a dying business. “The whole financial underpinnings of gas stations are starting to crumble,” Metz said.
Gas stations often bear the names of major oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron, but that doesn’t mean those companies actually own the stations. Usually, they supply the fuel to independent business owners who signed agreements to sell their products and pay royalties to use their branding. Back in the day, oil companies owned a lot of stations (and thus the tanks beneath them); today, the top five largest oil companies own about 1 percent of gas stations.
The number of stations overall has been in decline for decades thanks to mediocre profits, rising land values in cities, and more fuel-efficient cars. An analysis from Boston Consulting Group found that between 25 and 80 percent of gas stations nationwide could be unprofitable in 12 years — and that analysis was conducted in 2019, before a slate of new policies, including federal tax credits, were passed to promote electric vehicles. Under vehicle-emissions rules unveiled by the Biden administration in April, EVs would make up as much as two-thirds of all U.S. car sales by 2031. Last year, Washington state set a target of ending the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2030, just seven years away; it has also adopted California’s stricter deadline of 2035, along with five other states.
That shift could lead to a pileup of vacant gas stations that the existing cleanup programs won’t be able to handle. There are more than 145,000 fueling stations in the U.S., according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. Even if the country manages to break off its century-long attachment to gasoline, the fuel’s legacy may live on in the soil and water. The question of who pays to clean up the contamination is a mess in itself: In theory, station owners are supposed to pick up the tab, but sometimes they’re unable to pay — or unable to be found — when the bill comes due. So then, who pays? Sometimes it’s an insurance company, sometimes it’s an oil company, and sometimes it’s the government. It’s up to lawyers and courts to hash it out.
“This is a huge problem nationally,” Metz said. “It’s all over the country. There are all these abandoned gas stations, and it’s just going to get worse.”
Behind just about every environmental program in the United States is an environmental disaster that brought it into being, and leaking gas stations are no exception. In this case, the disaster became public in December 1983, when a 60 Minutes segment warned Americans that underground storage tanks were a “time bomb” in their neighborhoods. The show documented the daily struggles of families in a small Rhode Island town whose drinking water had long been contaminated by Mobil and Exxon stations uphill. With 2 or 3 of every 10 gas stations in the country leaking, the show’s host, Harry Reasoner, told viewers that it promised to be the pollution disaster of the 1980s.
The catastrophe was set in motion in the years after World War II, when many Americans bought cars and moved to the suburbs, spurring demand for gasoline. Oil companies helped build hundreds of thousands of gas stations around the country and installed steel storage tanks beneath them. But those steel tanks and piping, exposed to soil, corroded over time, and petroleum began seeping through cracks and holes, carrying carcinogens into the groundwater.
The petroleum industry knew the risks. In 1961, advertisements in the trade magazine National Petroleum News acknowledged that “rusty, leaky storage tanks” were a problem. The pipes that connected tanks to the pumps were prone to breaking, too. In 1962, a B.F. Goodrich ad touting flexible connectors warned that “the settling or shifting of underground storage tanks can cause pipelines to crack, leak, and break apart.”
Within a few years, safer fiberglass tanks emerged as a substitute, though the steel industry later argued that the fiberglass couldn’t handle the alcohol-blended fuels that were being used. Manufacturers started offering leak detectors, promising that the technology could help stave off lawsuits and bad press. “With Red Jacket Leak Detectors, you’ll probably never have to reckon with contamination from piping leak losses … litigation and bad publicity … unhappy dealers … or even disaster,” read an advertisement in 1972.
By the early 1970s, oil companies were well aware that the tanks they owned beneath gas stations posed a huge liability. “Large sums of money, time, and effort are exhausted on a continuing basis in the location and detection of leaking tanks and lines,” a report from Exxon said in 1973.
The realization came at a time when public concern over pollution was taking off. In 1969, floating debris caught fire in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, sending flames five stories high, and a drilling accident near Santa Barbara, California, spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of the Pacific Ocean. The modern environmental movement was born a year later, when some 20 million Americans demonstrated on the first Earth Day in April 1970. The protests led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and a slew of regulations to protect the air and water.
For companies selling gasoline, it was a worrying development. “The oil companies started to realize that they could be liable for a lot of environmental harm caused by these little gas stations,” said Peter Lehner, who investigated underground storage tank leaks for the Natural Resources Defense Council as well as the New York attorney general’s office in the late 1990s.
Oil giants found ways to unload some of that risk. In a lawsuit brought by residents of West Point, Indiana, against Shell in 1993, the oil company admitted that it began replacing steel tanks with fiberglass ones at the stations that it owned in the mid-1970s — but not at independently owned stations that sold Shell gasoline and touted its brand, according to court documents. The company adopted a policy that independent dealers were “on their own” when it came to technical advice or leaks from tanks, and refused to allow them to attend the company’s “tank camp” that provided intensive training on handling the equipment, the plaintiffs’ lawyers alleged in a court brief. They argued that the strategy saved thousands of dollars per station and noted a trial court had found that “the oil companies used their purported independence as a shield against liability.”
Shell ended up losing the case after the Indiana Supreme Court held it legally responsible for tanks that had leaked at a station that it operated but never owned, ordering the company to pay millions in cleanup costs and attorneys’ fees.
Another tactic was to sell stations — along with the liability for underground tanks — to new owners. The purchase and sale agreements for gas stations often contained a clause that indemnified the oil company for all harm caused by a leak, regardless of whether they were at fault, leaving the new owner responsible for the costs. An undated contract from Texaco, for instance, spells out that the purchaser would agree “to maintain all storage facilities” to prevent spills and “indemnify Seller for all claims, fines and expenses relating thereto.”
“I have talked to several gas station owners that have purchased gas stations from Big Oil,” said Ryan Bixby, the managing principal at the environmental consulting firm SoundEarth, who oversees cleanups in Washington state. “I think that some of the property owners really didn’t understand what they were getting into when they released that liability.”
Oil companies knew that gasoline posed a major health threat. In Rockaway, New Jersey, in 1980, a Shell scientist found that seven plumes were leaking from underground storage tanks, contaminating the groundwater with gasoline and methyl tertiary-butyl ether, or MTBE — a common gasoline additive that posed health risks and was particularly difficult to clean up. At Shell, an internal joke circulated that MTBE stood for “Most Things Biodegrade Easier”; later iterations of the acronym included entries like “Menace Threatening Our Bountiful Environment” and “Major Threat to Better Earnings.” In 1981, Arco noted in a memo that tanks were polluting the U.S. water supply with toxic chemicals such as benzene.
Leaking tanks went from a source of private hand-wringing to a public scandal in 1983, the year the 60 Minutes segment ran. The New York Times reported that millions of gallons of gasoline were seeping from storage tanks each year. Congress soon moved to protect groundwater supplies. Within a year, it had formed a national underground tank program and directed the EPA to develop a regulatory system to prevent and detect leaks and clean up tanks.
By 1985, the industry’s concern over regulations and liability had reached a fever pitch. National Petroleum News reported that “the day of reckoning” was nearly at hand, with tank leak liability giving “equipment distributors and oil marketers the cold sweats.”
That year, California created its own underground tank regulations, sending the oil industry into shock. In response, the oil company Unocal sent California dealers who were leasing its stations special legal agreements asking them to pay for inspection costs. “[Major oil companies] could also try to make lessees pay for repairs, registration fees and damages associated with leaks,” U.S. Oil Week reported, noting that Chevron was already pushing maintenance and insurance costs for leak-prone tanks onto its independent dealers.
Another response to impending regulations was to lobby allies in Congress. Representative Billy Tauzin, a Democrat from Louisiana with heavy campaign funding from oil companies, proposed limiting liability for the owners and operators of leaking tanks to $3 million. Critics labeled the proposed bill the “Exxon Relief Act.” Tauzin also tried to codify a loophole allowing oil companies to be absolved of financial responsibility for leaks simply by selling off tanks to gas station owners. But that failed when Congress took another step and passed an amendment to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1986, which held that no owner or operator of an underground storage tank could transfer that liability to someone else.
Regardless, gas station owners were facing another financial problem. Private insurers, being in the business of making money instead of losing it, began dropping out of their pollution liability contracts or rewriting them to exclude coverage for tanks in 1986. For some insurance companies, it was already too late — some went bankrupt from the soaring costs of covering pollution from gas stations, said Alexandra Kleeman, an attorney in Seattle who helps people buy and sell contaminated properties.
That left gas station owners in a tight spot. “The insurance companies seem to be conspiring to avoid the risk entirely by all dropping the pollution coverages at the same time,” read a newsletter from the Southern California Service Station Association in 1985. The association argued that small gas station owners had been left in a “catch-22,” forced to provide financial responsibility for tanks with “no means of doing so.” The situation led states to set up programs, such as Washington’s Pollution Liability Insurance Agency, to help gas station owners meet the financial requirement.
The EPA devised more fully fleshed out regulations for underground storage tanks in 1988, requiring that they have devices to prevent spills and corrosion on any metal parts. Gas station owners were given 10 years to upgrade their tanks or install ones that met the new standards. Mom-and-pop stations were not well-equipped to do so, and many were forced out of business after the 1999 deadline.
Hoping to make oil companies pay for groundwater pollution, local residents turned to litigation in the mid-1990s. A lawyer named Scott Summy was winning lawsuits against oil companies all around the country, arguing that oil companies knew that MTBE-laced gasoline would spread far and wide, contaminating drinking water supplies. Over the years, Summy won more than $1 billion in settlements for residents and public water providers.
With a fleet of upgraded and newly replaced tanks in the ground, and at least some justice served, underground storage tanks soon faded from national attention. Behind the scenes, however, some states quietly shifted the cleanup costs from polluters to taxpayers.
In Indiana, for example, taxpayers spent more than $21 million decontaminating gas stations owned by former Vice President Mike Pence’s family after their company, Kiel Bros. Oil Co., went bankrupt in 2004. “Indiana has been especially amenable to using public money to pay for heavily contaminated soil to be excavated and for high-powered pumps to suck toxic liquid and vapor from the soil,” the Associated Press reported in 2018.
Arizona shifted the primary responsibility for cleanups from tank owners to taxpayers in 2004, an investigation by the Arizona Republic found. From 2011 to 2013, almost $45 million in taxpayer dollars was spent cleaning up leaks and spills from gas stations in the state because gas station owners were unable to pay the bill. At the time, more than one-third of gas station owners in the state had no financial coverage for their tanks, despite legal requirements.
The same story played out in Tennessee, too, according to reporting by the Tennessean. In 2016, the newspaper found that the state’s residents were footing 90 percent of the bill for cleanups. By 2021, the oil industry’s environmental fees that fed the state’s remediation fund had been eliminated entirely, while taxpayers were paying roughly $14 million each year through a tax on gasoline.
Anyone filling up their tank in the United States pays a 0.1 cent tax on each gallon of fuel that goes into the EPA’s trust fund for cleaning up leaking tanks, created in 1986 to pay for remediation when no viable owner could be found. More than $1.3 billion is sitting in the fund right now; last fiscal year, $67 million of it went toward remediating spills.
Depending on who you’re talking to, the subject of underground storage tanks either elicits warnings of an impending disaster or praise as one of the country’s overlooked success stories.
Federal officials point to the hundreds of thousands of sites that have been remediated over the past 40 years. Last March, the EPA announced that it had reached the “significant milestone” of cleaning up more than 500,000 underground storage tank leaks.
The federal regulations put in place in the 1980s — such as banning bare steel tanks and requiring spill-protection equipment — have prevented countless disasters. New technology has emerged that helps detect problems sooner, with some detection systems able to find a leak by monitoring vapor, said Bixby of SoundEarth. That’s a more reliable way than the old “dipstick” method in which a worker manually dips a long pole into a tank to measure fuel levels, a practice that can eventually wear a hole in the bottom of the tank. Newer tanks also come with two walls and monitors that can detect when petroleum slips through the first wall of defense.
In Washington state, the Department of Ecology is finding fewer leaks. Back in 1990, it discovered 900 leaks a year; since 2016, the number has hovered around 30.
Brand-new tanks are fairly reliable when maintained and monitored correctly, experts told Grist — but these aren’t the ones environmental advocates are worried about. The aging tanks installed at the beginning of the 1990s were “still pretty rudimentary,” Bixby said. Many of these older systems, especially the sumps, weren’t designed to handle the corrosive mix of gasoline and ethanol sold in the United States. On top of that, only 57 percent of underground storage tanks in the country meet all federal requirements to prevent and detect leaks. In Washington state, just over half are in compliance with federal rules, according to the most recent EPA data from this spring. That means that at least 600 fail to meet safety standards.
“Failing to meet regulatory requirements increases the risk of a release, and/or reduces the chance that a release will be quickly discovered,” a spokesperson for the EPA said in a statement to Grist. States have a variety of tools to enforce the requirements, including fines and the ability to prevent gas stations from having more fuel delivered, the EPA said. But the fact that such a large share of gas station owners aren’t following the rules suggests that states are wary of making such moves.
Kleeman, the environmental attorney in Seattle, thought that one reason Washington state wasn’t cracking down was because it had other environmental priorities, such as climate change. “We do have a crazy number of impacted sites for being so green, but I wouldn’t say that abandoned gas stations or contaminated gas station sites are really that big of a concern,” she said. “On the scale of things that are probably keeping Governor [Jay] Inslee up at night, it’s not, you know, the big issue.”
Dangerous spills are still turning up across the country. In Monmouth, Oregon, a small town outside the capital of Salem, a 76 gas station spilled 14,000 gallons of gasoline into nearby groundwater in April 2021. The leak, discovered when workers at a sewage treatment plant a mile away noticed the scent of gasoline, was caused by a line failure at the top of an underground storage tank. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that if somebody had lit a match at the wrong time, people would have died,” said a state official who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “The vapor from that escaped fuel was definitely above the ignitability threshold.”
It’s hardly an isolated anecdote. In Provo, Utah, 55,000 gallons of gasoline escaped from a storage tank into the soil and groundwater in March 2018; the state’s environmental department called the incident “catastrophic.” In Lily Lake, Illinois, a rural town outside Chicago, a Shell gas station under construction spilled nearly 8,000 gallons of gasoline after heavy rain flooded tanks last April, sending petroleum into a nearby wetland. And in November last year, a gas station in Bloomington, Indiana, spilled several thousand gallons of fuel due to a leak in the storage tank or piping.
Washington state has the sixth-biggest backlog of leaking underground storage tanks, behind Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, according to the EPA. Long waiting lists aren’t necessarily signs of indifference. They can be a result of stringent groundwater standards or geography. West of the Cascade mountains in Washington, high groundwater levels can cause leaked gasoline to spread further.
Barry Rogowski, the program manager for the Washington Department of Ecology’s toxic cleanup program, said that underground storage tanks are one of his agency’s priorities. Over 4,000 sites have been cleared by the state, with some 2,500 to go. A lot of the remaining contamination is hard to reach — with contaminated water sitting under, say, a railroad track or major roadway — and requires additional resources, Rogowski said. The Department of Ecology recently hired six staffers to help with tasks like sampling and site assessments to chip away at the backlog.
The reluctance of private insurers to cover aging tanks left Washington looking for new options. Under a longstanding program, private insurers provide $75,000 of the total $1 million of insurance for the tanks, with the state backing the rest. But if insurance companies decided to back out of the reinsurance program entirely, as some officials feared they might, the Department of Ecology would have to go around shutting down gas stations that no longer complied with the law, according to Garcia of the state’s Pollution Liability Insurance Agency.
So this year, Garcia’s agency worked with state legislators to pass a bill, HB1175, implementing a new system. For each gas station that enters the new program, the state will cover $1 million for old leaks and $2 million for future ones. The funding comes from a small tax on oil companies when selling their products in the state — which is increasing from 0.15 percent to 0.3 percent — along with premiums from gas station owners. Garcia said that the new approach gives the state more control over gas station cleanups by taking out “the insurance middleman.” Governor Inslee signed the law in April.
Critics of the law, such as Metz — the anti-gasoline advocate — called it a “bailout” of a dying industry. He sees gas stations as a link in a long supply chain that originates in the oil fields and ends with carbon pollution spewing from tailpipes. The transportation system has become the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, much of which comes from vehicles pumped full of gasoline and diesel at the pump.
Some environmental advocates are skeptical that the new policy will cover all the costs. “If we have 2,000 tanks that need to be cleaned up, that’s basically a billion-dollar liability,” said Clif Swiggett, who leads policy analysis at Carbon Washington, a climate policy nonprofit. “So that’s a huge amount of costs that’s about to come over the horizon. … These gas stations are going to go out of business, and in a big wave, if we successfully electrify transportation.”
One of Metz’s complaints with the legislation is that it doesn’t prioritize prevention. When asked which states had done a good job preventing spills, the EPA pointed to Colorado, which has spent the past several years using its petroleum industry-funded cleanup money not just to address leaks, but to stop them from happening in the first place. Mahesh Albuquerque, the director of Colorado’s Division of Oil and Public Safety, said the state rewards gas station owners for removing their tanks by offering $1 for every gallon removed, up to $30,000. The thinking is that better equipment (and fewer tanks) could save the state money in the long run by cutting down on remediation costs.
Colorado has spent $4.3 million on these kinds of incentives over the last two decades, and its tank-removal reimbursement program has helped take nearly 500 old tanks out of the ground, Albuquerque said. The average age of an underground storage tank in Colorado was roughly 27 years when the program started in 2019, in line with the national average calculated by the EPA at the time; today, Colorado’s average is down to about 25 years. (The EPA does not maintain current data on the average age of tanks, a spokesperson told Grist.)
“The benefit has been huge for our state, where it’s incentivized owners to actually be a little more proactive,” Albuquerque said. “The focus needs to be on prevention rather than cleanup.”
The approach has resulted in more gas stations adhering to federal standards. In Colorado, 93 percent of gas stations are in compliance with the EPA’s rules for preventing leaks, the second-highest compliance among states after Wyoming. Gas station owners who fail to follow these standards face consequences: In the event of a leak, owners are eligible for $2 million in reimbursement for cleanup costs from the state — but how much they get reimbursed depends on their track record of meeting the guidelines. The state might cover only 75 percent of the costs for an owner who violated the rules, for example, or deny all reimbursements for particularly egregious violations, Albuquerque said.
Even with these measures in place, new leaks continue to be discovered in Colorado, running the state about $37 million in cleanup costs every year.
Electric vehicles could well be the biggest shift in American transportation since cars replaced horses. But what happens to gas stations — and the tanks beneath them — when hardly anyone needs gasoline anymore?
Looking at an abandoned gas station today gives you a preview of what might be coming. At the Bigfoot gas station in North Seattle, unleaded gas is priced at $2.69 — one indication it’s been closed for a few years, along with the graffiti covering the building. When I visited the site in March, a biker zooming by craned his neck to call out, “Check out that sinkhole!” A chain-link fence guarded a cavernous hole in the ground by the old gas pumps, concrete breaking off around its edges. At the tiny, pink cannoli stand next door, a barista waited at the window, looking on at the forlorn facility.
The common-sense solution for the future of gas stations is to turn them into EV charging stations. But the convenience store model might not translate. Most people charge their vehicles at home. Road-trippers require fast-charging stations along the highway. Public parking lots are a good place for chargers, but running into a convenience store to buy peanut M…Ms doesn’t take more than five minutes or so, not long enough to get much juice from even the fastest chargers. People might prefer to charge up while running longer errands, like grocery shopping. Walmart, for example, recently announced it would install thousands of chargers at stores around the country.
In theory, a gas station lot could turn into anything. But developers are reluctant to take on contaminated lots. The process of excavation might unearth complications, such as an old tank that no one realized was there, or contamination that went undetected in the initial inspection process. “You often don’t find these impacts until much, much later,” Bixby said.
Developers hesitate to get involved with a contaminated property, but if they do, they can push the cleanup process forward. “It’s rare that a landowner just says, ‘Oh, well, I’m aware of the contamination, it’s on my property, it’s my responsibility, so I will clean it up,’” Bixby said. “It’s more common that that cleanup happens when somebody is interested in buying the property and a lender says, ‘Well, that’s great, but I’m not going to loan you any money on it until your property is clean.’”
Bixby recently finished cleaning up a property in the Rainier Valley in South Seattle that had been contaminated for more than a decade. Property transactions kept falling through until a developer came along who wanted to put in below-grade parking. That made it easier to sell, because it cut down on the costs of hauling in new soil: A contaminated site generally requires digging up the dirt, trucking away the contaminated soil, and backfilling the giant hole.
In that case, the big oil company that was responsible for the contamination settled a case for $1.8 million, Bixby said. The total cost of the cleanup was even higher. It’s common for oil companies to settle cases long before they get to court. That’s because if the case goes to trial, the polluter may not only have to cover the cleanup costs, but also the plaintiff’s attorney fees, which can be almost as high, Bixby said.
Some abandoned gas stations have ended up with a more creative future, but even those come with headaches. A group of artists recently converted an abandoned gas station in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, across from Boeing Field, into a community center and art museum called Mini Mart City Park. It took 15 years of environmental studies and soil cleanup, with the project totaling close to $2.3 million.
Given the toxic legacy of gas stations, some communities have begun pushing back against their development. Two years ago, Petaluma, California, became the first town in the country to ban new gas stations, following its declaration of a “climate emergency” in 2019. In March, Sonoma County prohibited their construction. Even famously car-centric Los Angeles has considered a similar ban.
For Beth Doglio, one of the Democratic state representatives who introduced HB1175, seeing new gas stations has become a source of frustration. “The energy right now to fuel our vehicles is this totally toxic, gross shit that’s underground,” Doglio said. Getting rid of the storage tank problem is a benefit of going electric that hardly anyone thinks about, she said.
“It’s not going to cost a fortune, $1 million, to fix a charging station. It’s kind of exciting. That, to me, was like, ‘Oh, wow, here’s yet another benefit of the clean energy transition.’”
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