Category: News

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.

The U.S. intelligence help to strike the Moskva was reported earlier by NBC News.

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 Odessa.

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 Odessa. 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.

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.

WASHINGTON — Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said Thursday that he planned to move on Wednesday to bring up a bill that would codify abortion rights into federal law, moving quickly in the wake of a leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, despite clear evidence that the measure lacks the support to be enacted.

The move is little more than an effort to send a political message ahead of midterm elections and a seismic ruling that could have major legal, cultural and electoral consequences that also carries deep significance for voters across the political spectrum.

The legislation is all but certain to be blocked by Republicans, falling short of the 60 votes that would be needed to advance past a filibuster. It also appears to lack even the simple majority it would need to pass the 50-50 Senate, given that Senator Joe Manchin III, the centrist Democrat from West Virginia who opposes abortion rights, voted against bringing up a nearly identical measure in February and has shown no signs that he has shifted his position.

Even if Mr. Manchin did change his mind on the bill, he has adamantly opposed altering Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, leaving Democrats short of the 50 votes they would need to do so and get their measure past a Republican blockade.

Still, Mr. Schumer said the vote next week would be one of “the most important we ever take,” framing it as an opportunity to emphasize to voters — who polls show widely favor at least some legal abortion — that elections matter, and that Democrats are the ones fighting to preserve reproductive rights.

“Senate Republicans spent years packing our courts with right-wing judges,” Mr. Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor. “Will they now own up to the harm they’ve caused, or will they try to undo the damage? The vote next week will tell.”

He added: “Republicans can run but they can’t hide from the damage they’ve created.”

Even if Democrats have no real path to passing a bill to enshrine Roe into federal law, the vote will give them a chance to show their progressive core supporters that they are trying to do so. They also hope the action stokes a backlash against Republicans by swing voters, including college-educated suburban women, who might be alienated by the G.O.P.’s opposition to abortion rights.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, and other top Republicans have mostly refrained from boasting about the impending demise of Roe since the draft opinion surfaced, focusing instead on the unprecedented Supreme Court leak. Their responses suggest that they, too, see the potential for a battle over abortion rights to hurt their party ahead of midterm congressional elections, and are working to reframe the issue to their advantage by portraying Democrats as extreme on the issue.

Democrats said their bill has gained urgency since the last time they tried to take it up. Back then, the threat to abortion rights was more theoretical. Now, they said, it has taken on new significance with the end to a constitutional right suddenly imminent.

They have also altered the measure in an effort to garner more support among pro-abortion-rights Republicans, removing a lengthy series of findings, including passages that referred to abortion restrictions as “a tool of gender oppression” and as being “rooted in misogyny.” Also scrapped was a section clarifying that while the bill references women, it is meant to protect the rights of “every person capable of becoming pregnant,” including transgender men and nonbinary individuals.

But the fundamentals of the bill, which states that medical workers can provide abortions to their patients, remain the same.

Democrats had hoped that removing such language could win over Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who both support abortion rights.

But Ms. Collins said on Thursday that she still opposes the bill, because it goes beyond simply codifying Roe v. Wade, which she supports, and lacks provisions that would allow Catholic hospitals to refuse to perform abortions.

Nicaragua’s ruling family has largely weathered sanctions imposed by the United States in recent years as American officials accused the country’s government of sliding toward autocracy.

Now, it seems, the family’s resolve may be breaking.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the most prominent son of Nicaragua’s autocratic president, Daniel Ortega, quietly approached Washington to restart dialogue, according to officials and diplomats familiar with the outreach, as the Biden administration levied sanctions against Moscow, one of the Central American nation’s few remaining allies.

The key topic on his mind: sanctions relief for the family.

The meteoric rise of the son, Laureano Ortega, has helped the family consolidate power; he now manages Nicaragua’s most important relationships, forging landmark diplomatic and energy agreements with high-level Chinese and Russian diplomats.

A senior U.S. State Department official was dispatched to Managua to meet with Laureano Ortega in March, but the meeting never took place after the Ortegas seemingly got cold feet. Mr. Ortega, 40, is seen as the favorite child to succeed his father, 76, a former revolutionary leader who is said to be in poor health.

Despite Daniel Ortega’s frequent denunciations of Washington, Nicaragua’s economy relies heavily on the United States, its largest trading partner by far. Russia, Venezuela and Cuba, Mr. Ortega’s stalwart allies, do not make the list of Nicaragua’s top five trading partners.

But sanctions intended to thwart Mr. Ortega’s dictatorial tendencies have hit the family and its inner circle hard; top generals and several of the president’s children, including Laureano, have been sanctioned by Washington, their businesses blacklisted and accused of laundering money for the regime.

The high-level nature of the overture was taken as a signal by Washington that Latin America’s autocracies may be rethinking their alliance to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, as his country’s military is bogged down in Ukraine and its economy ravaged by sanctions.

The Biden administration hopes to make inroads with Mr. Putin’s Latin American partners by portraying Russia as a declining power with little to offer.

On March 5, shortly after Russia’s invasion, senior American officials flew to Venezuela for talks, the highest-level negotiations between the countries in years. Those talks secured the release of two imprisoned Americans while President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela signaled a willingness to increase his country’s oil production if Russian oil exports were banned.

“Russia cannot give them money now and the Venezuelan wallet is closed,” said Arturo McFields, Nicaragua’s former ambassador to the Organization of American States, who resigned in March to protest Mr. Ortega’s dictatorial rule.

Mr. McFields said he was briefed on Nicaragua’s outreach to Washington before he resigned and added that the Ortega family and its inner circle were reeling under American sanctions.

The president’s children are unable to live the comfortable lives to which they have grown accustomed, while the money needed to pay pro-government paramilitaries or expand the police force to manage growing dissent is dwindling every month, Mr. McFields and a former senior American official said.

With Russia and Venezuela suffering under their own sanctions, Nicaragua has nowhere to turn to for economic relief, Mr. McFields said.

Speaking of the Ortegas, he said, the “family needs money to keep their cronies, the police and their paramilitaries happy because they have nothing to offer but repression.” He added, “But they know that’s not good because they are creating a melting pot for another April 2018,” a reference to massive protests against Mr. Ortega’s rule that were violently quelled by police and pro-government paramilitary groups.

Laureano Ortega aimed to secure sanctions relief for the Ortega family and its inner circle in exchange for releasing political prisoners, a priority for the Biden administration, according to American officials with knowledge of the talks.

Mr. Ortega’s spokeswoman and vice president, his wife, Rosario Murillo, did not respond to questions about the talks, instead emailing revolutionary slogans. In the past she has denounced the sanctions as imperial aggressions.

A senior State Department official said it was unclear whether Laureano Ortega’s outreach was prompted by fears that Russia’s growing isolation would affect the Ortega regime, which is increasingly seen as a pariah state by much of Latin America, or whether it was the byproduct of internal dissent between the family and the “old guard” — the president’s allies from his Sandinista days who currently serve in his government.

As the family increases its grip over the state, members of the old guard are increasingly at odds with the Ortega family — uncomfortable with their growing dynastic ambitions — and are also affected by Washington’s sanctions, according to the American official and Mr. McFields. The State Department official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that has not been reported.

“A key takeaway from this outreach is that the U.S. sanctions on Nicaragua clearly have the family’s attention,’’ said Dan Restrepo, a former national security adviser for Latin America under President Barack Obama. “Probably even more so as the U.S. ramps up its sanctions regime against Russia. That combination is clearly hitting pretty hard when it comes to regime insiders.”

If the Ortega family is willing to discuss releasing political prisoners, Washington will engage, the State Department official added. If not, Washington is preparing to apply additional pressure on the regime with more sanctions.

Laureano Ortega approached Washington through a third party, the official said, but declined to comment further. Another person familiar with the talks said Mr. Ortega approached the State Department through Nicaragua’s ambassador to Washington, Francisco Obadiah Campbell Hooker.

When reached by telephone, Mr. Campbell denied that and said he had no knowledge of the matter.

Laureano Ortega currently serves as a presidential adviser managing Nicaragua’s trade, investment and international relationships. Last year, he met with China’s deputy foreign minister to sign an agreement withdrawing Nicaragua’s recognition of Taiwan and he forged the first nuclear cooperation agreement with Russia.

Mr. Restrepo said the high-level outreach reinforced “the administration’s approach to lean into sanctions to indicate that the anti-democratic way forward is a dead end and it will only get more intense.’’

Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla leader who rose to power after helping overthrow another notorious Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, in 1979, spent the 1980s fighting off American-funded paramilitary groups that sought his overthrow.

He then served in Nicaragua’s opposition in the 1990s, until he clinched victory in elections in 2006, after adopting a pro-business platform and reconciling with the Catholic Church, which had long opposed him.

He then steadily began to consolidate his family’s grip on power. In 2017, Mr. Ortega appointed his wife as vice president as his children began taking larger roles in business and politics.

Mr. Ortega often consults his wife, Ms. Murillo, before making major political decisions, Mr. McFields and an American official said, a relationship so close, the couple is often referred to in Nicaragua as “OrMu,” a mash-up of their names.

“Laureano is not autonomous enough to move a finger without having the full agreement from both Ortega and Murillo,” said Carlos Fernando Chamorro Barrios, a Nicaraguan journalist who fled last year, just months before his sister, Cristiana Chamorro Barrios, a presidential candidate, was jailed.

“Laureano is used as the messenger for his mother and father. This is as high up as possible.”

As dissent against Mr. Ortega has intensified, the government has deployed all levers of the state to brutally crush it.

When a powerful student movement helped lead nationwide antigovernment protests in 2018, it was violently put down by the police and pro-government paramilitary groups, leaving at least 350 dead, according to human rights groups.

After Mr. Ortega locked up his most credible challengers, banned large political events and closed voting stations en masse in the run-up up to his re-election last year, the Biden administration slapped sanctions on Nicaragua’s mining sector and the military’s investment arm. “The government has grown into a Frankenstein, it has grown into a family dictatorship with no clear ideology,” said Mr. McFields, the former Nicaraguan ambassador.

“Over time the government has shown that everything rests on the family model and your relation to it,” he said. “Even the people in government are tired of the situation. They are tired of a regime that can’t seem to solve anything unless it’s through repression.”

Oscar Lopez contributed reporting.

Last fall, as container ships piled up outside the Port of Los Angeles, it looked as if inflation was going to be with us for longer than many had predicted. Curious how C.E.O.s were justifying higher prices, my team and I started listening in on hundreds of earnings calls, where, by law, companies have to tell the truth. While official statistics on inflation such as the Consumer Price Index can tell you that prices are rising, earnings calls provide rich, qualitative data that speak to why and how.

Executives from the nation’s largest publicly traded companies had a lot to report to their shareholders about supply chain snarls, product shortages and rising prices — mostly that they were very good for business. What was striking in the earnings calls was not the supply chain shortages or companies’ typical profit motives; it was the plain old corporate profiteering. The Economics 101 adage that “inflation is just too much money chasing too few goods” doesn’t come close to the full story. This raises the question: When companies are exploiting consumers in a time of national crisis, when should government step in?

Companies that historically might have kept prices low to pick up profit by gaining additional market share are instead using the cover of inflation to raise prices and increase profits. Consumers are now expecting higher prices at the checkout line, and companies are taking advantage. The poor and those on fixed incomes are hit the hardest.

As Hostess’s C.E.O. told shareholders last quarter, “When all prices go up, it helps.” The head of research for the bank Barclay’s echoed this. “The longer inflation lasts and the more widespread it is, the more air cover it gives companies to raise prices,” he told Bloomberg. More than half of retailers admitted as much when surveyed.

Executives on their earnings calls crowed to investors about their blockbuster quarterly profits. One credited his company’s “successful pricing strategies.” Another patted his team on the back for a “marvelous job in driving price.” These executives weren’t just passing along their rising costs; they were going for more. Or as one C.F.O. put it, they were “not leaving any pricing on the table.”

The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, said that sometimes businesses are raising prices just “because they can.” He’s right. Companies have pricing power when consumers don’t have choice. Sometimes this is because demand for consumer staples like toilet paper, toothpaste and hamburger meat is relatively inelastic. If you need a box of diapers, you need a box of diapers. Other times pricing power comes from concentrated market power. In industries like meatpacking and shipping — in which giants have over 80 percent of market share at times — it’s easier to take big markups when there aren’t major competitors to undercut you.

What we learned on these earnings calls was quickly reflected in data. Despite the rising costs of labor, energy and materials, profit margins reached 70-year highs in 2021. And according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, fatter profit margins, not the rising costs of labor and materials, drove more than half of price increases in the nonfinancial corporate sector since the start of the Covid pandemic.

Despite clear evidence that a majority of price increases are not justified by rising costs, there is a fierce debate in Washington about what, if anything, policymakers should do to address it. This debate primarily stems not from questions about the cause of price increases but from differing viewpoints on whether policymakers should play a role in ensuring fair and just prices.

Most economists believe that markets are efficient allocators of scarcity and that governments should have little, if any, role in guarding against unfair pricing. They argue that price hikes will help cool demand and alleviate scarcity by efficiently rationing goods by consumers’ ability to pay. If sellers take price hikes too far, customers will just go to a competitor across the street. But what if there are no competitors? Not to worry: Truly exorbitant markups will all but guarantee new businesses entering the market. Many economists even argue that publicly traded companies have an obligation to shareholders to bring in as much profit as possible. If they see any interventionist role of government, it is in suppressing demand through interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, a blunt policy tool with a high likelihood of throwing the country into a recession.

On the other side of the debate are a majority of Americans, including me, who look at the economy and see businesses exploiting supply chain bottlenecks, foreign war and a pandemic to bring in record profits on the backs of consumers. We don’t dispute that the system is working well for Fortune 500 companies and Wall Street investors, but we want lawmakers to stop the profiteering that has gone too far.

Although economists may not like to admit it, prices are not immune from political considerations. In fact, 38 states and the District of Columbia already limit price increases on certain goods through price-gouging statutes designed to prevent companies from capitalizing on abnormal disruptions, like pandemics and hurricanes, that lend themselves to scarcity and price gouging. In other words, the bulk of state legislatures have decided that although shareholders might like to see bottled water sold for $100 a gallon and gas for $5 after a hurricane, that is neither fair nor in the public interest.

Lawmakers must do even more. They should pursue a federal price-gouging statute to give regulators the authority to stop companies from exploiting crises to wring out more profit. Last week, Democrats in Congress announced plans to do just that. They could go further to discourage profiteering through the tax code — whether by increasing the corporate tax rate or by imposing excess-profits taxes like those proposed by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Bernie Sanders. This is not new; the government took similar action during times like World War II and as recently as 1980 for oil and gas. Regulators, even without new legislation, should start by enforcing existing laws, including ones against price fixing, price gouging and collusion.

The supply shocks we are experiencing are just a dress rehearsal for those to come. Climate change will bring increasingly severe and frequent disasters that wipe out crops, flood manufacturing plants and disrupt trade routes. The White House Council of Economic Advisers admitted as much in its latest annual Economic Report of the President. More scarcity will undoubtedly bring more opportunities for profiteering, and policymakers need to close their introductory economics textbooks and actually look at the economy. The question we should be asking is not whether companies will exploit those disruptions — we know they will — but what we can do to stop it, or else companies will just make the rest of us pay the price.

When Karen Shainyan opened his Facebook page one recent day, it was overflowing with messages reading “Congratulations!”, as if it were his birthday. There were also expressions of sympathy.

It took Mr. Shainyan, a Russian gay rights advocate and a journalist, a moment to digest the mixed messages: The Kremlin had just labeled him a “foreign agent” — a designation that many opposition figures take as validation of their work, but one that significantly complicates their lives.

The government uses the label to ostracize and diminish opposition figures and organizations — tantamount to branding them enemies of the state. More than 400 people or organizations have been designated foreign agents since the label first started at the end of 2020, with new names now announced virtually every Friday. There is no prior warning or explanation from the government.

Analysts and opposition figures say the designation is a way of ratcheting up the repression that it is contributing to the surge in exiles.

Mr. Shainyan was, by his own reckoning, in good company. The seven other people on the foreign agents list that week included a prominent political scientist; a journalist with a wildly popular interview program; and a well-known cartoonist who consistently skewered President Vladimir V. Putin.

Some of those designated, like Mr. Shainyan, had already departed Russia, with the label seemingly meant to coerce them into staying away. “They want to squeeze the active people — not to kill them or to put them in jail — but to squeeze them out, across the border,” he said in a telephone interview from Berlin, where he had landed after fleeing Russia last month.

Those being pushed out joined an exodus of tens of thousands of Russians who have fled the country since the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, a flood of talented, highly educated Russians who have decided that they would prefer exile to living in an authoritarian state.

The exiles include many people not directly involved in politics — technology specialists, entrepreneurs, designers, actors and financiers — countless professionals either directly engaged with the global economy or who just wanted to feel connected to the wider world.

Tough economic sanctions and a sweeping withdrawal of Western firms from Russia are gradually strangling those opportunities.

“Russia is losing a lot of great people,” said Serob Khachatryan, 39, who had started a cryptocurrency business in Moscow right before the invasion and is now in Armenia, working with other IT professionals to find ways to both help Ukrainians and to undermine Mr. Putin. “It is going to end up being just the army with nuclear weapons and the oil and gas. That is what Putin wants. I think Russia needs more than that.”

Among those designated a foreign agent along with Mr. Shainyan was Ekaterina Schulmann, a political science professor at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, a rare private university and one with a reputation for being a liberal bastion. “Anyone can be on that list, so why not me?” she said. “This looks very much like an attempt to drive people out.”

Ms. Schulmann said in an interview that she had anticipated ending up on the list. Police investigators had recently demanded more information about her ties to the university. Six people connected to it have already been detained, including three charged with embezzling public funds, in a case that many consider politically motivated.

In addition, Ms. Schulmann, the host of a YouTube political talk show with nearly one million subscribers, had described the invasion as watching a “catastrophe” unfold.

Leaflets featuring her face and the wording “She Supports Ukrainian Nazis” were hung at one of her former residences. Ms. Schulmann had announced on her show just days before she was labeled a foreign agent that she was in Berlin under a yearlong fellowship at the Robert Bosch Academy.

“Shortly it will be impossible to work as a professional in my field in Russia,” she said. She suggested that the length of the war will determine whether the political situation improves. “If it does not, you will probably see that the public sphere in Russia will be largely cleaned, purged of its liberal, humanistic elements.”

The Kremlin has long encouraged its critics to leave, and Mr. Putin made his scorn for dissenters amply clear in March, saying in a nationally televised speech that he considered those who identified with Western values “scum and traitors.” He threatened to remove them from society, while his spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said the “cleansing” would happen spontaneously as disloyal people moved abroad.

The law on foreign agents linked the designation to receiving funds from outside Russia, but the term has historically been associated with spies and infiltrators. The most recent additions to the list of foreign agents have been heavily weighted toward journalists and gay rights activists. But the circle of people targeted in recent months has widened to include any stripe of critic.

Ms. Schulmann once served on the presidential Human Rights Council. Alexei Venediktov mingled at receptions with all manner of Kremlin advisers for many years when he was the editor in chief of the Echo of Moscow radio station, a favorite of the liberal intelligentsia that was closed in February. A hugely popular rapper, known by his stage name, Face, was the first musician to be designated.

Those designated must put the label prominently on all their work — stigmatizing them — and file frequent, and onerous, financial disclosure forms.

For more than two years, Mr. Shainyan has used his YouTube channel to focus on L.G.B.T.Q. life, a fraught topic in Russia, where vaguely defined laws make it illegal to distribute “gay propaganda” to minors. He sought to encourage gay Russians to be less closeted as well as to promote greater acceptance among the Russian population.

Mr. Shainyan, 40, took his camera to provincial outposts like Kazan, Irkutsk and Vladivostok. “I don’t want to hide, I want to live freely,” said Ivan, a young entrepreneur among the dozen gay or transgender people featured in Mr. Shainyan’s “Queerography” program from Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal.

Mr. Shainyan always thought he might be labeled a “foreign agent” for that work, especially since he received financial backing from abroad, so the fact that it only happened now made him think that his more recent interviews with prominent critics of the war might have landed him on the list, and not his gay activism.

Russia seems to experience mass emigration with a certain painful regularity. An estimated one million Russians fled in the early 1920s after the Russian Revolution and civil war. Among the most famous were painters like Marc Chagall and Vasily Kandinsky, as well as the writers Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin, the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1991, the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union prompted another wave of exiles, especially among scientists.

“It seems like in Russia, one or two generations grow up and then the latest revolution or war happens and then part of that generation leaves,” said Grigory Sverdlin, 43, who used to run a charity called Nochlezhka that had established roughly a dozen facilities for the homeless in St. Petersburg and Moscow. “It is clear that the departure of active, educated people is bad for the country’s economy, it is bad for the country’s culture, and by culture I also include political culture.”

But previous emigration waves extended over years, not months.

“It was not abrupt, there was nothing like this,” said Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago and Kremlin critic who left in 2015 after being fired from his university job.

Aleksei Skripko, 47, who ran a small simultaneous translation business, left with his wife and four children. They had avoided politics, but the sense of tightening repression was inescapable. He said he had been absolutely certain there was no chance the Soviet Union could be resurrected. “What I am seeing now tells me that I am wrong,’’ he said, “and that I have been wrong all my life.”

Mr. Sverdlin, now in Tbilisi, Georgia, decided to leave because he could not stay silent about the war and he had been warned that his one-man protests, although legal, had attracted attention from law enforcement. He called the decision the hardest of his life, quoting a line from an émigré poet who departed after the civil war: “There was this entire world; now there is not.”

Sophia Kishkovsky and Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.

Marcus Leatherdale, who made classical portraits of Manhattan’s demimonde in the 1980s — Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Sydney Biddle Barrows, otherwise known as the Mayflower Madam, all made their way to his Lower East Side studio — died on April 22 at his home in the state of Jharkhand, India. He was 69.

The cause was suicide, said Claudia Summers, his former wife. His partner of two decades, Jorge Serio, died in July, and Mr. Leatherdale suffered a stroke soon after, Ms. Summers said, adding that he had also been mourning the death of the couple’s dog and his mother in the last year.

Mr. Leatherdale was the Cecil Beaton of Downtown Manhattan. He photographed a not-yet-famous club kid named Madonna in her ripped jeans and his denim vest. The performance artist Leigh Bowery was majestic in a tinseled mask, corset and a merkin. Andy Warhol was a Hamlet in a black turtleneck. Susanne Bartsch, the nightlife impressaria, was a towering presence in red leather.

The Montreal-born Mr. Leatherdale had already traveled through India and Afghanistan in a van and been to art school in San Francisco before he landed in New York City in 1978, moving into the Wild West of the Lower East Side. He and Ms. Summers shared a loft on Grand Street, where Mr. Leatherdale set up his studio.

Theirs was not a traditional marriage, but they were best friends, and he was Canadian, so it made life easier if they wed. His boyfriend for a time was Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photography studio he also managed. Mr. Leatherdale and Mapplethorpe were a striking pair, dressed like twins in leather and denim, their faces as if painted by Caravaggio, and they often photographed each other.

The Grand Street loft was an unusual household. Ms. Summers was a dominatrix working under the name Mistress Juliette; one of her clients cleaned the place free of charge. Mapplethorpe assisted Ms. Summers with her work by offering her a pair of leather pants, a rubber garter belt and S&M tips. Mr. Leatherdale, sober, tidy and decidedly not hard core despite his leather uniform, was mock-annoyed one morning when he awoke to find an English muffin speared to the kitchen table with one of Ms. Summers’ stilettos. “What did you get up to last night?” he asked her.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was often hanging out there, playing his bongo drums; so were friends like Cookie Mueller, the doomed, gimlet-eyed author and Details magazine contributor who was for a time Mapplethorpe’s and Ms. Summers’ drug dealer, and Kathy Acker, the performance artist and novelist. But mostly what went on in the loft was Mr. Leatherdale’s work.

For Details magazine, a chronicle of downtown Manhattan’s creative communities — its galleries, clubs and boutiques — Mr. Leatherdale had a regular column called Hidden Identities, for which he would contribute veiled portraits of his friends.

He photographed Joey Arias, the husky-voiced drag performer, as a Japanese snow princess. Keith Haring was a rakish Santa Claus. Robin Byrd, the amiable stripper and cable television host, wore only her cowboy boots and a thong. Ms. Barrows, christened the Mayflower Madam for her lineage as head of a high-powered Manhattan escort service, wore a ball gown.

When Annie Flanders, Details’s editor (who died in March), pushed Mr. Leatherdale to include those whose fame extended above 14th Street, he photographed subjects like Jodie Foster, dressing the actress in a satin corset with a pouf skirt, one arm draped across her face — an atypical costume for someone more at ease in bluejeans.

He photographed Ms. Summers, often in full dominatrix regalia, hundreds of times.

“His photographs were a celebration of why we moved to New York City in the first place,” she said, “which was to be in the midst of that kind of creativity and boundary pushing in terms of gender and sexuality. Not that we thought of it that way or spoke in those terms. Marcus photographed the best of who we were, these idealized versions.”

Marcus Andrew Leatherdale was born on Sept. 18, 1952, in Montreal. His father, Jack, was a veterinarian; his mother, Grace Leatherdale, was a homemaker. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute and, once in New York, the School of Visual Arts.

Unlike Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, and to whom he was often compared, and unlike many of his subjects, Mr. Leatherdale seemed less focused on his own fame.

“He didn’t seem to be going for the glory in the same way that Robert was,” said David Hershkovits, co-founder of Paper magazine. “He was more restrained. I don’t feel like he was ever distracted by what anybody else was doing. Shiny objects wasn’t his thing.”

“Robert was determined to be a star, at all costs,” Mr. Leatherdale told I-D magazine in 2017. “So when I started to be known for my photography, tensions grew.”

He added: “We were artistic comrades, at first, until I got recognition. But in all fairness, NYC is a place where everyone is very career-oriented. I too was very ambitious, but not competitive.”

Yet Mr. Leatherdale, with typical self-deprecation, said he viewed Mapplethorpe as the “more accomplished artist.”

Critics often lumped the two together, even years after Mapplethorpe’s death.

“Marcus Leatherdale’s work has remained somewhat in the shadow of that of his senior colleague, Robert Mapplethorpe,” Holland Cotter wrote in a review of Mr. Leatherdale’s work in 1992. “Both take the nude figure as a central image; both show a penchant for theatrically posed and lighted studio setups. Whereas Mapplethorpe went for a combination of shock and slickness, however, Mr. Leatherdale’s recent work displays an interest in carefully staged tableaux with a symbolic content.”

By the 1990s, Mr. Leatherdale was photographing almost exclusively in India, making portraits of Hindu holy men, temple beggars, fishermen and pilgrims in the same elegant, classical manner he developed in New York City. He was drawn to the rawness of the life there, and the spirituality, Ms. Summers said. Later, he began to document the Adivasis tribes, a far-flung minority population.

“I want to preserve the tradition of these proud people as best I can, somewhat like Edward Curtis did with the American Indians,” he told an interviewer in 2016. “My work can be viewed as anthropological portraiture, even the vintage New York City work of the 1980s.”

With his partner, Mr. Serio, a makeup artist, he made homes in India, New York and Portugal.

Ms. Summers and Mr. Leatherdale divorced in 2018. He is survived by a brother, Robert. Information on other survivors was not available.

In 2019, Mr. Leatherdale collected his work from the 1980s in a show called “Out of the Shadows,” at the Throckmorton Fine Art gallery in Manhattan, and in a book of the same title, written with Ms. Summers. It’s a haunting record of a vanished time and place — collectively, a true memento mori, as Ms. Summers said, “though we didn’t realize it at the time.”

There is Divine, the star of John Waters’ “Pink Flamingos,” regal in a satin shift, crowned in a beehive. There, too, is Ms. Mueller, Tina Chow, Mapplethorpe and others who would soon be dead from AIDS. Stephen Reichard, once a handsome art dealer and consultant who liked to dress in sharp, expensive suits, is naked and skeletal from AIDS, a pieta on a hard wooden chair. It was his decision to be photographed this way in 1988, and to climb the three flights to Mr. Leatherdale’s loft on his own, though he struggled. Mr. Reichard died a few weeks later.

“I didn’t realize I was archiving an era that was going to be extinct,” Mr. Leatherdale said recently. “I was just getting by. This is just what we were up to. Of course, you think you will be 20 forever.”

The revelation of a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade has caused many Americans to express doubts about whether the justices are guided by the law rather than by their political beliefs.

In interviews across the country, even some opponents of abortion expressed unease with the way that a majority of the court had coalesced behind the sweeping draft written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. that would undo nearly 50 years of legalized access to abortion nationwide.

Rebekah Merkle, an author and mother of five in Moscow, Idaho, said she thought that Supreme Court justices would be “vindicated as the heroes” if they struck down Roe v. Wade. But although she approves of the composition of the court, she does not dispute that it finds itself deeply enmeshed in politics.

“It certainly seems more politicized to me than it used to be,” Mrs. Merkle said. “And part of it is because politics have gotten so ugly recently. And that seems to have definitely impacted the court, as well.”

Jenny Doyle, a neonatal nurse practitioner and mother of two in Boulder, Colo., was so distressed by the Roe news that she considered whether she should leave the country: “I think Iceland sounds good,” she said.

But she was on the same page as Mrs. Merkle in seeing the court as an increasingly political actor.

“I absolutely believe in a term limit on the Supreme Court,” she said, of justices who can choose to serve until they die. “They are losing touch with the real America and the real issues of Americans.”

Scholars and political experts have regularly debated whether the court’s steady march to the right, exacerbated by increasingly contentious confirmation fights and disputes like the Senate’s refusal to even hold a hearing on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick B. Garland, was sapping public faith in the court as fundamentally a legal forum. Also perhaps straining that faith was the now-familiar ritual of conservative nominees professing their view of Roe as settled law and their respect for precedent — and then apparently voting to overturn it the first chance they got.

Neil Siegel, a Duke University law and political science professor, said in a statement that trust in the institution was damaged both by the leak and by the mocking tone of the draft opinion, which he called “extraordinary and egregious.”

“What the leak and the draft have in common,” he said, “is a disregard for the legal and public legitimacy of the court — and a failure to register that the justices and their clerks are temporary occupants of an institution that is greater than themselves.”

Even before the impending decision to revisit abortion rights reopened painful national divisions, public faith in the court had deteriorated sharply. A national survey by Pew Research Center conducted early this year found that 54 percent of U.S. adults had a favorable view of the Supreme Court, compared with 65 percent last year.

An overwhelming majority of adults — 84 percent — said the justices should keep their political views out of their judicial decisions, but only 16 percent of that group felt the court did a good or excellent job of it. Over the past three years, Pew found, approval of the court had declined 15 percentage points, reaching its least positive rating in nearly four decades.

A Morning Consult-Politico survey released on Wednesday found that about 66 percent of respondents said they support setting term limits for justices, with about 21 percent disapproving.

Nicole Lamarche, pastor of Community United Church of Christ in Boulder, said on Tuesday that she traced her disillusionment to the Republican senators’ blockade of Mr. Obama’s Supreme Court nominee after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016.

“To me, when they refused to appoint Merrick Garland, or even begin the hearings process, that to me was a sign of a different time,” Ms. Lamarche said.

But the fast and furious appointment of three conservative justices during the Trump administration sent the court veering to the right, with the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in particular deepening divisions.

In recent months, the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol revealed that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had urged President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

For decades, Americans have told pollsters roughly two to one that they support a constitutional right to abortion; as recently as last week, in a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 54 percent of Americans said Roe should be upheld, compared with 28 percent who wanted justices to reverse it.

When the challenge to Roe — in a case about Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban — was argued in December, and it became clear that five justices were ready then to overrule the decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor articulated the public’s gathering suspicion.

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sotomayor asked.

This week the sense of unease spread from the corridors of power to coffee shops on Main Street. Even some Republicans expressed alarm at the court after the leaked draft of Justice Alito’s scornful dismissal of Roe.

“It rocks my confidence in the court right now,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the few Republicans in the Senate who support abortion rights.

Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican with a reputation for independence who presides over the Ohio Supreme Court, was particularly taken aback at the spectacle of a leaking scandal at the nation’s highest court. “I’m not shocked very easily. This shocked me,” she said. “This is just not done.”

Americans across the political spectrum expressed similar doubts.

As Janna Carney, 35, picked up lunch near the downtown Los Angeles office where she works as a creative director in advertising, she said of the justices, “I liked the idea they couldn’t be owned by anybody, because you can’t vote for them, they’re not running campaigns.” Now, she said, she has trouble regarding them as neutral arbiters.

The country seems to have slipped so far into “red team vs. blue team” thinking that “we don’t have these nine impartial judges, we count them as team members,” she said. “It feels like our whole system is crumbling. It feels like we’re Rome and this is the fall.”

Others see the same thing, that justices are no longer independent voices who can evolve over time, moving left or right, but akin to a political slate.

“They’re lifetime appointments, and now they’re political appointments,” said Donna Decker, a poet who lives in Tallahassee. “In the past, we were surprised by some of the appointments. At first, someone might have seemed conservative, and then voted liberal, and vice versa. That’s not happening in the last few years. And that does concern me.”

In Oakland, Calif., Cesar Ruiz, 27, a tech worker, said he kept remembering that five of the justices were appointed by presidents who took office without a popular majority, at least in their first terms. When news of the leaked draft flashed on his cellphone, he said, “I remembered in high school, learning about the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade and all the civil rights we gained in those years. Now an unelected, undemocratically appointed court is about to just wipe that out.”

For many Americans, however, most unsettling was uncertainty about where the court goes from here.

“It’s a hell of a shot to take away Roe v. Wade, but it’s just the start,” Fred Johnson, 60, a retired U.S. Army colonel and high school social studies teacher, said from a bar stool in a brewery in Louisville, Ky. “What’s next?”

Reporting was contributed by Eric Berger, Charlie Brennan, Jill Cowan, Austyn Gaffney, Alexandra Glorioso, Ann Hinga Klein and Kristin Hussey.