I got together this week with an old friend I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. Before meeting up, I was seized with a now-familiar apprehension. Would we find our old dynamic? Or would we sit across from one another awkwardly, unable to reclaim the rhythms and repartee that used to come so easily?
Only after the reunion went off without a hitch did I realize that I’d feared that if we hadn’t regained our groove, this could have been our last meeting for a while.
Perhaps it’s the clarity that comes from enduring a difficult period, but I’ve noticed, in myself and others, a diminishing tolerance for uncomfortable or unfulfilling social interactions. Seeing my old friend was thrilling. It felt nutrient-dense, almost like our connection was refueling my personality. But I’ve also experienced the opposite: a quick drink with an acquaintance that feels unduly exhausting.
My colleague Catherine Pearson spoke to experts to determine how many friends a person needs in order to stave off loneliness. (A 2010 meta-analysis found that loneliness is “as harmful to physical health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”) While no consensus emerged on an optimal number, Catherine did find that more isn’t always better: “Spending time with friends you feel ambivalent about — because they’re unreliable, critical, competitive or any of the many reasons people get under our skin — can be bad for your health.”
Our time and attention are valuable and finite, and we’re in control of what we do with them. We forget this sometimes. We reflexively say yes to invitations because we happen to be free. We go to events out of a vague sense of obligation. We say, “Let’s meet for drinks,” because it’s socially easier than just saying, “Take care.”
In “The Writing Life,” Annie Dillard writes: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” It’s an encouragement to live with intention. It’s good wisdom to keep in mind when deciding whom we spend our time with as well.
Here’s a confession: I hate having breakfast in bed. All those toast crumbs, syrup drips and tea spills make me too tense to enjoy it — on Mother’s Day or any other morning. But I do love it when my family makes me breakfast. So I’ve put in a request for Jerrelle Guy’s terrific sheet-pan chocolate chip pancakes. This easy, satisfying recipe has become a favorite in our house, with two tiny tweaks. Instead of baking the batter in one large sheet pan, we divide it across two smaller, quarter-sheet pans (measuring 9-by-13 inches) so there are more crispy edges. It’s a tip pinched from the recipe notes, and it works. The second is nixing the chocolate chips, because that leaves more room for loads of softened butter, blueberries and a downpour of maple syrup. (Want more satisfying recipes? Check out my column this week.)
REAL ESTATE
The Kentucky Derby: Grab your fanciest hat and mix some mint juleps: It’s Derby Day. The mile-and-a-quarter horse race is referred to as “the most exciting two minutes in sports,” and the winner gets a shot at horse racing’s premiere prize, the Triple Crown. For many, though, the party is the main draw. Coverage begins at 2:30 p.m. Eastern today on NBC, with the race set for 6:57 p.m.
KRYVYI RIH, Ukraine — The solicitation to commit treason came to Oleksandr Vilkul on the second day of the war, in a phone call from an old colleague.
Mr. Vilkul, the scion of a powerful political family in southeastern Ukraine that was long seen as harboring pro-Russian views, took the call as Russian troops were advancing to within a few miles of his hometown, Kryvyi Rih.
“He said, ‘Oleksandr Yurivich, you are looking at the map, you see the situation is predetermined,’” Mr. Vilkul said, recalling the conversation with a fellow minister in a former, pro-Russian Ukrainian government.
“Sign an agreement of friendship, cooperation and defense with Russia and they will have good relations with you,” the former colleague said. “You will be a big person in the new Ukraine.”
The offer failed spectacularly. Once war had begun, Mr. Vilkul said, the gray area seeped out of Ukrainian politics for him. Missiles striking his hometown made the choice obvious: he would fight back.
“I responded with profanity,” Mr. Vilkul said in an interview.
If the first months of the war in Ukraine became a military debacle for the Russian army — deflating the reputations of its commanders and troops in a forced retreat from Kyiv — the Russian invasion also highlighted another glaring failure: Moscow’s flawed analysis of the politics of the country it was attacking. The miscalculation led to mistakes no less costly in lives for the Russian army than the faulty tactics of tank operators who steered into bogs.
The Kremlin entered the war expecting a quick and painless victory, predicting that the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky would fracture and that leading officials in the largely Russian-speaking eastern region would gladly switch sides. That hasn’t happened.
The political myopia was most significant in the country’s east, political analysts say.
In all but a tiny number of villages, Russia failed to flip local politicians to its side. The Ukrainian authorities have opened 38 cases of treason, all targeting low level officials in individual instances of betrayal.
“Nobody wanted to be part of that thing behind the wall,” said Kostyantyn Usov, a former member of Parliament from Kryvyi Rih, referring to Russia’s isolated, authoritarian system.
He said that system has dismal appeal in Ukraine and noted the absence of widespread collaboration with Russia, including among Ukrainians who speak Russian and share the country’s cultural values.
“We are part of something bright,” he said of Ukraine. “It is here, with us, in our group. And they have nothing to offer.”
Other prominent, once-Russian leaning politicians including Ihor Terekhov, mayor of Kharkiv, and Hennady Trukhanov, mayor of Odesa, also remained loyal and became fierce defenders of their cities.
Along with leaders in the southeast, Ukrainian people also resisted. Street protests against occupation in Kherson continue despite lethal dangers for participants. One man stood in front of a tank. Kryvyi Rih’s miners and steelworkers have shown no signs of pivoting allegiance to Russia.
“Before the war, we had ties to Russia,” said Serhiy Zhyhalov, 36, a steel mill engineer, referring to familial, linguistic and cultural bonds. But no longer, he said. “No one has any doubts that Russia attacked us.’’
Ukraine’s southeastern regions, an expanse of steppe and blighted industrial and mining cities, is now the focus of fighting in the war.
Driving south from Kyiv, the highway leaves behind the dense pine forests and reedy swamps of northern Ukraine and the landscape opens into expansive plains. Farm fields stretch out to the horizons, in brilliant, yellow blossoming rapeseed or tilled black earth.
In many ways, the region is entwined with Soviet and Russian history. The iron and coal industries shaped southeastern Ukraine. In and around the city of Kryvyi Rih are iron ore deposits; the coal is farther east, near the city of Donetsk.
The two mineral basins, known as the Kryvbas and the Donbas, gave birth to a metallurgical industry that drew in many nationalities from around the Czarist and Soviet empires from the late 19th century onward, with Russian becoming the lingua franca in the mining towns. Villages remained mostly Ukrainian speaking.
The region for years elected Russian-leaning politicians such as Mr. Vilkul, a favorite villain to Ukrainian nationalists for promoting Soviet-style cultural events that angered many Ukrainians. He staged for example, a singalong party in Kryvyi Rih to belt out “Katyusha,” a Russian song associated with the Soviet World War II victory.
More substantively, Mr. Vilkul ascended in politics under the former, pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, in whose government he served as deputy prime minister until street protesters deposed Mr. Yanukovych in 2014.
Much of the rest of Mr. Yanukovych’s cabinet fled with him to Russia. But Mr. Vilkul remained in Ukraine as a de facto political boss of Kryvyi Rih while his aging father served as the city’s mayor.
And he caught Moscow’s eye. In 2018, Mr. Vilkul said in the interview, he was told through an intermediary that “the time of chaos is over” and that he should now follow orders from Moscow if he wished to remain in politics in the southeast. He said he refused.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
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Victory Day concerns. Officials across Ukraine issued urgent warnings about the threat of stepped-up Russian missile strikes over the weekend, amid fears that President Vladimir V. Putin might use Russia’s Victory Day holiday on May 9 to intensify attacks and turn what he calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine into explicit, all-out war.
In Mariupol. In the ruined city, where fighting continued to rage, an evacuation convoy was dispatched again to the Azovstal steel plant, where about 200 civilians are believed to be trapped underground, along with the last Ukrainian soldiers defending the city. The Russian bombardment of the factory continued overnight.
Russian oil embargo. The European Union unveiled a plan to halt imports of Russian crude oil in the next six months and refined oil products by the end of the year. If approved as expected, it would be the bloc’s biggest and costliest step yet toward ending its own dependence on Russian fossil fuels.
The Russians, he said, had not even bothered to court him, they only leveled demands. He said Moscow took the same approach to other politicians in Ukraine’s east. “They didn’t even try to convince us,” he said. “They just thought we would be, a priori, on their side.”
On the eve of the war, Mr. Vilkul was likely the Russian-leaning politician in Ukraine with the broadest popular support. “I was alone on this level,” he said. He was also viewed by Moscow as a promising potential convert to its side when it invaded Ukraine.
That’s when the call came to Mr. Vilkul’s cellphone from Vitaly Zakharchenko, a Ukrainian in exile in Russia who had served as Interior Minister under Mr. Vilkul in Mr. Yanukovych’s government. He recommended Mr. Vilkul cooperate with the Russians.
“I told him to get lost,” Mr. Vilkul said. “I didn’t even consider it.”
Mr. Vilkul said he had been misunderstood — by Russia’s leadership and his nationalist opposition at home. A great-grandfather, he said, had fought White Russians in the civil war. The Vilkul family, he said, “has been fighting Russians on this land for a hundred years.”
The Kremlin, he said, had misinterpreted his respect for World War II veterans and support for rights of Russian-speakers as potential support for a renewed Russian empire, something he said was a mistake. He called the Russians “classic megalomaniacs.’’
“They mistook common language and values like attitudes to the Second World War and Orthodoxy as a sign that somebody loves them,” he said.
A second offer, this time presented publicly by another Ukrainian exile, Oleh Tsaryov, in a post on Telegram, came about a week later, when Russian troops had advanced to within six miles of the city. “My fellow party members and have always taken a pro-Russian stance,” the post said, referring to Mr. Vilkul and his father, and added ominously that “cooperation with the Russian army means preserving the city and lives.”
Mr. Vilkul responded with an obscene post on Facebook.
On the first days of the invasion, Mr. Vilkul ordered the region’s mining companies to park heavy equipment on the runway of the city’s airport, thwarting an airborne assault, and on approach roads, slowing tank columns. The tires were then popped and engines disabled.
The city’s steel industry began to turn out tank barriers and plates for armored vests. Mr. Zelensky, whose hometown is Kryvyi Rih, appointed Mr. Vilkul military governor of the city on the third day of the war, though the two had been political opponents in peacetime.
Mr. Vilkul has taken to wearing fatigues and a camouflage bandanna. A parade of Ukrainian nationalists, including the leader of the Right Sector paramilitary, Dmytro Yarosh, and a prominent activist and military officer, Tetiana Chernovol, once sworn enemies of the Vilkul family, have shown up in his office to shake his hand.
“If we fight the Russians,” he said. “Were we ever really pro-Russian, in essence?”
The White House is stepping up its warnings about a coronavirus surge this fall and winter, and is making contingency plans for how it will provide vaccines to the American public if Congress does not allocate more money for the Covid-19 response, according to a senior administration official.
With prospects for a fresh round of emergency coronavirus aid appearing shaky on Capitol Hill, administration officials met this week with key senators — including two leading Republicans — to press their case. Democrats have been contemplating wrapping Covid aid into another emergency package for Ukraine, but it was unclear whether they will do so.
The White House has been asking Congress for $22.5 billion in emergency aid to continue responding to the pandemic, but Republicans have insisted on a much lower number — $10 billion — and have stripped $5 billion in global aid from the request. Republicans are also insisting that the Biden administration suspend its plans to lift a public health order known as Title 42, which authorities have used to deport asylum-seekers during the pandemic.
The Biden administration is preparing for the possibility that 100 million Americans — roughly 30 percent of the population — will get infected with the coronavirus this fall and winter, according to the administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The 100 million figure is not as high as the total number of Americans known to have become infected with the highly contagious Omicron variant during the wave in December and January. It is based on a range of outside models, though the official did not specify which ones, and assumes that a rapidly evolving virus in the Omicron family — not a new variant — will spread through a population with waning immunity against infection.
Should that scenario play out, the administration’s goal is to prevent a spike in hospitalizations and deaths. One way that might be accomplished would be to revive mask mandates, the official said.
A report last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 60 percent of Americans, including 75 percent of children, had been infected with the coronavirus by February, and that the Omicron variant was responsible for much of the toll.
The official predicted the next coronavirus wave in the United States would begin this summer in the South, with a significant number of infections as people move indoors to escape the heat. In the fall, it would begin to spread across the rest of the country, particularly the north, although the spike in cases would not be as steep.
After dropping substantially after the winter Omicron surge, new confirmed U.S. cases have been rising again. As of Friday, the average of new U.S. cases had reached about 70,200 a day, an increase of 52 percent over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database, though infections are thought to be undercounted, especially with access to at-home testing. Hospitalizations are also climbing nationally, with an average of more than 18,400 people with the coronavirus in U.S. hospitals, an increase of 20 percent from two weeks ago. And deaths, a lagging indicator, ticked up for the first time in weeks, inching upward by 1 percent, to an average of 371 a day.
If Congress does not approve more money for the domestic response, the official said, the administration would use funds designated for testing and therapeutics to develop a bare-bones vaccination program that would cover just older Americans and those with compromised immune systems. Officials have said they cannot provide enough boosters for the general population in the fall without more funding.
Both Moderna and Pfizer are now working on so-called “bivalent vaccines” that can protect against some known variants. If those vaccines are authorized by federal regulators in time, and a substantial number of Americans take them or get booster shots that are already authorized, the official said, the fatality rate should drop toless than one tenth of 1 percent of people who get infected. But if access to vaccines is limited, the United States could see hundreds of thousands of deaths, the official said.
Last month, a panel of outside experts who make recommendations to federal regulators grappled with the challenges involved in revamping vaccines, including when such decisions might be made and the uncertainty of which variant of the virus could be dominant in the fall.
The official said testing will be a particular challenge. Test makers are already laying off employees as demand for rapid at-home testing drops. The Strategic National Stockpile needs 1 billion rapid tests going into the fall, but will have only 400 to 500 million without additional funding, the official said.
Among the other likely big winners in the election was the Alliance, a centrist party that aligns with neither the nationalists nor the unionists. Analysts said the party’s candidates had drawn votes away from “soft unionists,” suggesting that the sectarian conflicts of the past are less resonant, particularly with younger voters, than everyday concerns like housing, jobs and health care.
“A plurality of voters in Northern Ireland say they are not nationalist or unionist,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of politics at Queen’s University in Belfast. “Now there seems to be momentum behind that view.”
“The overriding point Sinn Fein is making is, ‘We want to be in government,’” Professor Hayward said. “That is welcomed by people who are fed up by the dysfunction of the government.”
In so-called first-preference votes, which were reported on Friday evening, Sinn Fein won 250,388 votes, the Democratic Unionist Party won 184,002, and the Alliance won 116,681. Under the territory’s complicated voting system, candidates with the largest number of votes automatically win seats in the assembly.
But voters can express additional preferences, and seats are allocated according to the parties’ share of votes. That means that the final number of seats won by Sinn Fein and other parties will not be clear until Saturday.
For all the symbolism, the victory was as much about disarray in the unionist movement as the rise of the nationalists. Unionists have been divided and demoralized since Brexit, largely because the Democratic Unionist Party signed off on the British government’s negotiation of a hybrid trade status for Northern Ireland, known as the protocol.
The arrangement, which imposes border checks on goods flowing from mainland Britain to Northern Ireland, has triggered a backlash among unionist voters, many of whom complain that it has driven a wedge between them and the rest of the United Kingdom. The British government, eager to mollify the unionists, is weighing legislation that would throw out parts of the trade protocol. But it has yet to act.
MEXICO CITY — A powerful explosion rocked central Havana on Friday morning, destroying parts of a luxury hotel and damaging nearby buildings just yards from the Cuban Capitol building.
At least 18 people were killed and dozens were injured, the president said. More were missing. Among the dead were a pregnant woman and a child.
The devastating blast came as Cuba is trying to revive a tourism industry that is a key pillar of its fragile economy and that had been upended by the pandemic.
Videos and photos shared on social media showed ambulances rushing to the scene and much of the facade of the Hotel Saratoga destroyed. Rubble was piled on the street, and smoke billowed into the sky.
“There was a stink, like a chemical, that burned your nose,” said Miriam Díaz, 56, a Havana resident who lives behind the hotel and was on a bus arriving home at the time of the blast. “We couldn’t get out because the door wouldn’t open.”
The hotel, a popular destination for international visitors and celebrities, was undergoing renovation work and was not open to guests at the time of the blast, government officials said.
Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, went to the scene shortly after the explosion, along with Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz. The office of the Cuban presidency said on Twitter that preliminary investigations indicated the explosion, shortly before 11 a.m., was caused by a gas leak.
At least 64 people, including 50 adults and 14 children, were initially hospitalized as a result of the blast, officials said. Many apartments were damaged, and those residents affected were being transferred to a safe location while repairs were carried out.
“Havana is in shock today after the accidental explosion of a gas tank at the Hotel Saratoga, which caused a large part of the building to collapse,’’ Mr. Díaz-Canel wrote on Twitter. “Our deepest condolences and sincere support to the families and friends of the victims.”
The explosion at a prominent hotel called to mind a series of hotel bombings in Havana in the 1990s linked to militant exiles. But the authorities were quick to dismiss any speculation that the blast had been deliberate.
“This wasn’t in any way a bomb or an attack,” Mr. Díaz-Canel told reporters at the scene. It was “an unfortunate accident.”
The president’s office added that search and rescue efforts were still being carried out, with people potentially still trapped in the rubble. Officials suggested that the blast happened just outside the hotel.
“I felt the explosion,” said Paulo Morales, 21, an engineering student who lives just a few blocks from the hotel. “It shook the street. It shook the ground. It shook the windows.”
An iconic building dating to the 19th century, the Hotel Saratoga had reopened in 2005 as a luxury, five-star establishment. The hotel had been closed for two years because of the pandemic, according to its Facebook page, and was set to reopen next week.
Among the buildings damaged was the nearby Concepción Arenal School. A teacher from the school who did not want to give her name said several students had been injured. She said windows were blown out, with shards of glass flying a considerable distance.
The local director of education told Cuban media that five students were injured in the blast.
“It’s shocking,” said Ms. Díaz, whose daughter attends the school but was unharmed by the blast. “It’s really very tough.”
State media reported that children were evacuated to the Capitol in the wake of the blast, and officials said later that students would be able to attend another facility starting Monday. Among those hospitalized were 14 children, the authorities said.
A nearby church was also badly damaged.
“The walls fell down completely. The roof of the church caved in,” said Mr. Morales, who was a parishioner. “All the windows, there wasn’t a single one left — not in the church and not in the Martí Theater that’s in front.”
As rescue workers moved in, Mr. Morales said he watched people being pulled from the rubble. At least three were dead.
“They were destroyed,” he said. “You could see a lot of blood.”
The Cuban Communist Party newspaper, Granma, said on Twitter that the explosion occurred “while liquefied gas was presumably being moved from a truck.”
The explosion came as Cuba’s all-important tourism sector was beginning to bounce back after being hard hit during the pandemic. The island nation had been shut off to visitors for months, plunging Cuba into one of it worst economic crises in history.
“This has to give people pause about whether Havana is really ready to reopen,” said Renata Keller, a Cuba expert at the University of Nevada, Reno. Cubans “really need this recovery in the tourism industry and this explosion is not going to help.”
The disappearance of tourists deprived Cuba of vital foreign currency that it is heavily dependent on, exacerbating the financial challenges caused by the decades-long U.S. embargo.
The economic crisis set off one of the largest protest movements in Cuban history, with thousands of people taking to the streets in cities across the country. A subsequent government crackdown has led to the jailing of dozens of people for crimes, including sedition.
The explosion occurred days after Cuba hosted an international tourism fair in the nearby resort town of Varadero.
Shortly after the blast, calls spread on social media for blood donations to help victims of the explosion. Photos shared online showed Cubans lining up to donate at a blood bank in Havana.
Mexico’s foreign secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, said on Friday afternoon that the upcoming visit of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the island would go ahead as planned.
“Our solidarity to the victims and those affected as well as to the people of this dear brotherly nation,” Mr. Ebrard said on Twitter.
Originally built in 1880, the Saratoga was considered one of the most important hotels in Havana in the 1930s, according to its website.It initially served as a tobacco warehouse and store, along with some apartments. It was built at a different location before it was moved to its current address on Paseo del Prado, a long and popular avenue that cuts through Havana. It was turned into a hotel in the 1930s.
Now owned by the state-run Gaviota tourism group, the hotel has hosted international travelers for decades. Among its notable clientele have been guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
Hannah Berkeley Cohen contributed reporting from Columbus, Ohio. Frances Robles contributed reporting from Miami, Fl.
Ukrainian troops, emboldened by sophisticated weapons and long-range artillery supplied by the West, went on the offensive Friday against Russian forces in the northeast, seeking to drive them back from two key cities as the war plunged more deeply into a grinding, town-for-town battle.
After weeks of intense fighting along a 300-mile-long front, neither side has been able to achieve a major breakthrough, with one army taking a few villages one day, only to lose just as many in the following days. In its latest effort to reclaim territory, the Ukrainian military said that “fierce battles” were being waged as it fought to retake Russia-controlled areas around Kharkiv in the northeast and Izium in the east.
The stepped-up combat came as the White House announced on Friday that President Biden would meet virtually on Sunday with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and the leaders of the G7, which includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, noted that the leaders would convene as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia prepares to celebrate the annual holiday of Victory Day on Monday with military parades and speeches commemorating the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.
The holiday has intensified fears in Ukraine and some Western capitals that Mr. Putin could exploit the occasion to expand his Feb. 24 invasion, after his initial drive failed to rout the Ukrainian military and topple the government.
“While he expected to be marching through the streets of Kyiv, that’s actually not what is going to happen,” Ms. Psaki said. She called the G7 meeting “an opportunity to not only show how unified the West is in confronting the aggression and the invasion by President Putin, but also to show that unity requires work.”
Ukraine on Friday urged civilians to brace for heavier assaults ahead of Victory Day in Russia, warning them to avoid large gatherings and putting in place new curfews from Ivano-Frankivsk in the west to Zaporizhzhia in the southeast.
Friends and family paying their respects to Tengiz Lanskiy, 57, and Volodymyr Kovalsky, 39, volunteer fighters with previous military experience who were killed early in the war, at Bucha cemetery on Friday.Credit…Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Ukrainian police forces were also placed on heightened alert ahead of the holiday, which will be commemorated in Russia with military parades in Moscow and hundreds of other cities.
Vadym Denysenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, warned civilians that they could risk their lives by gathering in crowded places.
“We all remember what happened at the train station in Kramatorsk,” Mr. Denysenko said on Telegram, referring to a devastating missile strike in that eastern city last month, which killed dozens of people as they crowded on railway platforms, trying the flee the invasion.
“Be vigilant,” Mr. Denysenko said. “This is the most important thing.”
The regional governor of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Sergei Haidai, warned that Russian forces were preparing for a “major offensive” in the next few days against a pair of eastern cities, Severodonetsk and Popsana. He assailed what he called “continued horror” in the region, where he said that the latest Russian shelling had killed two people and destroyed dozens of houses.
The pace of Russian missile strikes across Ukraine has been intensifying in recent days as Moscow tries to slow the flow of Western arms across the country. But as with so many aspects of the war, uncertainty about Mr. Putin’s intentions runs deep.
Vladimir Nikiforov, 53, who was injured in shelling a few weeks ago, recovering on Friday at the hospital in Kramatorsk, Ukraine.Credit…Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
There is rampant speculation that he might use the upcoming holiday to convert what he calls a “special military operation” into an all-out war, which would create a justification for a mass mobilization of Russian troops and set the stage for a more broad-ranging conflict. Kremlin officials have denied any such plans. But they also had denied plans to invade Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have said that a military draft in Russia could provoke a backlash among its citizens, many of whom, polls show, still view the war as a largely distant conflict filtered through the convoluted and sometimes conflicting narratives provided by state-controlled media.
“General mobilization in Russia is beneficial to us,” Oleksei Arestovych, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, said during an interview on Ukrainian television this week. “It can lead to a revolution.”
Some Western analysts speculate that Mr. Putin may instead point to the territory that Moscow has already seized in eastern Ukraine to bolster his false claims that Russia is liberating the region from Nazis.
The Pentagon, for its part, has avoided stoking speculation about Mr. Putin’s Victory Day plans.
“What they plan to do or say on Victory Day, that’s really up to them,” John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said on Thursday. “I don’t think we have a perfect sense.”
Fears that Russia could intensify its assault came as the United Nations Security Council adopted a statement on Friday supporting efforts by the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, to broker a diplomatic resolution to the war.
The statement, initiated by Mexico and Norway, was the first action regarding Ukraine that the council had unanimously approved since the invasion began. Russia supported the statement, which did not call the conflict a “war,” a term the Kremlin forbids.
Mr. Zelensky insisted on Friday that peace talks cannot resume until Russian forces pull back to where they were before the invasion. Still, he did not foreclose the possibility of a negotiated settlement.
A house with warnings of mines painted onto the front fence on Friday in Bucha, Ukraine. De-mining teams are still operating across Bucha and neighboring villages to remove and defuse unexploded ordnance.Credit…Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
“Not all the bridges are destroyed,” he said, speaking remotely at a virtual event held by Chatham House, a British research organization.
Alexey Zaitsev, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said on Friday that talks between Russia and Ukraine were “in a state of stagnation,” Russian state media reported.
Mr. Zaitsev blamed NATO countries for prolonging the war by shipping billions of dollars in arms to Ukraine, even as those countries have urged Mr. Putin to withdraw his troops.
“This leads to an extension of hostilities, more destruction of civilian infrastructure and civilian casualties,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky said that Russian propagandists had spent years fueling “hatred” that had driven Russian soldiers to “hunt” civilians, destroy cities and commit the kind of atrocities seen in the besieged southern port of Mariupol. Much of the city, once home to more than 400,000 people, has been leveled, and it has become a potent symbol of the devastation wrought by Russia in Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky said Russia’s determination to destroy the last Ukrainian fighters holed up with desperate civilians in bunkers beneath the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol only underscored the “cruelty” that has defined the invasion.
“This is terrorism and hatred,” he said.
On Friday, about 50 women, children and elderly people who had been trapped beneath the Azovstal plant in Mariupol were evacuated in a humanitarian convoy, according to a high-ranking Ukrainian official and Russian state media. The official, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereschuk, said the evacuation had been “extremely slow” because Russian troops violated a cease-fire.
Nearly 500 people have managed to leave the Azovstal plant, Mariupol and surrounding areas in recent days with help from United Nations and the Red Cross, according to Mr. Guterres.
As the fighting drags on, concerns are growing that the war could exacerbate a global hunger crisis.
The caskets of Oleksandr Malevskyi, top, and Yurii Varianytsia, Ukraine soldiers killed during fighting in the country’s east, during their funerals at the Saints Peter and Paul Garrison Church in the western city of Lviv on Friday.Credit…Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
The United Nations said on Friday that there was mounting evidence that Russian troops had looted tons of Ukrainian grain and destroyed grain storage facilities, adding to a disruption in exports that has already caused a surge in global prices, with devastating consequences for poor countries.
At the same time, the organization’s anti-hunger agency, the World Food Program, called for the reopening of ports in the Odesa area of southern Ukraine so that food produced in the war-torn country can flow freely to the rest of the world. Ukraine, a leading grain grower, had some 14 million tons in storage available for export, but Russia’s blockade of the country’s Black Sea ports has prevented distribution.
“Right now, Ukraine’s grain silos are full,” said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, while “44 million people around the world are marching towards starvation.”
Reporting was contributed by Dan Bilefsky, Nick Cumming-Bruce, Rick Gladstone, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Farnaz Fassihi.
On Wednesday, the S&P 500 stock index jumped 3 percent, as though all was right with the world. On Thursday, stocks collapsed, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq index plunging 5 percent as though the end of times was in sight.
Things on Friday aren’t much clearer: Stocks swung back and forth in early trading.
If you are looking for patterns in these crazy swings, the answer is simple: The financial markets are coming to grips with a stunning policy change by the Federal Reserve.
Over the last two decades, financial markets may have become so accustomed to encouragement from the Fed that they just don’t know how to react, now that the central bank is doing its best to slow down the economy.
But the Fed’s intentions are evident, if you read and listen.
Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said unequivocally during a news conference on Wednesday that the central bank was really and truly committed to driving down inflation. A transcript of Mr. Powell’s words is available on the Fed site. So is the text of the Fed’s latest policy statement. Check for yourself.
The Fed is willing to increase unemployment in the United States if that is what’s required to get the job done. And while they would much prefer that the United States doesn’t fall into a recession, Fed policymakers are willing to take the heat if the economy falters.
This may be hard to accept, and for a good reason.
Pretty much since the start of the great financial crisis that began in 2008, the loose monetary policy of this very same Federal Reserve has repeatedly propelled financial markets to giddy heights. By reducing short-term interest rates to virtually zero and by buying trillions of dollars in bonds and other securities, the central bank kept the financial system from freezing up, and then some. It stimulated business activity, effectively lowered the yields of a broad range of bonds and encouraged investors to take risks. That drove up the stock market.
Understand Inflation in the U.S.
These extraordinarily generous policies are at least partly responsible for the current burst of inflation — the most serious episode of rising prices since the 1980s.
Yet at its latest policymaking meeting on Wednesday, the Fed made it more obvious than ever that it has shifted its policy in a fundamental way. That is, understandably, extremely difficult for financial markets to digest.
“This is a very big change, and the markets are having trouble processing it,” Robert Dent, senior U.S. economist for Nomura Securities, said in an interview.
No wonder the markets have been swerving wildly, falling one day, rising the next, but trending downward since the beginning of the year.
“Because the risks that the economy faces and that the Fed faces are so great, and because the responses by the Fed could be so significant, you’re seeing swings that are very big every day,” Mr. Dent said. “Swings that a year or 24 months ago would have been highly unusual are now the norm.”
Yet the current situation is anything but normal.
The Covid-19 pandemic has left millions of casualties worldwide, and it’s not over. From the narrow viewpoint of economics, the pandemic threw supply and demand for a vast variety of goods and services out of whack, and that has baffled policymakers. How much of the current bout of inflation has been caused by Covid, and what can the Fed possibly do about it?
Then there are the continuing lockdowns in China, which have reduced the supply of Chinese exports and dampened Chinese demand for imports, both of which are altering global economic patterns. On top of all that is the oil price shock caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine and by the sanctions against Russia.
Until late last year, the Fed said the inflation problem was “transitory.” Its response to an array of global challenges was to flood the U.S. economy and the world with money. It helped to reduce the impact of the 2020 recession in the United States — and it contributed to great wealth-creating rallies in the stock and bond markets.
But now, the Fed has recognized that inflation has gotten out of control and must be significantly slowed.
This is how Mr. Powell put it on Wednesday. “Inflation is much too high and we understand the hardship it is causing, and we’re moving expeditiously to bring it back down,” he said. “We have both the tools we need and the resolve it will take to restore price stability on behalf of American families and businesses.”
But its tools for reducing the rate of inflation without causing undue harm to the economy are actually quite crude and limited, he later acknowledged, in response to a reporter’s question. “We have essentially interest rates, the balance sheet and forward guidance, and they’re famously blunt tools,” he said. “They’re not capable of surgical precision.”
As if that were not scary enough, for an operation as delicate as the Fed is attempting, he added: “No one thinks this will be easy. No one thinks it’s straightforward, but there is certainly a plausible path to this, and I do think there, we’ve got a good chance to do that. And, you know, our job is not to rate the chances, it is to try to achieve it. So that’s what we’re doing.”
Well, fine. The Fed needs to make the attempt, but given the precariousness of the situation, the high volatility in financial markets is exactly what I’d expect to see.
The Federal Reserve is committed to continuing to raise the short-term interest rate it controls, the Fed funds rate, to somewhere well above 2.25 percent. Only a few months ago, that rate stood close to zero, and on Wednesday, the Fed raised it to the 0.75 to 1 percent range. The Fed also said it would begin reducing its $9 trillion balance sheet in June by about $1 trillion over the next year, and it continues to issue cautionary “forward guidance” — warnings of the kind that Mr. Powell made on Wednesday.
Watch out, he was essentially saying. Financial conditions are going to get much tougher — as tough as needed to stop inflation from becoming entrenched and deeply destructive. The Fed will be using blunt instruments on the American economy. There will be damage, inevitably. People will lose their jobs when the economy slows. There will be pain, even if it isn’t intended.
Inflation F.A.Q.
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What is inflation? Inflation is a loss of purchasing power over time, meaning your dollar will not go as far tomorrow as it did today. It is typically expressed as the annual change in prices for everyday goods and services such as food, furniture, apparel, transportation and toys.
What causes inflation? It can be the result of rising consumer demand. But inflation can also rise and fall based on developments that have little to do with economic conditions, such as limited oil production and supply chain problems.
Is inflation bad? It depends on the circumstances. Fast price increases spell trouble, but moderate price gains can lead to higher wages and job growth.
Can inflation affect the stock market? Rapid inflation typically spells trouble for stocks. Financial assets in general have historically fared badly during inflation booms, while tangible assets like houses have held their value better.
In the financial markets, short-term traders are unable to make sense of all this. The day-to-day shifts in the markets are about as informative as the meandering of a squirrel. But for those with long horizons, the outlook is straightforward enough.
A period of wrenching volatility is inescapable. This happens periodically in financial markets, yet those very markets tend to produce wealth for people who are able to ride out this turbulence.
It is important, as always, to make sure you have enough money put aside for an emergency. Then, assess your ability to withstand the impact of nasty headlines and unpleasant financial statements documenting market losses.
Cheap, broadly diversified index funds that track the overall market are being hit hard right now, but I’m still putting money into them. Over the long run, that approach has led to prosperity.
Count on more market craziness until the Fed’s struggle to beat inflation has been resolved. But if history is a guide, the odds are that you will do well if you can get through it.
WASHINGTON — The United States provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet last month, another sign that the administration is easing its self-imposed limitations on how far it will go in helping Ukraine fight Russia, U.S. officials said.
The targeting help, which contributed to the eventual sinking of the flagship, the Moskva, is part of a continuing classified effort by the Biden administration to provide real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine. That intelligence also includes sharing anticipated Russian troop movements, gleaned from a recent American assessment of Moscow’s battle plan for the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the officials said.
The administration has sought to keep much of the battlefield and maritime intelligence it is sharing with the Ukrainians secret out of fear it will be seen as an escalation and provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war. But in recent weeks, the United States has sped heavier weapons to Ukraine and requested an extraordinary $33 billion in additional military, economic and humanitarian aid from Congress, demonstrating how quickly American restraints on support for Ukraine are shifting.
Two senior American officials said that Ukraine already had obtained the Moskva’s targeting data on its own, and that the United States provided only confirmation. But other officials said the American intelligence was crucial to Ukraine’s sinking of the ship.
On April 13, Ukrainian forces on the ground fired two Neptune missiles, striking the Moskva and igniting a fire that eventually led to the sinking of the warship. Attention has also focused on whether the aging ship’s radar systems were working properly. Ukrainian and U.S. officials said the Moskva was possibly distracted by Ukraine’s deploying of a Turkish-made Bayraktar drone nearby.
Immediately after the strike, Biden administration officials were scrupulously silent, declining to confirm even that the Moskva had been struck. But in recent days, American officials confirmed that targeting data from American intelligence sources was provided to Ukraine in the hours before the Neptune missiles were launched.
The officials declined to elaborate on what specific information was passed along, but one official said the information went beyond simply a report on the ship’s location in the Black Sea, 65 nautical miles south of Odesa.
The Biden administration has declined to publicly confirm that American intelligence provided the targeting information that allowed Ukraine to hit the Moskva.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
The sinking of the ship was a major blow to Russia and the most significant loss for any navy in 40 years.
Russia has denied Ukrainian missiles played any role in the Moskva’s demise, claiming instead that an onboard fire caused a munitions explosion that doomed the ship. Independent Russian news outlets based outside the country have reported that about 40 men died and an additional 100 were injured when the warship was damaged and sank.
Biden administration officials have declined to publicly confirm that American intelligence provided the targeting information that allowed Ukraine to hit the Moskva.
The Pentagon press secretary, John F. Kirby, asked about a report in The Times of London that a Navy P-8 spy plane from Sigonella air base in Italy was tracking the Moskva before it was hit by Ukraine, spoke of air policing missions in the Black Sea as part of a carefully worded response: “There was no provision of targeting information by any United States Navy P-8 flying in these air policing missions,” he said.
An American official said the Ukrainians asked the Americans about a ship sailing in the Black Sea south of Odesa. The United States identified it as the Moskva, and confirmed its location. The Ukrainians then targeted the ship. The Ukrainians carried out the strike without the prior knowledge of the United States. The official said the United States provided confirmation to the Ukrainian military, but other officials said it was not certain Ukraine could have hit the ship without U.S. assistance.
After this article was published, Mr. Kirby added in a statement, “The Ukrainians have their own intelligence capabilities to track and target Russian naval vessels, as they did in this case.”
American officials have acknowledged publicly that actionable intelligence was provided to the Ukrainians in the run-up to Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, and that the practice has continued in the weeks since. But these officials have shied away from confirming American involvement in Ukrainian operations that have resulted in the deaths of Russian soldiers.
The U.S. assessment of Russia’s war plan for the Donbas region allowed a senior Pentagon official to say last week that Russia appeared to be “several days behind” schedule in its offensive there because of stiff Ukrainian resistance and continuing supply line problems.
An apartment complex that was damaged by Russian shelling in Chernihiv, Ukraine. As American and allied support for Ukraine has increased, Russia has threatened to retaliate, which could set off a wider war.Credit…Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Russian forces can always deviate from their plans, but American officials said the intelligence allows Ukrainian forces to avoid attack in some locations and position themselves to strike Russians in others.
Although the administration remains wary of provoking Mr. Putin to the point that he further escalates his attacks — President Biden has said he will not send American troops to Ukraine or establish a “no-fly zone” there — current and former officials said the administration found some value in warning Russia that Ukraine had the weight of the United States and NATO behind it.
Officials said Moscow had its own calculations to weigh, including whether it could handle a bigger war, particularly one that would allow NATO to invoke its mutual defense charter or enter the war more directly.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that American intelligence about Russian movements provided to Ukraine has allowed Kyiv to target and kill a number of Russian generals. On Thursday, Mr. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, acknowledged intelligence sharing with the Ukrainians but provided few details.
But Mr. Kirby said the Ukrainians have their own sources of intelligence, which they combine with others and choose what targets to strike. “They make their own decisions,” Mr. Kirby said. “And they take their own actions.”
In an interview on Thursday with CNN, Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said the Biden administration had been loath to discuss intelligence sharing for fear of saying anything “that will escalate the conflict.”
“We are providing real-time intelligence to Ukraine to help it defend itself,” Mr. Schiff said. “I don’t think the administration wants to go into specifics about just what kind of what circumstances, but we want to make sure that Ukraine is successful.”
For decades, the Moskva, a potent embodiment of Russian naval power in the Black Sea, bristled with missiles and loomed ominously on the horizon, inspiring awe in those who saw it.
But American Navy officials who toured Russian cruisers when there was U.S.-Russian military cooperation in the late 1990s and early 2000s said the Moskva had problems. There was little visible damage control equipment aboard the warship for quickly putting out shipboard fires.
The officials said they could not see fire extinguishers or fire hoses in passageways throughout the ships. On American ships, such equipment is stored close at hand to allow the crew to rapidly extinguish fires, which is critical at sea.
Russian media reports have said a fire onboard ignited an ammunition magazine, seriously damaging the Moskva. American officials say the Neptune missiles most likely caused the fire, which the crew could not contain before the aging vessel ultimately sank while being towed to port.
“The Russian military had long debated whether to retire the Moskva,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington County, Va. “It was an aging Soviet cruiser in dire need of modernization.”
But with a shortage of cruisers and destroyers, Moscow ultimately decided to extend its service. It was the Moskva’s guns, in fact, that fired on Ukraine’s Snake Island in the first days of the war.
A satellite image released by Maxar Technologies showed the warship Moskva docked at a port in Sevastopol, Crimea, last month.Credit…Maxar Technologies, via Associated Press
The Federal Reserve is trying to cool off the red-hot U.S. job market. But it could be months before those efforts start to bear fruit.
The central bank said Wednesday that it would raise interest rates half a percentage point, the biggest increase in more than two decades, and begin paring its bond holdings in a bid to rein in inflation. In a news conference after the announcement, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, cited the labor market, and in particular the record number of job openings relative to the number of unemployed workers, as a reason that policymakers had become more aggressive in recent months.
“You can see that the labor market is out of balance: You can see that there is a labor shortage,” Mr. Powell said.
Higher interest rates should, in theory, result in less demand from both consumers and businesses, leading companies to post fewer jobs and hire fewer workers. Mr. Powell is hoping that will allow the labor market to rebalance without an increase in the unemployment rate.
But those changes won’t be evident overnight. Interest rates take time to affect the economy, and there are reasons to think the process could take longer than usual this time around. Consumers, in the aggregate, are sitting on trillions of dollars in money saved during the pandemic, and many appear eager to spend it on long-delayed activities like travel. That could blunt the impact of the Fed’s policies, said Michelle Meyer, chief U.S. economist for Mastercard.
“The buffer that’s out there for the consumer is substantial, which means it may take longer to see the impact” of rate increases, she said. “The more resilient the economy is and the stronger it is, the higher the Fed will have to take interest rates in order to see that dampening of demand to depress inflation.”
Still, interest rates will have an effect eventually, Ms. Meyer said. One of the first places that the Fed’s actions are likely to show up is the housing market. Mortgage rates have risen significantly, leading to a steep drop in applications for new mortgages, and there are signs that sales have begun to slow. Construction activity — and construction jobs — won’t respond as quickly, in part because of the longstanding shortage of homes for sale, but eventually building is likely to slow as well.
Manufacturing is also likely to feel the effect of higher rates. But the signals could be hard to interpret: Many economists already expected a slowdown in manufacturing this year as the pandemic recedes and consumers revert to spending more on services rather than goods.
The country is divided. There are those Americans furious that the Supreme Court is soon to take away the right to have an abortion. And there are those Americans furious that someone leaked that the Supreme Court was soon to take away the right to have an abortion.
Among those Americans angry with the anonymous leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade is the entire Republican Party. “Last night’s stunning breach was an attack on the independence of the Supreme Court,” said Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, in a statement issued after the leak. “This lawless action should be investigated and punished as fully as possible. The Chief Justice must get to the bottom of it and the Department of Justice must pursue criminal charges if applicable.”
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas told Fox News that “The leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion will do lasting damage to the integrity of the court and the independence of the judiciary.” And Senator Mike Lee of Utah wrote that because the Supreme Court relies on “decorum and confidentiality” to do its work, it is therefore “dangerous, despicable, and damaging” to leak its deliberations to the public. The Supreme Court, he declared, “is not a political body.”
He might also have added that it has a right to privacy.
In any case, McConnell, Cruz, Lee and the rest of their Republican colleagues must be joking.
The Supreme Court is, and has always been, a political body. That’s true of the justices, certainly. Over the course of the court’s history, most of them were chosen with political considerations in mind, to the point that many were politicians themselves. It’s true of the institution as well. The Supreme Court deals with political issues — not simply abstract questions of law — and operates within the context of political conflict and political struggle.
And the Supreme Court, right now, is an avowedly partisan institution, an unaccountable super-legislature controlled by men and women drawn from a cadre of conservative ideologues and apparatchiks, acting on behalf of the Republican Party and its allies. Whatever legitimacy it had retained was sacrificed in the drive to build the majority that seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and open the floodgates to harsh restrictions on the reproductive autonomy of millions of Americans.
When McConnell led the Senate Republican caucus in a blockade of President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court in 2016 and then killed what remained of the judicial filibuster the next year to place Neil Gorsuch in the seat instead, they diminished the legitimacy of the court. When those same Republicans looked past a credible accusation of sexual assault to confirm Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, they again diminished the legitimacy of the court. And when, with weeks left before the 2020 presidential election, Republicans ignored their own rule from four years earlier — that an election-year vacancy “should not be filled until we have a new president” — to place Amy Coney Barrett on the bench in a rushed, slapdash process, they once more diminished the legitimacy of the Court.
What’s more, their occasional protests notwithstanding (in a speech last year at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, Barrett insisted the court was “not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks”), the court’s conservatives have done almost nothing to dispel the view that their majority is little more than the judicial arm of the Republican Party. They use “emergency” orders to issue sweeping rulings in favor of ideologically aligned groups; they invent new doctrines designed to undermine voting rights protections; and as we’ve just witnessed, they’ll let nothing, not even 50 years of precedent, stand in the way of a sweeping ideological victory.
No discussion of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, or lack thereof, is complete without mention of the fact that its current composition is the direct result of our counter-majoritarian institutions. Only once in the past 30 years — in the 2004 election — has anything like a majority of the American electorate voted for a president who promised a conservative Supreme Court. The three members who cemented this particular conservative majority — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett — were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators representing far fewer than half of all Americans.
The typical response to this point is to say we do not elect presidents by popular vote. And we don’t, that’s true. But Americans have always acted as if the popular vote conveys democratic legitimacy. That’s why supporters of Andrew Jackson condemned the “corrupt bargain” that placed John Quincy Adams in the White House in 1825, why many supporters of Samuel Tilden were furious with the compromise that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency after the 1876 presidential election, and why allies of George W. Bush were prepared to argue that he was the rightful winner of the 2000 election in the event he lost the Electoral College but won a majority of voters.
It matters whether a president has democratic legitimacy. Donald Trump did not. But rather than act with that in mind, he used his power to pursue the interests of a narrow ideological faction, giving its representatives free rein to shape the Supreme Court as they saw fit. The court, then, is stained by the same democratic illegitimacy that marked Trump and his administration.
Republicans seem to know this, and it helps explain why they’re so angry about the leak. They hope to write conservative ideology into the Constitution. For that to work, however, Americans need to believe that the court is an impartial arbiter of law, where each justice uses reason to come to the correct answer on any given issue of constitutional interpretation.
The leak throws that out the window. The leak makes it clear that the Supreme Court is a political body, where horse-trading and influence campaigns are as much a part of the process as pure legal reasoning.
If the court is a political body — if it is a partisan body — then a roused and unhappy public may decide to reject its judgments and authority. That public may ask itself why it should listen to a court that doesn’t heed its opinion. And it may decide that the time has come to reform the court and dismantle the ill-gotten majority that conservatives worked so hard to create.
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