We start today with Liliya Yapparova of the Russian independent news outlet Meduza and her on-the-ground reporting from various locations in and around Kyiv, Ukraine including the Universytet metro station in central Kyiv.
Oksana and Oleksandr fled their home in a panic on February 24. “There was gunfire and booms coming from the balcony, and there was a very powerful rustling coming from the kitchen,” Oksana recalls. “And I realized that if they hit the Kyiv reservoir the entire left bank would be washed away.”
Asked why they’re still staying in the metro station, Oleksandr and Oksana list a number of reasons: taxis are too expensive, the trains to Lviv depart after curfew begins, and it’s difficult to get through the checkpoints on the bridge. But when pushed, they admit that they could, in fact, leave the bomb shelter — and even head for western Ukraine, where it’s relatively safer.
“It’s just that you spend the night here once and then you start vacillating: stay here or go home, go to Lviv or Poland — what to do? You don’t understand,” Oleksandr explains. “Besides, you get the feeling as if it’s almost over, as if it’s your last day in the station and then the war will end.”
Oksana admits that she’s afraid to confront the “other life” that awaits her outside: “Lest we come up from the metro to [find] ruins, like when Kyiv was destroyed in 1941.”
One of the more notable things about Courtney Weaver’s “Lunch with the FT” interview with Kozyrev in the Financial Times is the decision to keep the location of the lunch a secret at Kozyrev’s request, “given the increased threat to opponents of the Kremlin.”
Kozyrev speaks about his background (his father was an engineer on location in Brussels where Andrei was born), his specific frustrations with the Clinton administration, Boris Yeltsin’s alcoholism, and that by the beginning of Yeltsin’s second term as president, Kozyrev could already see that autocracy was on the rise and reform was waning.
Kozyrev also says that he is in awe of both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Marina Ovsyannikova, who interrupted a newscast with a placard condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the question of whether Vladimir Putin is a rational or irrational actor, Kozyrev asserts that Putin is acting “rationally” but not “reasonably”:
Authoritarian regimes “cannot be sustainable without these kinds of formal aggression. Because they are unstable inside,” Kozyrev argues.
Steve Coll writes for The New Yorker that President Zelensky and Ukraine will face a number of “terrible predicaments” in the weeks ahead.
Zelensky has been justly celebrated for his personal courage and his adaptations of Churchillian rhetoric for the TikTok era. His presentation to Congress last week was a study in discomforting moral provocation. He invoked Pearl Harbor and September 11th to describe Ukraine’s daily experience under Russian missiles and bombs, then showed a graphic video depicting the recent deaths of children and other innocents. Later that day, Biden called Putin “a war criminal” and announced a new package of military supplies, including anti-aircraft systems and drones. The aid may help, but it cannot relieve Zelensky of the terrible predicaments he must manage in the weeks ahead. Ukraine may be facing a long war costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, a war that may not be winnable, even with the most robust assistance that NATO is likely to provide. In any event, NATO’s greatest priority is to strengthen its own defenses and dissuade Putin from attacking the alliance.
Though new COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths driven by the Omicron variant have declined from devastating highs in January, nationwide more than 1,000 people a day are still dying. Around the world more than 6 million have died from the virus; by the end of April, it will have killed at least 1 million Americans.
Vaccination rates have flatlined. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 66 percent of Americans are “fully vaccinated.” Yet once boosters are factored in, that number drops to less than 35 percent. That means tens of millions of Americans remain unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated. And there’s still no approved shot for children under age 5.
Waning vaccine immunity remains a concern. Pfizer and BioNTech are seeking emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for a second booster shot for those 65 and older. That recommendation will probably extend to younger people as well, because existing vaccine protection was not as robust when Omicron became the dominant variant.
Meanwhile, South Korea, once touted for its deft management of the virus, suffered its worst numbers ever Thursday with more than 620,000 cases and 429 deaths in a 24-hour period. China has more than 37 million people back in lockdown with its worst outbreak in two years. Hong Kong now has the world’s highest death rate. According to Johns Hopkins University, cases have swelled at least 37 percent in Greece, Ireland, and Austria in the past week.
Katherine J. Wu of The Atlantic notes that while COVID-19 is not “like the flu,” the trajectories of the vaccination campaigns for the two respiratory diseases are developing some similarities.
Annual flu vaccines are both an old innovation and a new imperative. Originally developed in the 1940s, when World War II was still raging, the shots first went to the military, under orders from the surgeon general. By the end of the fall of 1945, “everyone in the U.S. Army was vaccinated,” Dehner told me. The shot was cleared for civilian use and soon became a regularly reformulated vaccine to keep pace with the viruses’ rapid mutational clip. The vaccine worked—flu deaths plummeted among those who received the shot. Still, only after the 1957 flu pandemic pummeled people who were over the age of 65, pregnant, or ill with a chronic disease did public-health officials begin actively recommending the vaccine for those groups. Another 45 years would pass before children six to 23 months old joined the list. And only in 2010 were annual flu vaccines recommended for everyone six months and up.
More than a decade later, getting just half of American adults to nab the jab is “considered a good year,” Buttenheim told me. That level of uptake is paltry compared with the percentages of children who are, by the age of 2, up-to-date on their shots against chicken pox (90.2), hepatitis B (90.6), measles (90.8), and polio (92.6). But unlike those vaccines, flu shots are high maintenance, requiring refreshment through adolescence and adulthood, every single year. The annual vaccines have other factors working against them too. While they’re decently good at keeping people out of the hospital and the ICU, their protections against less-severe infections are relatively weak, topping out at about 60 percent effectiveness, and fast-fading. (They do far worse than that when there’s a mismatch between the vaccine’s contents and the circulating strain du jour.) “A lot of times, you still end up getting the flu even if you’ve had the vaccine”—which has given the shots a pretty bad rap, says Seema Mohapatra, a health-law expert at Southern Methodist University.[...]
COVID vaccines have already begun to follow flu shots’ problematic patterns. Set up to believe that the vaccines would instantly obliterate all infections, many people now consider the shots’ performance underwhelming, says Limaye, who has spoken with about 3,000 vaccine-hesitant people in the past two years. And since the start of the coronavirus crisis, it’s been tough to shake the false narrative in some circles that essentially “everyone” who gets the virus “seems to be just fine,” she said. In America, states with low annual flu-shot-uptake rates are near the bottom of the charts on the COVID-vaccine front as well. There’s a mirroring across demographics as well: For both flavors of shots, the elderly, the white, the wealthy, and the highly educated are more likely to be dosed up. These gaps are bound to widen, as the inequities of first doses become the inequities of boosters, and fewer and fewer people return for additional injections. “First to second, second to third, we already saw dropoff,” says Arrianna Marie Planey, a medical geographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
LZ Granderson of The Los Angeles Times has a reminder that bills like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill originated with Russia 2013 “gay propaganda” law and what that means, especially for WNBA star Brittney Griner.
That’s right, Vladimir Putin created a “don’t say gay” bill first.
In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights, of which Russia was a member, ruled the law was illegal. But that condemnation didn’t do much to change the Kremlin’s attitude toward its LGBTQ population.
I bring this up because the WNBA’s Brittney Griner, who came out in 2013, has been flying into this hostile environment since turning pro. What many of the league’s queer players, and their families and friends, have been juggling isn’t just the emotional and physical toll of a near nonstop 12-month playing schedule between the WNBA and international play. It’s trying to do all of that while being concerned about your spouse visiting you or meeting someone new on a dating app.
Griner, who wrote about her coming out process in her 2014 book, “In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court,” was arrested on Feb. 17 on drug charges, just days after Putin’s government tried to shut down the LGBTQ Network for talking about LGBTQ issues. On Thursday, a Russian court extended her detention to May 19. On Friday, the U.S. State Department issued a statement demanding access to Griner, saying “we have repeatedly asked for consular access to these detainees and have consistently been denied access.”
Philip Bump of The Washington Post digs into some of the nuances behind Friday’s New York Times editorial about “cancel culture” and free speech.
Consider jokes. Have you ever watched a comedy from the 1930s? Did you appreciate all of the jokes? How about Eddie Murphy’s comedy specials from the 1980s? What we find funny overlaps with what we find acceptable, and Murphy’s jokes about homosexuality or inscrutable gags about hats or whatever Fatty Arbuckle was doing (even that name!) simply don’t land as they used to.
Americans now have different boundaries for speech and behavior about race and gender than in years past. That means that some people very familiar with the old boundaries suddenly find the ground shifting beneath their feet. That can seem like a new infringement on speech when, instead, it’s a change in how speech is received.
“Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country,” the Times wrote on Friday: “the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” This isn’t really true (in addition to being an obvious erroneous conflation “right” and “ability”). Instead, the change is often that what triggers “shaming” or “shunning” isn’t the same as what might once have done so.
Michael Macagnone writes for Roll Call about efforts by the Census Bureau to avoid the undercounting of minorities for the 2030 U.S. Census.
To avoid further misses, the Census Bureau is looking at more ways to engage minority communities and address mistrust they may have of the federal government, Santos said. The agency may also consider taking on so-called easier-to-count communities, such as homeowners, through cheaper methods like administrative records to free up funds for in-person counting efforts in minority groups. [...]
...the agency missed almost 5 percent of the country’s Hispanic population, the largest miss for that group in decades. In 2010, the agency missed about 1.5 percent of that population, less than 1 percent in 2000, and almost 5 percent in 1990.
The 2020 census also missed about 3 percent of the Black population, also the highest such undercount in decades. In 2010, it missed 2 percent of that population, less than 2 percent in 2000 and 4.5 percent in 1990.
On the other side of the ledger, the agency estimates it overcounted the Asian population by 2.6 percent, the white population by 1.6 percent and homeowners by 0.4 percent.
The agency plans to release more detailed results from its post-enumeration survey in May.
Finally today, Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan of The Diplomat has a number of lingering and possibly disturbing questions about an unarmed Indian missile that accidentally landed in Pakistan March 9.
That the missile launched by India landed inside Pakistan, a nuclear rival, is obviously a serious matter. India was lucky that the missile was unarmed and there were no casualties, and that Pakistan did not use this opportunity to engage in a retaliatory attack. As experts have noted, “there are few cases in history – if any – of a nuclear-armed rival accidentally firing a missile into the territory of another nuclear-armed rival.” While there have been accidents in the past in other countries that involved even nuclear weapons, there hasn’t been a case of an accidental launch of a missile between two nuclear-armed states.
A number of issues about this incident remain unclear. One is about the type of missile that was involved. While neither government explicitly stated it, Indian media reports have quoted Indian defense officials as saying that the weapon involved was the BrahMos cruise missile. The BrahMos was a result of a joint India-Russia venture, which led to the modification of the Russian P-800 Oniks anti-ship cruise missile. The BrahMos program has been a successful one for India and all three Indian military services have purchased the missile. India has also planned to export the BrahMos missiles and bagged its first foreign customer, the Philippine armed forces, recently. If the missile involved was in fact a BrahMos, it is likely to raise questions from its users from within the Indian military and also among foreign customers. Thus, resolving the question of how this accident happened has implications within Indian military in addition to international security ramifications. The Indian government has promised a thorough probe, although it is unclear whether the results of the probe will be released publicly.
In addition to the missile type involved in the accident, there are also questions about how the accidental launch took place. It is unclear from the different Indian statements, and even from the unofficial source-based reporting in Indian media, whether the missile launch took place because of technical problems, some kind of human error, or some procedural lapse. Each has a different implication. The most concerning would be the question of human error or procedural lapse. The Indian military services over the last several years have witnessed many high profile tragedies and mishaps, including a helicopter accident that led to the death of India’s first Chief of Defense Staff, General Bipin Rawat, his wife, and several other officers in 2021; the “friendly” shooting down of an Indian helicopter by Indian air defenses in Srinagar at the height of the Balakot crisis in 2019; an accident that left India’s indigenous Arihant submarine out of commission for many months in 2018; and a fire and explosion on board an Indian Kilo-class submarine in 2013 that killed 18 crew members.
Everyone have a great day!