Category: News

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.

The video is mesmerizing: As three whitish-gray geysers gush eastward from the mountains of New Mexico, a sheet of brown spills down from the north like swash on a beach.

What it represents is far more destructive.

The image, a time-lapse captured by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, shows two devastating events happening in the Western United States. The first is a wildfire outbreak in northern New Mexico that started last month and has intensified in the past two weeks, fueled by extreme drought and high winds. The second is a dust storm caused by violent winds in Colorado.

Both are examples of the sorts of natural disasters that are becoming more severe and frequent as a result of climate change.

Seven large fires were burning in New Mexico as of Tuesday, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. The satellite image shows four of them. The westernmost is the Cerro Pelado fire, covering about 27,000 acres near the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The northernmost is the Cooks Peak fire, covering about 59,000 acres near Taos. Just south of that are the Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires, which merged around April 22 into one huge, 160,000-acre blaze.

The total land burning in the satellite image is roughly 380 square miles, an area larger than Indianapolis. The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire in particular has forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes, including in Las Vegas, N.M., a town of 13,000 about an hour east of Santa Fe.

Wildfires are a natural part of the ecosystems of the West, but human activity has made them far worse. Drought is a major contributor. The past two decades have been the driest in 12 centuries in the American Southwest, largely because of climate change, and there are no indications that conditions will improve anytime soon.

The other big factor is wind, which is fueling all of the fires in northern New Mexico right now. In fact, the Hermits Peak Fire started as a prescribed burn — meaning a fire set intentionally, under controlled conditions, to clear out dry vegetation and reduce the risk of larger, uncontrolled fires — but gusty, unpredictable winds blew it out of control.

High winds were also responsible for the second phenomenon visible in the image NOAA released: the dust storm in Colorado.

“Visibility is dropping to near zero and winds are gusting to 50-60 m.p.h. within this blowing dust,” the National Weather Service in Pueblo, Colo., said on Twitter on Friday, warning of extremely dangerous conditions for drivers.

The satellite imagery underscores how widespread the effects of such disasters can be. While the “brownout” conditions were relatively localized during the dust storm, winds carried the dust particles across hundreds of miles of southeastern Colorado, western Kansas, and the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles.

Fine particulate matter degrades air quality and poses health hazards, particularly for people with underlying lung or heart diseases. That applies to dust as well as to smoke, soot and other byproducts of wildfires.

Last summer, wildfires led to air quality warnings across almost the entire country and turned the sun red as far east as New York City. And researchers found in January that dangerous levels of smoke and ozone were increasing over much of the Western United States.

When he ran for mayor, Eric Adams positioned himself as a champion for the working class — a lifelong New Yorker who had grown up in poverty and won support from voters in the boroughs outside Manhattan.

But in his first months in office, he could oversee rent increases of up to 9 percent for the city’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments.

The powerful Rent Guidelines Board, which the mayor effectively controls, will take a preliminary vote on Thursday on proposed rent increases of 2.7 to 4.5 percent on one-year leases and 4.3 to 9 percent on two-year leases. A final vote is expected in June.

Critics say those rates are too steep — 9 percent would be the largest increase since 1990 — and unfair when the state’s eviction moratorium ended in January and market-rate rents across the city are rising.

More than 2,000 eviction cases are being filed each week, and rents have risen 33 percent, according to one real estate website.

The proposed rent increases present a challenge for Mr. Adams, a Democrat, who is facing criticism within his party for supporting any substantial increase when many New Yorkers are still struggling during the pandemic.

His predecessor, Bill de Blasio, backed rent freezes and modest increases during his eight years in office because he said they were crucial to fighting inequality.

Mr. Adams, who is himself a landlord and has rented out his Brooklyn property, which is not rent stabilized, has defended the need for rent increases, though he did not say how much they should rise.

He argued that higher rents were necessary for small property owners facing rising costs.

“We must be fair here — allow tenants to be able to stay in their living arrangements, but we need to look after those small mom-and-pop owners,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference last month. “If you invested all your money into a 10-unit house, and you cannot pay the bills, you could lose that.”

Groups like the Working Families Party note that most rent-stabilized buildings are owned by large landlords, not small property owners. They point to a report by an urban planning professor at New York University that found that only about one-third of rent-regulated buildings were owned by landlords who had five buildings or fewer.

The issue is part of a growing rift over housing between Mr. Adams and the City Council, where leaders have criticized the mayor’s focus on removing homeless encampments at a time when affordable housing is scarce.

Adrienne Adams, the Council speaker, called the proposed rent increases “unconscionable” and said they would “only exacerbate the housing and homelessness crises confronting our city.”

The politics of a rent increase are complicated for the mayor, said Basil Smikle, director of the public policy program at Hunter College. Mr. Adams could be viewed as insensitive to the concerns of New Yorkers who are struggling to pay rent, but his message about supporting small property owners could connect with his supporters, Mr. Smikle said.

“It’s possible that a lot of the mom-and-pop owners came from areas where he got strong support in Queens and Brooklyn,” he said.

A report by the Rent Guidelines Board found that costs have risen substantially for building owners since spring of last year, including a 19.6 percent increase in fuel costs. Insurance costs rose 10.9 percent and utilities like electricity rose 5.8 percent.

Shahana Hanif, a City Council member from Brooklyn and a chair of the progressive caucus, said the rent increases would be “excruciatingly painful” for tenants and urged the Adams administration to look for other solutions to support small landlords.

“I’m adamantly opposed to the rent hike and find it really disgraceful that the mayor isn’t showing the compassion and empathy that we need for tenants,” she said.

The annual decision by the Rent Guidelines Board, which affects more than two million residents who live in buildings built before 1974 that have six or more units, always ignites passionate debate and an intense lobbying effort from tenants and landlords.

For decades, the board approved sizable increases almost every year — often from 3 percent on one-year leases to 8 percent on two-year leases — but that came to an end under Mr. de Blasio. As he left office, Mr. de Blasio named the board’s rent freezes and modest increases during his tenure as one of his greatest achievements.

Landlords have pushed for substantial rent increases at the higher end of the proposed range. They argue that new state rent laws approved in 2019 favoring tenants already made conditions more difficult for landlords.

“This is a starting point for owners to recover from eight years of rent freezes and inadequate guidelines, and the draconian changes to the state’s rent laws,” said Vito Signorile, a vice president at the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents about 25,000 owners.

The rent board has nine members, all appointed by the mayor: five representatives of the public, two of owners and two of tenants. Mr. Adams has named three appointees since taking office.

His choice in March of Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at N.Y.U. and an adjunct fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, as a representative of the public raised concern among tenant advocates.

Mr. Gupta told Vox last year that he was a “little skeptical of rent control.” He declined a request for an interview on Wednesday.

Brad Lander, the city comptroller, said that appointing someone “who has expressed skepticism about the entire system of rent regulation is deeply troubling.” He urged the board to reconsider its proposed increases.

“While a modest rent increase may be merited this year, Mayor Adams’s appointed board must not return to the days of Giuliani and Bloomberg’s unreasonably high increases,” Mr. Lander said.

Mr. Adams also appointed Christina Smyth, a lawyer who says on LinkedIn that she represents “multifamily building owners,” as the landlords’ representative, and Adán Soltren, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit that provides legal services to poor New Yorkers, as a representative of tenants.

Mr. Adams won a competitive Democratic primary last year with support from Black and Latino voters and working-class neighborhoods, but he is also close to business leaders and real estate developers.

Members of the Real Estate Board of New York, the real estate industry’s main lobbying arm, donated to Mr. Adams’s campaign or to a PAC that supported him.

Aby Rosen, a co-founder of RFR Realty, gave $100,000 to the PAC, called “Strong Leadership NYC,” and Gary Barnett, the founder of Extell Development Company, gave it $250,000. Other real estate executives like Richard LeFrak, C.E.O. of the LeFrak Organization, donated to Mr. Adams’s campaign.

Mr. Adams said last month that small landlords had been “decimated” by the pandemic and could lose their buildings to landlords who own thousands of units.

“What happens if they lose their buildings?” Mr. Adams said. “The megaguys come in and buy the buildings, and now we see the gentrification that we all say we fear.”

Dana Rubinstein and Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting.

WARSAW — Soviet diplomats moved out of the hulking Warsaw housing compound more than 30 years ago. But some Russians stayed behind, sheltering until the early 2000s behind a fence topped with barbed wire from a city that, with the collapse of their empire, had suddenly become hostile territory — and an important intelligence target.

A moldering, Russian pulp fiction paperback left behind inside the now derelict property, perhaps provides a clue to the preoccupations of the Russians who lived in the compound that was notorious since its heyday in the 1980s as a nest of spies: “Game on a Foreign Field.”

“It was always called Spyville and yes, many of these guys were spies,” the mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, said in an interview.

Fed up by Russia’s refusal to relinquish the property despite court rulings that it no longer had rights to the site, the mayor last month grabbed it back, declaring that he wanted it for Ukrainians instead. The number of Russian diplomatic personnel in Warsaw, he said, has been falling for decades, accelerated by the recent expulsion of 45 suspected spies. “They didn’t need such a big infrastructure but they wanted to keep the premises,” he said. “That is why we have been fighting with them to get it back.”

Built in the late 1970s to house Soviet embassy staff when Poland was still a member of the Warsaw Pact and a seemingly obedient communist satrap, “Spyville” was officially emptied of diplomats and their families when the Soviet empire crumbled in the late 1980s but stayed in Russian hands. A louche nightclub — open only to Russians and their guests — operated there for a time but the compound, a cluster of concrete blocks around a fetid pond, has mostly been associated with espionage.

Polish urban explorers who sneaked into the property found Russian newspapers from as late as 2005, long after the Russians had supposedly left, reinforcing the compound’s reputation as a haven for undercover skulduggery.

A place of mystery and decay, it was also a small and deeply unwelcome outpost of the “Russian World,” a territorial and ideological concept dear to President Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Putin used the concept to justify his invasion of Ukraine, asserting that the country was an inalienable part of Russia. But the idea that Russia has an inviolable right — for linguistic, historical, legal or other reasons — to control bits of foreign land, extends far beyond Ukraine to myriad places that the Kremlin views as its own.

During his first years in power, Mr. Putin followed the example of his predecessor as Russia’s president, Boris N. Yeltsin, and surrendered foreign outposts that no longer served any clear purpose or were too expensive to maintain. These included a listening post in Cuba and a naval base in Vietnam.

Since then, however, Mr. Putin has set a very different course, pushing for the return of lost property, including the Cuban spy post he gave up in 2001, a graveyard containing czarist-era Russian graves on the French Riviera, a church in Jerusalem and other sites he views as belonging to Russky mir, or the Russian world.

At the same time, he has resisted giving up anything that Russia still controls abroad, frustrating Japanese efforts to negotiate at least the partial return of islands seized by Moscow at the end of World War II and obstructing Polish demands, backed by court decisions, for the return of “Spyville.”

Frustrated by Moscow’s refusal to hand over the Warsaw property, which Russia rented under a Soviet-era agreement, the Polish capital’s mayor, Mr. Trzaskowski, last month entered the compound for the first time, helped by a locksmith armed with metal shears and an electric saw, along with the Ukrainian ambassador and a court-appointed bailiff.

“Spyville is now passing into our hands,” the mayor declared. Security guards hired by the Russian embassy and an embassy representative put up no resistance. Moscow’s ambassador in Warsaw, Sergei Andreev, later complained to Russian state media that the mayor had illegally “occupied” a diplomatic site.

The mayor had merely enforced court decisions in 2016 and again this month, all ignored by Moscow, that voided Russia’s claim. The Russians insist they have honored the terms of the lease; the Poles say they have not.

“The courts passed a judgment that the property was rented out by the Polish state and that the lease had ended. If you are renting a property and not using it for almost 20 years, that of course means that you don’t need it anymore,” the mayor said.

Russia, as the successor state of the Soviet Union, inherited more than 20 Warsaw properties that had been given or leased to Moscow during the communist era. One of these, which Moscow also tried to hang onto, now houses the Ukrainian embassy.

But the biggest of these, other than a vast, colonnaded embassy building that looks like a palace, is “Spyville,” located just a mile from the embassy in the south of the city.

“For Russia it is symbolic,” the mayor said. “They just push and shove over questions of a symbolic nature, asserting their importance in Warsaw and in Poland.” He added: “This is all a legacy of Soviet times. The biggest embassy properties in Warsaw are those of the Russian Federation and the Chinese, simply because in the Communist times they were getting the best plots of land.”

Poland, he added, has no designs on buildings owned by Russia, only property that was rented to Moscow “under very favorable conditions for obvious reasons” at a time when the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of troops stationed in the country to enforce its will.

Krzysztof Varga, a Polish writer and journalist who grew up near the former Soviet housing complex, said the place has been known as “Spyville” as long as he can remember. “The whole district contained many buildings that belonged to the Russians,” he said, recalling that K.G.B. agents working in an office nearby used to hang out at a restaurant in the neighborhood.

Because there were so many Russians in the area nobody bothered much about “Spyville,” he said, “Everybody knew it was the Russkis and that was it.”

But what the Russians were doing there was never clear, particularly after Soviet diplomats left and a nightclub, Club 100, opened on the premises, leading to complaints, according to one Polish media outlet, “of loud parties with more Kalashnikovs than guests” and frequent police raids.

The mayor said he has no idea what was going on inside the compound. “Somebody was using the building at the start of the century for a few years but we could not check because we could not even enter without a court order,” he said.

Club 100, long closed, stands across an untended garden from the main residential blocks, a row of concrete, modernist style buildings faced with marble at their base. They combine late Soviet aspirations for luxurious living — spacious apartments with balconies, glass-faced cabinets and orange sofas from the 1970s — with the feel of a prison thanks to stained walls, coils of barbed wire and the stench of rot and ruin.

A pile of garbage next to the entrance to Block C, sealed with a piece of particle board, contains an old mechanical typewriter with a Cyrillic keyboard, smashed pieces of furniture and rusty metal film canisters from Mosfilm, the Soviet Union’s premier film studio.

Across the pile are draped strands of film from a dark 1989 Russian fantasy thriller, To Kill a Dragon, the story of a village liberated from tyranny but unwilling to accept its newfound freedom. The movie was banned in the Soviet Union, convulsed at the time of the film’s release by angry debate over the wisdom of the country’s retreat from communism, but was still shown to and, it seems, appreciated by Soviet diplomats and spies living in Warsaw.

Mr. Trzaskowski, the mayor, said he initially planned to turn the recovered property into a shelter for refugees from Ukraine, of which Poland has taken in nearly three million. But he found “Spyville” in such a state of disrepair — all the elevator cables had been cut and one block is structurally unsound — that engineers now need to decide whether the buildings, the tallest of which have 11 floors, can be salvaged or need to be torn down.

Whatever gets decided, Mr. Trzaskowski added, “it will definitely serve the Ukrainian community” in one way or another. On that, he said, municipal authorities and Poland’s central government, which otherwise agree on little and frequently fight, “are on the same page.”

Anatol Magdziarz in Warsaw contributed reporting.

Despite a last-minute plea to “respectfully bow out” of contention for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the country singer Dolly Parton made it in anyway, joining a musically diverse array of inductees for 2022 that also includes Eminem, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon, Eurythmics, Duran Duran and Pat Benatar.

The honorees — voted on by more than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals — “each had a profound impact on the sound of youth culture and helped change the course of rock ’n’ roll,” said John Sykes, the chairman of the Rock Hall, in a statement.

Parton, 76, had said in March that she was “extremely flattered and grateful to be nominated” but didn’t feel that she had “earned that right” to be recognized as a rock artist at the expense of others. Ballots, however, had already been sent to voters, and the hall said they would remain unchanged, noting that the organization was “not defined by any one genre” and had deep roots in country and rhythm and blues.

In an interview with NPR last week, Parton said she would accept her induction after all, should it come to pass. “It was always my belief that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was for the people in rock music, and I have found out lately that it’s not necessarily that,” she said.

But she added, “if they can’t go there to be recognized, where do they go? So I just felt like I would be taking away from someone that maybe deserved it, certainly more than me, because I never considered myself a rock artist.”

Following years of criticism regarding diversity — less than 8 percent of inductees were women as of 2019 — the Rock Hall has made a point in recent years to expand its purview. Artists like Jay-Z, Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson have been welcomed in from the worlds of rap, R&B and pop, alongside prominent women across genres like the Go-Go’s, Carole King and Tina Turner.

This year, Eminem becomes just the tenth hip-hop act to be inducted, making the cut on his first ballot. (Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording.)

Parton, Richie, Simon and Duran Duran were also selected on their first go-round, while fresh nominees like Beck and A Tribe Called Quest, who had been eligible for more than a decade, were passed over. Simon, known for her folk-inflected pop hits like “You’re So Vain,” was a first-time nominee more than 25 years after she qualified. Benatar and Eurythmics, long eligible, had each been considered once before.

Those passed over this year also included Kate Bush, Devo, Fela Kuti, MC5, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine and Dionne Warwick.

Judas Priest was on the ballot, but will instead be inducted in the non-performer category for musical excellence, alongside the songwriting and production duo Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis. Harry Belafonte and Elizabeth Cotten will be recognized with the Early Influence Award, while the executives Allen Grubman, Jimmy Iovine and Sylvia Robinson are set to receive the Ahmet Ertegun Award, named for the longtime Atlantic Records honcho and one of the founders of the Rock Hall.

The 37th annual induction ceremony will be held on Nov. 5, at Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, Calif., and will air at a later date on HBO and SiriusXM.

Russia’s decades-long dominance of Europe’s energy market is crumbling, and the biggest blow is expected this week as the European Union moves toward a ban on Russian oil.

On Wednesday, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, proposed a complete import ban on Russian oil with crude phased out over six months and refined products stopped by the end of the year, subject to approval by the member states.

With this phased approach, “we maximize pressure on Russia, while at the same time minimizing collateral damage to us and our partners around the globe,” she said.

Oil prices rose after the announcement. Brent crude was up more than 3.7 percent for the day.

Analysts say it will be possible to sever Europe’s oil ties to Russia, but the effort will take time and may lead to shortages and higher prices for gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other products — a situation that could penalize consumers already struggling with inflation and, ultimately, derail the economic recovery from the pandemic.

It’s “going to be complicated,” said Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm. “You have got a de-linking of two very intertwined parts of the global energy system,” he said, adding, “There are going to be disruptions and costs associated with that.”

“But policymakers are increasingly convinced it is necessary and better to do that relatively rapidly, both to try and reduce revenues for funding Russia and to reduce European exposure to Russian influence,” Mr. Bronze said.

The European Union’s aims are clear. With Russia continuing to wage war in Ukraine, Europe wants to deny President Vladimir V. Putin funds from sales of oil, usually his largest export earner and a cornerstone of the Russian economy. Russia’s oil sales to Europe are worth $310 million a day, estimates Florian Thaler, chief executive of OilX, an energy research firm.

The move against oil would be part of an effort to end Moscow’s ability to twist European arms over energy. In its latest attempt to do so last week, Russia cut off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. Russian oil may be an easier target than gas, analysts say. “The oil system can reconfigure itself,” said Oswald Clint, an analyst at Bernstein, a research firm, adding that oil was “a very deep, liquid and fungible market” served by thousands of tankers.

Still, for the European Union, cutting itself off from Russian oil will be a herculean task that may risk sowing division. About 25 percent of Europe’s crude oil comes from Russia, but there are wide differences in the level of reliance among countries, with the general rule being that nations geographically closer to Russia are more entangled in its energy web.

Britain, which is not a member of the European Union and has oil production from the North Sea, has said it will phase out Russian energy; Spain, Portugal and France import relatively low amounts of oil from Russia.

On the other hand, several nations, including Hungary, Slovakia, Finland and Bulgaria, usually import more than 75 percent of their oil from Russia and might struggle to replace it with alternative sources soon.

“It is physically impossible to operate Hungary and the Hungarian economy without crude oil from Russia,” Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, said on Tuesday.

While worries focus on gas pipelines, huge volumes of oil also flow from Russian oil fields through the Druzhba pipeline (named after the Russian word for friendship), whose northern branch feeds Germany and Poland and southern line goes to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

Refineries along this route, including the PCK facility in Schwedt, near Berlin, “have been running on Russian crude for the last 50 years,” Mr. Thaler of OilX said. “You need to source a proxy for that on the international market.”

Mr. Thaler said Hungary and Slovakia could potentially receive more oil from tankers in the Adriatic Sea, via a pipeline that runs through Croatia, while the Czech Republic could be fed from a terminal in Trieste, Italy. Policymakers in Brussels may give Hungary and perhaps other countries long lead times to win their support.

Germany, on the other hand, and Poland now seem determined to end their dependence on Russian energy, and this change of heart in Germany seems to be key to European policy. Germany plans to bring oil through the eastern port of Rostock as well as from across the border in Poland, from the port of Gdansk.

The German government says it has been able to end contracts for Russian crude, with the exception of the Schwedt refinery and another in eastern Germany called Leuna, which together account for roughly 12 percent of the country’s imports from Russia.

“That means the embargo is already being implemented, step by step,” Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister, said on Monday.

While oil is spoken of as a single commodity, there are many types with different characteristics, and refineries are often configured to run certain grades of crude. Switching away from Russian oil may involve costs if the fuel can even be found, analysts say.

Zsolt Hernadi, the head of MOL, a large Hungarian oil company, recently said it could require up to four years and $700 million to recalibrate his company’s refineries in the event of an embargo on Russian oil.

Analysts say an embargo could trigger a costly competition for alternative sources of oil.

Viktor Katona, an oil expert at Kpler, which tracks energy flows, said that of the substitutes potentially available for Russian oil, only Saudi output was a good fit. So far the Saudis, who will lead an OPEC Plus meeting on Thursday, have shown little inclination to increase their output more than incrementally. Mr. Katona said Iranian oil might also work, but sanctions imposed by the United States continue to crimp Iran’s fuel sales. Oil from Venezuela, which is also crimped by sanctions, is often mentioned as a possible swap for Russian crude.

Strains are already showing up in the market for diesel, which is used by both ordinary drivers and truckers. Diesel is in short supply because European distributors are wary of buying refined products from Russia, which once supplied large volumes of the fuel to Europe. Diesel is selling for the equivalent of about $170 a barrel, well above the $107-a-barrel futures price of Brent crude, the international standard, and Mr. Katona expects the price to keep going up. At the pump, diesel prices in Britain are up more than 35 percent over the last 12 months, according to the RAC, a motorists’ club.

An embargo is “going to inflict tangible pain on the European refiner and, in consequence, on the European customer,” Mr. Katona said.

Analysts say the releases of oil from reserves announced by Washington and the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which are scheduled to provide more than a million barrels of extra oil a day over six months, have so far had more impact on the American than the European market.

For Germany, Europe’s largest economy, the toughest decision will be what to do about the refinery in Schwedt, which is majority-owned by Rosneft, the Russian national oil company, and holds smaller stakes in two other refineries in Germany. Another Russian company, Lukoil, also holds stakes in refineries in Europe, including one of Italy’s main refineries, ISAB, in Sicily.

“Those companies would have little incentive to run non-Russian crudes,” Mr. Bronze said.

The German economic ministry said it did not expect “a voluntary termination of supply relations with Russia” in Schwedt and has been exploring legal options, including whether a state takeover could be justified.

And then there is the question of whether an embargo on Russian oil for Europe will achieve the aim of cutting off the Kremlin’s revenues. So far, the pressure on Russia seems to be raising prices and, therefore, revenues. Rystad Energy, a consulting firm, projects that even though Russian oil production is likely to decline in 2022, the Russian government’s total income from the fuel is likely to be up around 45 percent, to $180 billion.

Russia is also finding homes for its oil in India and, to a lesser extent, Turkey, as buyers take advantage of substantial discounts. “It might be just a game of musical chairs,” Mr. Katona said.