Everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed and strange, Minds made muddied and mute. We carry tragedy, terrifying and true. And yet none of it is new; We knew it as home, As horror, As heritage. Even our children Cannot be children, Cannot be.
Everything hurts. It’s a hard time to be alive, And even harder to stay that way. We’re burdened to live out these days, While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.
This alarm is how we know We must be altered — That we must differ or die, That we must triumph or try. Thus while hate cannot be terminated, It can be transformed Into a love that lets us live.
May we not just grieve, but give: May we not just ache, but act; May our signed right to bear arms Never blind our sight from shared harm; May we choose our children over chaos. May another innocent never be lost.
Maybe everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed & strange. But only when everything hurts May everything change.
Amanda Gorman is a poet and the author of “The Hill We Climb,” “Call Us What We Carry” and “Change Sings.”
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During an active shooting situation, American law enforcement officers are taught that their response should focus on two principles: first “stop the killing,” and then “stop the dying,” according to a training program based in Texas that is considered the national standard. The response should center on neutralizing the gunman, the program says, and then on getting medical aid to anyone who has been injured.
As more questions emerged on Friday about the police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, experts described those principles as the central tenets for handling such circumstances — a set of protocols that have evolved significantly over the last two decades but are widely accepted by law enforcement agencies in the United States.
Officers are taught to enter quickly in small formations — or even with only one or two officers — and act to contain and neutralize any gunman. “DO NOT waste valuable time searching areas where you know there is no violence occurring,” officers are told in a training bulletin from the Louisville Metro Police Department. “Go straight to the source of the violence.”
Rescues, the thinking goes, should begin after the gunman is stopped, or if there are additional officers to carry it out.
If the gunfire stops, the situation may change to a barricade or hostage situation, which calls for a different, slower approach, experts say. The priority becomes making contact with the aggressor and starting negotiations. Although hostage situations can require complex judgment calls — particularly if trapped victims are wounded and need treatment — law enforcement experts say negotiating has repeatedly saved lives.
From Opinion: The Texas School Shooting
Commentary from Times Opinion on the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Michelle Goldberg: As we come to terms with yet another tragedy, the most common sentiment is a bitter acknowledgment that nothing is going to change.
Nicholas Kristof, a former Times Opinion columnist: Gun policy is complicated and politically vexing, and it won’t make everyone safe. But it could reduce gun deaths.
Roxane Gay: For all our cultural obsession with civility, there is nothing more uncivilized than the political establishment’s acceptance of the constancy of mass shootings.
Experts said that situations often are fluid and may transition repeatedly from an active shooting scenario to a hostage situation. Questions about that distinction appeared to be at issue in the questions emerging about the police handling of the shootings in Uvalde.
On Friday, Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in a news conference that the commander overseeing operations in Uvalde had judged the situation to be one of a “barricaded subject” — “with no more children at risk” — at the point at which police were present and ready to burst into the classroom.
“Of course it was not the right decision,” Mr. McCraw said. “It was a wrong decision, period. There’s no excuse for that.”
He continued, “When there’s an active shooter, the rules change.”
The best practices for such shootings have evolved considerably since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, when officers were trained to maintain a perimeter and wait for a tactical team.
“Columbine changed everything because they realized that although it was not a bad plan to wait, people will get killed while you’re waiting,” said Robert J. Louden, a professor emeritus of criminal justice and homeland security at Georgian Court University in New Jersey.
Some experts have suggested that officers in Uvalde did not act sooner because they were afraid of being shot themselves — and two officers suffered graze wounds on the scene. At the news conference, Mr. McCraw said, “The incident commander inside believed they needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that point.”
Ashley Heiberger, a retired police captain who now does officer trainings, said that departments vary widely on what they require of officers in dangerous situations. Some expect them to head toward gunfire, while others give more discretion. “Most agency policy likely does not require you to go on a suicide mission,” he said. “But I would think that most officers would feel a moral obligation — protecting lives is your highest duty.”
Most of the names had already been published elsewhere — including in a major investigation into abuse allegations by The Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News. Some of the names had appeared in publicly available court documents as part of criminal or civil suits.
The publication comes weeks before the convention’s annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif., where leaders and members are expected to discuss other steps to address abuse allegations. The convention will also elect new leadership as it faces divisions over politics, culture and declining membership.
The third-party report contained multiple accounts of victims of sexual abuse and others who said they contacted the convention’s executive committee about alleged offenders and were ignored. At one point, Mr. Boto, the former vice president, referred to the work of activists in an internal email as a “satanic scheme.”
In 2007, a delegate at the denomination’s annual convention presented a motion to create a database of clergy and staff “involved in sexual harassment or abuse.” The next year, an executive committee working group rejected the notion, saying that maintaining such a list publicly would violate the denomination’s decentralized structure.
But the report released Sunday revealed that in 2007, the committee’s own general counsel, James Guenther, proposed a plan for the denomination’s website to link to such a database. “It would fit our polity and present ministries to help churches in this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct,” he wrote, recommending “immediate action.” Mr. Boto took no action, according to the report.
Mr. Boto could not be reached for comment.
The list’s publication also comes just two days after Gene Besen, the executive committee’s interim counsel, told committee members at a meeting that the committee would publish the list “as quickly as we can.”
The original ad hoc list contained about 700 names, with about 400 who were believed to be connected to the denomination. Though the list released Thursday does not represent a complete tally of Southern Baptist offenders, “promptly releasing that list is in our best interest, it’s important, it is of immediate concern to the public and to the survivor community, and we need to do it right away,” he told the committee.
One of the many strange things about being an American citizen these days is that there’s a whole lot of killing done in our name that our government deliberately keeps secret. Friends of mine, back from Iraq or Afghanistan, used to respond to people asking the inappropriate question veterans always get, “Did you kill anyone?” with the sharp-elbowed response, “If I did, you paid me to do it — ” a rough reminder of the link between the military and the citizens they represent. But back then, the actions of our military were much more visible. What does it mean to be a citizen of a state that kills for you but doesn’t tell you about it? Are you still responsible?
When I was a public affairs officer in the Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009, back during the era of massive antiwar protests, an activist group taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times to attack the credibility of a U.S. general led to spirited debates about everything from the morality of the war to the wisdom of its strategy. The main efforts of the American military in this period were conducted in the open, and my job entailed courting journalists to embed with our units to see what they were doing.
This relative openness meant the war provoked messy debate, political grandstanding, lies and hypocrisy and ill-informed analysis on cable news, and other byproducts of democracy. It also meant that the George W. Bush administration had to explain and defend its policies, which meant that I knew what we were supposed to be fighting for, what success was meant to look like, and why we were there. It meant political pressure brought to bear on U.S. policymaking to keep it tethered to the will of the American people.
But the nature of war shifted, for political and military reasons. One way of describing the change is to look at the pace of American Special Operations. In the spring of 2004 the Joint Special Operations Command was conducting about six operations a month in Iraq. By the summer of 2006 they were doing 300. This didn’t happen by sending the Navy SEALs to the gym to work on their run time, but by rehauling the whole process of finding targets, fixing them in place, finishing them, exploiting and analyzing the intelligence collected, and then disseminating that intelligence to the agencies and commands able to most rapidly act on it. It was this capability that former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates claimed in 2011 fused “intelligence and operations in a way that just, I think, is unique in anybody’s history.”
When Americans think about the killing we do overseas, we often think about the mechanism. A drone delivering a bomb strikes us as a bit creepy. A member of the Navy SEALs bursting into a bad guy’s compound strikes us as heroic. But the SEALs and the drone are just tools — the flat head and Phillips head screwdriver at the end of the targeting system. And the initial parts of that system can be offered to other countries, like Ukraine, which do the killing themselves. (In a press briefing on May 5, the Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, distanced the United States only slightly from the killing of Russian generals: “We do not provide intelligence on the location of senior military leaders on the battlefield or participate in the targeting decisions of the Ukrainian military,” he said, but he freely admitted we provide Ukraine with relevant intelligence.)
In a sign that it’s never “too soon” to glorify guns, G.O.P. leaders are gathering in Texas to wallow in that orgy of gun fetishism known as the N.R.A.’s annual convention.
President Biden’s recent trip to Asia nearly went off without a hitch — until Taiwan came up. Mr. Biden was asked whether the United States would respond “militarily” if China sought to retake the self-ruled island by force.
It was one of the most explicit U.S. defense guarantees for Taiwan in decades, appearing to depart from a longtime policy of “strategic ambiguity.” But it’s far from certain that the United States could hold off China.
I have been involved in dozens of war games and tabletop exercises to see how a conflict would turn out. Simply put, the United States is outgunned. At the very least, a confrontation with China would be a massive drain on the U.S. military without any assured outcome that America could repel all of China’s forces. Mr. Biden’s comments may be aimed at deterring a Chinese attack, and hopefully they will.
After a decades-long military modernization, China has the world’s largest navy and the United States could throw far fewer ships into a Taiwan conflict. China’s missile force is also thought to be capable of targeting ships at sea to neutralize the main U.S. tool of power projection, aircraft carriers.
If China’s leaders decide they need to recover Taiwan and are convinced that the United States would respond, they maysee no other option but a pre-emptive strike on U.S. forces in the region. Chinese missiles could take out key American bases in Japan, and U.S. aircraft carriers could face Chinese “carrier killer” missiles. In this scenario, superior U.S. training and experience would matter little.
The need to project power across vast distances also makes U.S. forces vulnerable to China’s electronic and cyberwarfare capability. China could disrupt networks like the United States Transportation Command, which moves American assets around and is considered vulnerable to cyberattacks. China may also have the ability to damage satellites and disrupt communications, navigation, targeting, intelligence-gathering, or command and control. Operating from home turf, China could use more-secure systems like fiber-optic cables for its own networks.
Under a best-case battle scenario for the United States, China would attack only Taiwan and refrain from hitting American forces to avoid drawing in U.S. military might. This would allow the United States time to bring its forces into the region, move others to safety and pick where and when it engages with China.
If the United States did ever intervene, it would need regional allies to provide runways, ports, and supply depots. But those partners may be eager to stay out of the crossfire.
I’m not the only one who’s worried. A 2018 congressionally-mandated assessment warned that America could face a “decisive military defeat” in a war over Taiwan, citing China’s increasingly advanced capabilities and myriad U.S. logistical difficulties. Several top former U.S. defense officials have reached similar conclusions.
Mr. Biden’s remarks were made in the context of Ukraine, and America’s failure to prevent that war may be driving his thinking on Taiwan. Mr. Biden may be calculating that Russia’ssetbacks in Ukraine will give China pause and that guaranteed U.S. intervention in a conflict over Taiwan would cost Beijing too much, even if it took the island.
But comparing Ukraine and Taiwan is problematic. Beijing views Taiwan — self-ruled since 1949 — as an integral part of Chinese territory since ancient times, a significantly deeper attachment than Vladimir Putin’s obsession with Ukraine. Reuniting the island with the mainland is one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most cherished goals, and China would see U.S. intervention as a bitter betrayal of the “one-China” principle — the recognition that China and Taiwan belong together, which Washington has endorsed since the 1970s.
China’s military is bigger and more formidable than Russia’s, and its economy far larger, more resilient and globally integrated. Rallying support for economic sanctions against Beijing during a conflict — China is the biggest trading partner of many countries — would be more challenging than isolating Russia.
If so, then Mr. Biden should stop rocking the boat and focus instead on strengthening America’s position in the Taiwan theater. This doesn’t just mean more weapons for Taiwan and a more robust U.S. military presence in the region, though the former would help the island hold out if China attacked, and both would boost deterrence.
It also means shrewd diplomacy. Mr. Biden needs to stand firm against Chinese intimidation of Taiwan, while working to ease Beijing’s anxieties by demonstrating a stronger U.S. commitment to a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan dilemma. Mr. Biden should also persuade regional friends to provide more bases for the United States to use. This not only increases U.S. operational flexibility, but heightens deterrence.
Whatever Mr. Biden’s calculations, departing from the “strategic ambiguity” that has helped keep peace for decades misses the point. The main question for President Xi Jinping must be not whether the United States would join in, but whether China could beat the United States in a battle for Taiwan. Twenty years ago, China’s poorly trained army and largely obsolete naval and air forces had no chance. But that was then.
Many will applaud Mr. Biden for standing up for democratic Taiwan in the face of Chinese threats. But he could be putting the island in greater danger, and the United States may not be able to come to the rescue.
Oriana Skylar Mastro (@osmastro) is a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Golden State will return to the N.B.A. finals for the first time since 2019 after defeating the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference finals.
Golden State won the series, 4-1, with a 120-110 victory in Game 5 on Thursday in San Francisco.
Because of injuries, the Warriors had spent a couple of seasons wandering through the N.B.A. wilderness. But their celebrated core — Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green — is together again and playing some of its best basketball, no small achievement considering the team’s triumphant past.
“I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing our guys compete and stay connected and improve and succeed,” Golden State Coach Steve Kerr said this week. “We’ve been through a lot the last couple of years, so it’s wonderful to be back in this position.”
Golden State won three championships and advanced to five straight finals from 2015 to 2019, before it all began to come unglued. While falling to the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 finals, Thompson tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and Kevin Durant ruptured his right Achilles’ tendon.
It would get worse. A few weeks later, Durant, who had helped Golden State win two championships, left for the Nets. Four games into the subsequent season, Curry broke his left hand. Golden State finished with the worst record in the league, a humbling blow for a franchise that had seemed on the cusp of establishing itself as a dynasty.
Earlier this season, in a podcast interview with the former player JJ Redick, Green acknowledged his uncertainty about the future — both the team’s and his own — as Golden State labored through that listless 2019-20 season. Without Thompson, who spent much of his time rehabilitating away from the team, and Curry, who appeared in just five games, Green did little to hide his frustrations. He mentored some of the team’s younger players, but he also sulked and shot terribly.
“I couldn’t get myself going,” Green told Redick. “It was never a point where I felt that my window was closing because of my skills or because of what I bring to the table. But if we’re going to suck like this every year, then my window is closed because I can’t get up for these meaningless games.”
Thompson suffered another misfortune when he tore his right Achilles’ tendon in a private workout before the start of the 2020-21 season.
Behind the scenes, though, Golden State’s decision makers were building toward a future — one they hoped would resemble the team’s not-so-distant past. In February 2020, General Manager Bob Myers traded for Andrew Wiggins, the No. 1 draft pick in 2014 who had never quite fulfilled his seemingly vast potential with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
With the Warriors, Wiggins would prove he could do a bit of everything: shoot, pass, rebound, defend. On Monday, Kerr described the trade for Wiggins as “the key to all of this.” Golden State’s depth at the wing position had evaporated after the 2019 finals. Thompson was injured. Shaun Livingston had retired. And Andre Iguodala had been traded to the Memphis Grizzlies.
“So the Wiggins trade allowed us to start to rebuild that wing defense,” Kerr said, “and Wiggs has just been so good. He’s gotten so much better over the last couple of years. He’s a perfect fit next to our guys.”
This season, Wiggins was a first-time All-Star as Golden State went 53-29, good for the third-best record in the West. There were other meaningful moments along the way. Curry broke the league record for career 3-pointers. Thompson, after 941 days away, made his long-anticipated return from injury, scoring 17 points — and even dunking — in a win against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
But Golden State did not exactly race into the playoffs. It took time for Thompson to regain his familiar feel for the game, and Curry missed the final 12 games of the regular season with a sprained foot. Over one particularly lean stretch at the end of March, the Warriors lost seven of eight games. It was far from assured that they were capable of making a deep run in the playoffs.
But Golden State needed just five games to eliminate the sixth-seeded Denver Nuggets in the first round, then six to take care of the second-seeded Grizzlies in the conference semifinals.
“I felt like we had a chance to be a lot better than we were in the regular season,” Kerr said this week, adding: “We believed from the beginning that we could be a pretty good team, and we’re catching some momentum now and trying to ride it out as best we can.”
WASHINGTON — Four House Republicans including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, signaled on Thursday that they would not cooperate with subpoenas from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, posing a dilemma for the panel that could have broad implications for the inquiry and for Congress itself.
Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona each sent letters to the committee objecting to the investigation ahead of the depositions scheduled for this week, and Mr. McCarthy, of California, filed a court brief arguing the panel’s subpoenas are illegitimate.
In a statement, Mr. Perry called the Democratic-led committee a “kangaroo court” and accused the panel of “perpetuating political theater, vilifying and destroying political opponents.”
The Republicans’ resistance could hinder the committee’s investigation, leaving unanswered questions about the deadly mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that left more than 150 police officers injured. It will also likely force the panel to decide whether to pursue criminal contempt of Congress charges against the men, which could prompt a legal showdown whose outcome could set a precedent for future congressional investigations.
Mr. Perry, Mr. Biggs and Mr. Jordan were summoned to testify this week, with Mr. McCarthy and Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama scheduled for next week.
CNN earlier reported that Mr. Perry and Mr. Biggs had sent letters to the committee objecting to the subpoenas. Mr. Brooks did not respond to a request for comment.
The men have employed slightly different tactics in resisting the subpoenas. While Mr. Perry refused to appear — his lawyer stated flatly that the congressman “declines to appear for deposition on May 26 and requests that you withdraw the subpoena” — Mr. Jordan issued a lengthy list of demands to which the panel was unlikely to agree.
Mr. Jordan, who is in line to become Judiciary Committee chairman should his party take control of Congress after November’s midterms, demanded “all documents, videos or other materials in the possession of the select committee” to be used in his questioning and any material the panel has in which his name appears.
“Your attempt to compel testimony about a colleague’s deliberations pertaining to a statutorily prescribed legislative matter and an important constitutional function is a dangerous escalation of House Democrats’ pursue of political vendettas,” Mr. Jordan wrote to Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the committee.
A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.
The men’s resistance came as 22 former Republican members of the House urged them to cooperate with the panel.
“We understand you may have concerns about this exercise of the committee’s subpoena power,” the former members wrote in their letter, posted to Medium. “Indeed, under most circumstances, we would strongly counsel against compelling the testimony of sitting members of Congress. But the exceptional nature of this circumstance is clear: one in which sitting members may have firsthand knowledge regarding an assault on our government. The best way to ensure a full and fair accounting of what happened before and on Jan. 6 is for you to provide your understanding of the events and to explain it to the American people.”
The committee issued the subpoenas this month as it dug deeper into the role Republicans played in attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
“The committee is without authority to issue the subpoena, and we respectfully request that it be immediately withdrawn,” his lawyer, John P. Rowley III, wrote.
The panel has been told by at least one witness that Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, burned documents in the fireplace in his office after a meeting with Mr. Perry, a person familiar with the committee’s activity said on Thursday. The information was first reported by Politico. The Times reported on Wednesday that the committee had information that Mr. Meadows had used his fireplace to dispose of documents.
Mr. McCarthy, along with Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, filed a brief in support of Stephen K. Bannon, a Trump ally who has been indicted on charges of contempt of Congress after he failed to comply with a subpoena from the committee.
In the brief, lawyers for Mr. McCarthy argued that the committee’s subpoenas were illegitimate because, they said, the panel is not following the rules of the House regarding the number of members of the committee and Republicans’ role on the panel. Several judges have already rejected that argument in other suits.
Mr. Bannon is attempting to have the contempt charges dismissed, and Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Scalise sided with him, arguing the Jan. 6 committee’s pursuit of Mr. Bannon could cause “potential damage” to the institution of the House.
The panel’s move to compel cooperation from the Republicans was widely seen as unprecedented in the modern history of congressional investigations. In the House, subpoenas are almost never issued outside of the Ethics Committee, which is charged with investigating allegations of members’ misconduct.
Before sending their letters, the Republicans under subpoena privately discussed how best to respond, according to people familiar with their thinking who described it on the condition of anonymity. Some argued there was a clear political benefit to defying the committee — because former President Donald J. Trump’s base would almost certainly look favorably on the move — but some also are worried about weakening the authority of their own subpoenas if their party takes over Congress.
Mr. Thompson has said that if the men do not comply, another option beyond a contempt charge could be a referral to the Ethics Committee.
BILOHORIVKA, Ukraine — Out on the riverbank, the scene of mayhem unfolded under a baking spring sun: blown-up tanks, the detritus of pontoon bridges, heaps of branches shorn off by explosions and the bodies of Russian soldiers, some half buried in the mud.
In the forest, a short walk revealed bits of torn Russian military uniforms hanging from trees, an eerie reminder of the troops who died violently here.
The failed river crossing that took place at this spot over several days in early May was one of the most lethal engagements of the war for the Russian army. Its forces had sought to surround Ukrainian soldiers in the nearby town of Sievierodonetsk — but instead became surrounded themselves, boxed in by the river and a Ukrainian frontline. At least 400 Russian soldiers died, mostly from artillery attacks.
As the war grinds across the rolling plains and forests of Eastern Ukraine, the maneuvering of troops has in large part evolved into attempts at entrapment. But as the deadly encounter at the bridge illustrated, the tactic comes with grave risks.
After failing to capture major cities such as Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, or to cleave off the entire Black Sea coast, the Russian military attempted a major encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the east. That effort is looking difficult now that Ukraine has blocked one main route of advance, near the town of Izium.
So the Russian forces’ immediate goal has become a smaller encirclement of Sievierodonetsk, the easternmost city in the Donbas region still under Ukrainian control. Artillery bombardments by Russian troops approaching from three sides have ravaged the city, knocking out water and electricity and in the past day killing at least six people.
Destroyed Russian armored vehicles near the river.
The Russian strategy has been to use the blunt instrument of its army’s vast artillery to pound away at Ukrainian forces, making incremental gains in the Luhansk region of the Donbas. Military analysts and Western intelligence officials believe that Moscow’s forces would face brutal urban combat if they tried to fully capture Sievierodonetsk, and that they would struggle to mount an offensive deeper inside Ukraine.
Encirclement is a harrowing prospect for soldiers.
“I try not to think about it,” said Pvt. Ivan Sichkar, a Ukrainian soldier surveying the destruction of the encircled Russian force. “If I think of being surrounded, there’s no time left to do anything else.”
The Russians’ refashioned goal has focused the battle on a slender, 75-mile front in the Donbas. It is seeking to advance from both the north and the south to close the one remaining supply line for Ukraine into the city of Sievierodonetsk.
On Tuesday, the Russian army advanced from the south, forcing Ukrainian troops to retreat from the small town of Svitlodarsk, lest the Russians envelop the town and trap soldiers inside. And in its Wednesday evening briefing, the Ukrainian general staff described stepped-up attacks by Russian helicopters and jets to support ground troops in the east.
With Russia making only halting progress in Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin moved Wednesday to shore up support at home, announcing raises in pensions and the minimum wage and making his first trip to meet with wounded soldiers. “They are all heroes,” he said at a military hospital.
Discarded Russian military uniforms and other personal belongings lay near the scene.
A handgun from the backpack of a Russian soldier found in an abandoned tank.
Russian military belongings.
Mr. Putin also signed a decree opening a fast track to Russian citizenship for Ukrainian residents of areas controlled by the Russian military, a further step toward annexing territory in southeastern Ukraine that Russia has occupied.
As Mr. Putin moved to reassure ordinary Russians, Ukraine’s Western allies were trying to maintain pressure on his government. In Ankara on Wednesday, talks took place between Turkey, Finland and Sweden over Turkish concerns about the two Nordic countries’ application to join NATO. At a news conference after five hours of negotiations, Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said more talks were needed.
“Turkey is not under time pressure,” Mr. Kalin said. “It is not possible for any process to proceed without meeting the security concerns of Turkey.”
The strategy of encirclement has yielded far-reaching political gains for Russia over the course of its longer conflict in the region, in which Russian-backed separatists battled Ukrainian forces for eight years before the full-scale invasion this year. Two cease-fires, known as the Minsk agreements and seen as struck on terms advantageous to Russia, followed successful Russian encirclements of Ukrainian troops in the east in 2014 and 2015.
But in Bilohorivka, a tiny coal mining town on the banks of the Siversky Donets River, the tables were turned earlier this month, at least temporarily slowing the Russian advance.
Ukrainian soldiers who fought in the battle took to calling the site “the ear” for a lobe-like loop in the river where the fiercest fighting took place. The Ukrainian military escorted reporters for The New York Times to the site, which is on a frontline formed in much of the Donbas region by the roiling, fast-flowing river, swollen by spring rain.
Ukrainian soldiers near the Siversky Donets River.
Sunlight filters through the foliage of a dense, quiet forest on the river’s floodplain, which was the Ukrainians’ kill zone. Mosquitoes buzz. In places, the smell of decaying corpses is overwhelming.
“The Russian bodies start here,” Private Sichkar said as he rounded a bend in a dirt road extending about mile through the forest to the river’s edge. Just in this one spot, 15 incinerated armored personnel carriers were scattered about.
“The Russians wanted some little victory,” Col. DmytroKashchenko, the Ukrainian officer who commanded the counterattack on the pontoon bridge, said in an interview. “They tried in Kyiv, they tried in Kharkiv, and they lost. They were trying to win at least something.”
The Siversky Donets River, which cuts a meandering path through eastern Ukraine, forms a natural barrier to Russia’s advances. Suitable sites for pontoon crossings are few, Colonel Kashchenko said.
He was ordered to one of the crossings on May 8, after the Russians deployed pontoons and moved soldiers into the forest on the near bank. Ukrainian infantry advanced into the area the next day, but were repulsed, suffering losses, he said.
They then set up a defensive line to box in the Russians as they crossed their pontoon bridge, and rained down artillery fire on the area. They also set about destroying the bridge by placing floating mines upstream, allowing the current to carry them to the Russians’ pontoons, which proved an effective tactic. The Ukrainian forces blew up four separate bridges at the crossing site.
The Russians hastily laid new pontoons and sent armored vehicles across, Colonel Kashchenko said, but they were unable to break through the Ukrainian defensive line. Dozens of armored vehicles and infantry soldiers became trapped and were mauled by Ukrainian artillery. The Ukrainians also hit Russian troops involved in the bridge work on the far shore.
The body of a Russian soldier on the riverbank. Russia took heavy losses there.Credit…
Colonel Kashchenko said he had offered the enemy forces a chance to surrender, shouting into a loudspeaker, “‘Russians, give up!’” But, he said, “I don’t know if they heard us.”
Some enemy soldiers escaped by swimming across the river, the Ukrainians said. The Ukrainians have yet to collect the remains of the Russians scattered around the forest.
In the mottled light sifting through the leaves, discarded food and personal items lay all about: a sleeping bag, bottles of shower gel, cans of beef, a bag of potatoes, Russian tea bags, flip-flop sandals.
Ukrainian soldiers found a certificate for a medal granted to a Russian colonel for earlier fighting in the war. It was called an “award for military excellence.”
Beside a disabled Russian tank lay a cardboard box apparently used for carrying supplies. On the box was an odd message for a unit in war: “Always believe something wonderful is about to happen.”
Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, former supreme allied commander in Europe, drew a distinction between the Ukrainian tactics of seeking to target Russian armored vehicles and troops with artillery and the Russian bombardments of towns and cities.
“In the big scheme of things, Ukraine is trying to do maneuver warfare to regain territory and cut off resupply routes,” General Breedlove said. “And Russia is doing more of a grinding, attrition-based warfare.”
Of Russia’s bungled pontoon crossing, he said, “the Russians did something poorly that is difficult even if you do it magnificently.”
Ukrainian soldiers walked past destroyed Russian armored vehicles.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian Authority announced on Thursday its final findings from a two-week investigation into the killing of a veteran Palestinian-American journalist, again accusing Israeli soldiers of intentionally killing her.
The Authority’s attorney general said at a news conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah that an Israeli soldier shot the Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, on May 11 with an armor-piercing bullet fired from a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle. It based its findings in part on examination of the high-velocity 5.56 mm bullet that struck her in back of the head.
Palestinian officials said that they were the only ones who had examined the bullet and neither Israeli nor U.S. authorities were permitted to examine it.
“It was proven that a member of the Israeli occupation forces stationed in the middle of the street fired a live bullet that hit the martyr journalist” directly in the head, said the attorney general, Akram Al-Khateeb. She was shot “while she was trying to escape from the successive gunshots fired by the occupation soldiers,” he added.
Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz responded to the Palestinian announcement by saying Israel was still conducting its own investigation into her killing, adding that any claim that the military intentionally harms journalists is a “blatant lie.”
The Palestinian conclusions reiterated those of the Authority’s preliminary investigation, announced two days after Ms. Abu Akleh was killed during an early morning Israeli military raid on the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. She was wearing a blue flak jacket and a helmet marked with the word “Press” when she was shot.
Another Al Jazeera journalist, Ali Samoudi, who was also wearing a protective vest, was shot in the back.
The bullet became the focus of separate efforts by Palestinians and Israelis to investigate the killing because etchings could match it to the gun that fired it. Israel has called for Palestinian officials to share the bullet that killed her so that Israel can see if it matches a rifle used by one of its soldiers on the day of her death.
But the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, has repeatedly rejected Israeli calls to jointly investigate Ms. Abu Akleh’s killing as well as Israel’s request to examine the bullet.
The Israeli military said in its initial investigation that it was not possible to unequivocally determine the source of the gunfire that killed Ms. Abu Akleh and she could have been killed by an Israeli soldier or a Palestinian gunman.
The results of the Palestinian investigation drew from an autopsy, forensic testing on the bullet and witness accounts as well as tree markings where other bullets struck, according to the attorney general.
Amateur video filmed at the site before and after her killing shows that there was no gunfire in the minutes preceding her killing. Bystanders were chatting and joking with each other in the seconds before she was killed, during a lull in the fighting.
Ms. Abu Akleh was shot from a distance of between 170 to 180 meters away, the Authority’s investigation found. Multiple videos from before she was shot showed a number of Israeli military vehicles stationed up the road.
An experienced reporter for Al Jazeera, Ms. Abu Akleh was an icon to many Palestinians, having reported for years on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank for one of the Middle East’s leading television channels.
Two days after her death, her funeral brought thousands of Palestinians to the streets of Jerusalem. Israeli police officers beat and kicked mourners carrying her coffin, after a disagreement about how the coffin should be carried to the funeral ceremony in a church in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Israel has mounted regular raids in the Jenin area since late March. Israel says the raids are necessary to curb a recent wave of attacks on Israelis, some of whose perpetrators came from the Jenin region. Palestinians consider the raids as a form of collective punishment.
This week, the Palestinian foreign ministry said it had submitted a letter to the International Criminal Court regarding various crimes committed by Israel in the occupied West Bank and particularly the “crime of execution” of Ms. Abu Akleh.
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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