Peace talks reach a ‘dead end,’ Putin says
In his first extended remarks about the war in almost a month, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said that his country would persist in its invasion of Ukraine “until its full completion.” Peace talks with Ukraine had reached a “dead end,” he said, as he falsely described as “fake” evidence of Russian atrocities in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. Follow the latest updates.
For the first time, Putin explicitly moved away from his goal of gaining total control of Ukraine. He said Russia’s aims now centered on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russia separatists have been fighting since 2014. “Our goal is to help the people who live in the Donbas, who feel their unbreakable bond with Russia,” he said.
Those comments cannot necessarily be taken at face value. For months leading up to the invasion, Russian officials insisted that there were no plans to invade and that a buildup of troops was merely a military exercise. Ukrainian and Western officials now anticipate an intense offensive in the Donbas region, where the Russian military has been pouring in troops.
Mariupol: Almost seven weeks into the war, the Russians have yet to conquer Mariupol, the strategically important southern Donbas port. Western officials said they were evaluating accounts that Russian forces might have dropped chemical weapons there, a war crime.
In other news from the war:
-
Ukrainian officials said they had thwarted a Russian cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid, raising fears that Moscow would increase its use of digital weapons in the war.
-
Weeks after Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, announced a strategic shift toward expanding his country’s military, doubts are emerging.
-
A mother wrote emergency contact details on her daughter’s back, in case the child were orphaned. A photo of the toddler has become a symbol of Ukraine’s anguish.
-
The World Bank is preparing to deliver $1.5 billion in aid to Ukraine.
10 people shot in Brooklyn subway attack
At least 23 people were injured, 10 of them from gunshot wounds, after a man in an orange construction vest released two smoke grenades and fired at least 33 shots on a subway train in Brooklyn yesterday morning. Five of the victims were critically hurt, but officials said they all were in stable condition and were expected to survive. Here’s how the shooting unfolded.
The attack — one of the worst outbreaks of violence in the subway in recent history — heightened fears across New York City at a time when officials have been confronting a rise in violent crime and struggling to lure riders back to a public transit system hobbled by the pandemic.
As of last night, hundreds of police officers were searching for Frank R. James, 62, whom officials have called a “person of interest” in the shooting. A $50,000 reward has been offered for information. He has also been connected to a YouTube channel where he delivered lengthy rants, many of them concerned with race and violence.
Anxiety: As the evening commute began, many New Yorkers were fearful. “I’m terrified of taking the subway,” said James Lee, who works near the station where the shooting had taken place. “I never take public transportation anymore in New York, period.”
The world exceeds 500 million known Covid-19 cases
As of yesterday, the world had exceeded half a billion known cases of the coronavirus, up from 400 million in February. The actual number is almost certainly far higher, with many cases going undetected or unreported. That gap may grow as some countries, including Britain and the U.S., scale back testing.
Against the warnings of experts and despite the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron subvariant BA.2., many nations have dropped their pandemic precautions. “What’s happening globally and in the U.S. is that people basically gave up,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O. “They just want to go back to normal life.”
Still, the number of new cases reported around the globe each day has been declining for some time to an average of about 1.1 million cases a day, or 32 percent fewer than two weeks ago. Deaths from the coronavirus have also fallen, with a global average of about 3,800 a day over the past week, 23 percent fewer than two weeks ago.
Vaccines: More than 5.1 billion people — about 66.4 percent of the world’s population — have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
In other news from the pandemic:
THE LATEST NEWS
Around the World
Life’s not easy if you’re an Adélie penguin on the Antarctic Peninsula’s western side, where Adélie populations have declined by up to 90 percent in some spots as a result of some of the fastest warming in the world. But it’s a different story on the eastern side of the peninsula.
Lives Lived
Mimi Reinhard, the Jewish secretary in a forced-labor camp who typed up what would one day be known as Schindler’s list, has died at 107.
ARTS AND IDEAS
Black artists lead the Turner Prize shortlist
Ingrid Pollard, a pioneering Black female photographer, and Veronica Ryan, a Black sculptor who found widespread recognition in her 60s, are among the four nominees announced yesterday for this year’s Turner Prize, the prestigious British visual arts award.
Born in Guyana, Pollard, 69, has been getting attention since the 1980s for her work exploring Black life, including its relationship to rural environments. Ryan, 66, makes sculptures of seeds, pods and fruit, as well as assemblages from sewn and crocheted bright fabrics.
Heather Phillipson was also nominated. In 2020, she installed in Trafalgar Square, London, “The End,” a work that included a 31-foot statue of a dollop of whipped cream with a fly on it. The fourth artist on the list is Sin Wai Kin, a nonbinary artist born in Toronto whose work mixes genres including traditional Chinese opera and drag shows.
Founded in 1984, the Turner Prize is one of the international art world’s major awards. Past winners, such as Damien Hirst and Steve McQueen, have often become global stars. But the prize has long been contentious in Britain, with newspaper critics often complaining that the nominated artists are too obscure or that their work is more activism than art.
This year’s winner will be announced at a ceremony on Dec. 7. A free exhibition of works by the nominees will run at Tate Liverpool from Oct. 20 through March 19, 2023.
