Author: News Polite

Slovakia, which was left reeling on Wednesday after an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Fico, is a relatively young country whose history is closely intertwined with that of its central European neighbors.

Slovakia is one of two nations born out of the former Czechoslovakia amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the waning years of the 20th century.

Czechoslovakia was a multiethnic nation established at the end of World War I that endured dismemberment by the Nazis and more than four decades of Communist rule. But during the fall of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when independence movements gained strength throughout the Soviet Union, a series of largely peaceful protests called the Velvet Revolution led Czechoslovakia first to independence and then to a split, often referred to as the Velvet Divorce, that left two nations: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

After several years of economic and political upheaval following its independence, Slovakia joined the European Union and NATO in 2004, and adopted the euro in 2009. As the country navigated the establishment of its national identity, some tensions remained with the Czech Republic, its richer and larger neighbor, which has roughly twice Slovakia’s population of five million.

Like much of Europe, Slovakia has been deeply polarized over the past decade. Mr. Fico, who has been a leading politician in the country since its independence, was forced to resign from office in 2018 amid sweeping protests over the murder of a journalist who was investigating government corruption.

He was re-elected last fall, after taking a pro-Russian campaign stance that capitalized on Slovakia’s historical Russian sympathies.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, the Silicon Valley investor Nicole Shanahan, said on Wednesday night that she had given another $8 million to their independent presidential campaign as it carries out the expensive endeavor of gaining ballot access across the country and tries to propel Mr. Kennedy onto debate stages.

Ms. Shanahan’s new donation, which she announced at a comedy fund-raiser in Nashville, brings her total contribution to the campaign to $10 million, not including the $4 million she gave to a super PAC backing Mr. Kennedy to help pay for a Super Bowl advertisement early this year. Ms. Shanahan, a lawyer who was formerly married to the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, gave the campaign $2 million shortly after Mr. Kennedy named her as his running mate in March.

After a nod to the media, Ms. Shanahan said, “I think I know what they’re going to say — they’re going to say Bobby only picked me for my money,” a remark that drew laughter from the crowd.

Ms. Shanahan’s comments came near the end of a four-hour event at the storied Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. She followed performances by comedians including Russell Brand, Rob Schneider and Jim Breuer, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member. Many of the performers praised Mr. Kennedy, but they also used their time onstage to rail against Covid vaccinations, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the mainstream news media and President Biden.

Ms. Shanahan’s personal wealth has been a significant asset for Mr. Kennedy. While campaign finance laws constrain individuals from donating more than $6,600 to a campaign, the candidates themselves can give unlimited sums of their own money.

Her cash has provided a financial lifeline as their campaign undertakes a costly effort to get on the ballot in all 50 states — which would be a challenging and expensive undertaking under any circumstances, even more so because the Democratic Party and its allies have pledged to mount legal challenges to the effort.

Ms. Shanahan made her announcement the same day that Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump agreed to two debates, one on June 27 on CNN and another on Sept. 10 on ABC News. In doing so, they rejected the traditional Commission on Presidential Debates, which had hosted the events for decades.

Both candidates were seeking to keep Mr. Kennedy off the stage, with Mr. Biden’s campaign chair, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, writing explicitly in a letter to the commission, “President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms.”

But Mr. Kennedy could potentially qualify for the CNN debate, and the effort could actually be easier under the network’s polling rules than it would have been under the guidelines set by the debates commission. Mr. Kennedy needs to show at least 15 percent support in four approved national polls between March 13 and June 20. He already has at least two polls that show him above that threshold, one from CNN and one from Quinnipiac University. He has another five weeks to earn more qualifying polls.

To qualify for the CNN debate, Mr. Kennedy must also get on the ballot in enough states so that he could potentially win the 270 Electoral College votes needed to be elected president. He is currently on the ballot in five states, which in total have 84 electoral votes, but his campaign has another five weeks to place him on the ballot in other states before the deadline to qualify for the debate.

Mr. Kennedy criticized both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump after news of their planned debates became public on Wednesday.

“They are trying to exclude me from their debate because they are afraid I would win,” he wrote on social media. “Keeping viable candidates off the debate stage undermines democracy.”

Last week, the Russian military opened a new front in its invasion of Ukraine.

Launching an offensive into the Kharkiv region, Russian forces quickly advanced several kilometers, managing to reoccupy several villages that were liberated during Ukraine’s successful offensive in September 2022. They have not yet reached the main line of defenses east of the city, which are held by brigades better equipped and more experienced than those closer to the border. But the situation is serious.

By threatening Ukraine’s second most populous city, Russia hopes to pin Ukrainian resources in the region, exposing the front elsewhere. Ukraine’s immediate priority is to stabilize the front line and prevent a major Russian breakthrough, which it may be able to do. But it is dealing with a series of challenges that have accumulated since last year and will not be quick to resolve. Despite the recent passing of the aid bill in Congress, which freed up billions in assistance for Kyiv, things are likely to get worse before they get better.

Russia’s aim is not to take Kharkiv, but to menace it by advancing toward the city and threatening it with artillery. While Russia lacks the forces to assault the city itself, the operation is designed to create a dilemma. Ukrainian forces are already stretched relatively thin; by drawing Ukraine’s reserves and better units to the defense of Kharkiv, the Russian attack weakens other parts of the front line. Russia remains focused on occupying the remainder of the Donetsk region in the east, looking to seize key transit hubs and population centers.

In recent days, some Ukrainian units have already been redeployed from Donetsk to Kharkiv, and it appears that Ukraine is deploying individual battalions to reinforce other parts of the front. This risks leaving Ukrainian forces in Donetsk even more vulnerable if Russia commits its reserves in that direction. Russian forces are also applying pressure near Kupiansk, to Kharkiv’s east, and in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia. Incursions along the border in the Sumy and Chernihiv regions may be to come.

The Russian offensive comes at a time of vulnerability for Ukraine. Since last fall, the country has faced three interrelated problems: lack of ammunition, manpower and fortifications. Ukraine has made progress improving its fortifications over the spring, and the aid package from the United States should alleviate its ammunition shortages. But Ukraine’s manpower has continued to deteriorate especially where it counts: in its infantry.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive last summer culminated primarily because of attrition among its infantry, and it has struggled to replace those losses ever since. In practice, this means there are often too few soldiers manning trenches and not enough infantry to develop a sustainable rotation, risking exhaustion over time. This also creates a pernicious effect of discouraging others to volunteer. Many Ukrainian brigades are understrength, and many soldiers are over the age of 40.

To be clear, Ukraine is not out of men. The situation is the consequence of policy choices, a rickety mobilization system and many months of political intransigence before the recent passing of a series of mobilization laws. These laws aim to widen the pool of soldiers by lowering the draft eligibility age, punishing those who try to evade service, allowing some convicts to serve and providing incentives for volunteers. They hold the promise to address Ukraine’s manpower problem, but much will depend on how they are carried out. The situation, in any case, will take months to improve.

Lacking sufficient forces and with a deficit of ammunition, Ukraine’s military responds to Russian breakthroughs by moving its best brigades and elite units around the front. This firefighting approach, which happened during the battles of Bakhmut and Avdiika, means that the best units do not have enough time to rest and regenerate. Ukraine also resorts to deploying individual battalions piecemeal to reinforce parts of the front without the rest of their brigade. These are short-term solutions that come with longer-term consequences, as these units degrade over time.

In contrast, Russia managed to address its manpower problems last year and now recruits approximately 30,000 contract servicemen a month. Many of these recruits are hardly ideal soldiers and are also in their 40s. But this physical advantage — combined with artillery, drones and glide bomb strikes — has given Russia a quantitative edge.

Yet Russia’s advantages are not necessarily decisive. The quality of its forces, together with leadership losses, have limited Russia’s ability to conduct larger-scale operations — it’s why Russian forces struggle to turn advances into breakthroughs and have not been able to make more significant gains. Russia is also burning through equipment, most of which comes from storage, and will face equipment shortages in 2025.

Even with the passage of the U.S. aid bill, Ukraine faces a difficult year. American assistance has bought Ukraine time and gives certainty about the resources that will be available. The funding could be sufficient for Ukraine to hold and, in the best case, restore the offensive potential of its military. It offers an opportunity. But the future hinges on what the West — which plays a significant role in training, intelligence and other forms of support — and Ukraine can make of it.

If Ukraine can limit Russia to modest gains this year, then Moscow’s window of opportunity is likely to close and its relative advantage may begin to diminish in 2025. This is not just a matter of Ukraine getting ammunition or weapons from the West, but also of effectively managing forces, addressing the long-running deficit of manpower and establishing proper defenses. Ukraine will have to defend itself while at the same time working to reconstitute its military. In the coming months, much hangs in the balance.

After decades of painful decline, Detroit’s population grew in 2023, according to new estimates released on Thursday by the Census Bureau.

The increase — to 633,218 from 631,366 residents — was slight, lifting Detroit to slightly below levels of 2021. But the symbolism was meaningful in a city that had hollowed out, year after year, since the days when more than 1.8 million people lived there. City leaders have long promised to reverse Detroit’s long decline in residents brought on by the shrinking of the auto industry, flight to the suburbs and municipal bankruptcy.

The new census estimates showed similar, moderate population rebounds for many big cities in the Midwest and Northeast after previous pandemic-era declines.

In the Northeast, cities with populations of 50,000 or more grew by an average of 0.2 percent after declining an average of 0.3 percent in 2022. In the Midwest, cities of that size grew 0.1 percent in 2023 after declining an average of 0.2 percent the year before.

Some major cities that saw population dips in 2021 — including New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago — largely returned to prepandemic trends, with increased rates of growth and smaller population declines than during the pandemic.

“We know that people moved out of bigger cities and into smaller cities during the pandemic,” said Andrew Beveridge, the president of Social Explorer, a demographic firm. “That’s abated somewhat.”

Robust growth in cities in the South and Sun Belt continued in 2023, with Southern cities growing an average of 1 percent.

“Thirteen of the 15 fastest-growing cities were in the South, with eight in Texas alone,” Crystal Delbé, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s population division, said in a statement.

The largest 15 cities in 2023 stayed the same as in 2022, though some moved up or down on the list: Jacksonville, Fla., climbed higher than Austin, Texas; and Fort Worth, Texas, grew larger than San Jose, Calif.

Midsize cities, with populations between 10,000 and 50,000 people, saw growth in every region but the Northeast.

Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit said that the new population estimate for his city was the first time since 1957 that the Census Bureau has not found the city to have lost population. According to census estimates, Detroit is now the 26th most populous city in the nation, up from the 29th in 2022. Decades ago, the city was the nation’s fourth most populous.

The administration of Mr. Duggan, who was elected mayor in 2013 and is serving his third term, has in the past raised questions about the Census Bureau’s population counts in Detroit, claiming that city residents were undercounted. For Mr. Duggan, the new population estimate fulfills a campaign promise he made before his first term to get the city growing again.

“I have said all along, A mayor ought to be judged by whether the population is going up or going down,” he said in an interview. “It took me longer to get there than I hoped.”

Mr. Duggan said that while Detroit is still facing some of the same challenges — like faltering demand for office space — as many larger cities are, the population growth is the result of years of steady, difficult work.

In the last decade, more than 10,000 houses have been renovated, property values have gone up, and a new auto plant to produce Jeeps was built in the city.