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    Your Monday Evening Briefing

    Daniel E. Slotnik and (Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.)Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.Firefighters at the scene of a missile strike in Lviv, Ukraine, today. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times1. Russia has begun its offensive in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian officials said.“Now we can state that the Russian forces have started the battle for the Donbas that they have been getting ready for a long time,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address.Russia claimed today that it had hit some 300 Ukrainian targets, mostly in the east, in one of the broadest barrages of missile attacks in weeks. There was also a missile strike on the western city of Lviv, which had been relatively unscathed until now. Seven people there died. Russian forces are closing in on a complete capture of the city of Mariupol, which would be a major strategic prize in the fight.In Russia, the central bank chief warned that ripple effects from Western sanctions were only beginning to spread, despite President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia’s economy remains stable. Moscow’s mayor said 200,000 jobs were at risk in the Russian capital alone.Travelers may no longer need to wear masks in U.S. airportsAlyssa Pointer for The New York Times2. A federal judge struck down the mask requirement on planes and public transit in the U.S.The ruling came days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended the federal transportation mask requirement through May 3. The judge in Florida said that the mandate “exceeds the C.D.C.’s statutory authority.”The judge’s decision apparently shuts down the requirement for people to wear masks on airplanes, in airports and while taking other public transportation. It was not immediately clear whether the Justice Department would appeal the judge’s order, which could keep the rule in place while the matter undergoes further litigation.In other Covid news, Philadelphia became the first major city in the U.S. to reinstate a mask rule in response to rising cases of the coronavirus. In China, several economic indicators show that Covid lockdowns could have a disastrous effect on the country’s economy.And in Shanghai, the authorities announced that some workers might have to live at their workplaces even after the city lifts its lockdown.Allies of former President Donald Trump are renewing a push to overturn the 2020 election.Veasey Conway for The New York Times3. Some Trump allies are pushing to “decertify” the 2020 vote in key states and overturn the election.More than a year after failing to cancel the 2020 election results, some of the same lawyers and associates are still insisting that former President Donald Trump won. In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, Trump allies are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. The efforts, dismissed as preposterous by many legal experts, are nonetheless stoking Trump supporters’ grievances. Democrats and some Republicans have raised deep concerns about the effect of the decertification efforts, including the potential to incite violence of the sort that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021.Kenya’s Peres Jepchirchir won the 126th Boston Marathon’s women’s division.Winslow Townson/Associated Press4. Peres Jepchirchir and Evans Chebet won the Boston Marathon.Jepchirchir finished the 26.2-mile course in 2 hours 21 minutes 1 second, beating Ababel Yeshaneh in the women’s division by just four seconds in a sprint to the finish line.Evans Chebet won the men’s race with a time of 2 hours 6 minutes 51 seconds, his first victory at a major marathon. The Boston Marathon returned to its traditional slot on the springtime calendar after three years.In 2020, the race was canceled for the first time in its history. And last year, the race was pushed to October, when it competed for elite entrants with a cluster of other marathons. We have highlights from the race.Alex Jones addressed Trump supporters in 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times5. Alex Jones’s Infowars and two affiliated companies filed for bankruptcy.The Infowars filing, which was made yesterday, came after courts in two states ruled against Jones, a far-right broadcaster, in defamation lawsuits by families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012.For years, Jones spread bogus theories that the shooting, which killed 20 elementary school students and six educators, was part of a government-led plot to deprive Americans of their guns and that the victims’ families were actors in the scheme. Two other companies connected to Jones, IWHealth and Prison Planet TV, also filed for bankruptcy protection. A homeless encampment along Glendale Boulevard in Los Angeles last month.Mark Abramson for The New York Times6. More than ever it has become deadly to be homeless in the U.S., especially for men in their 50s and 60s.There are many factors behind these lonely deaths: the aging of the unsheltered population; the wider availability of fentanyl, a fast-acting and dangerous opiate; the lack of treatment for chronic illnesses and the long-term health damage from years on the street. In many cities the number of homeless deaths doubled during the pandemic, and the problem is especially acute in California, where about one in four of the nation’s 500,000 homeless people live.“It’s like a wartime death toll in places where there is no war,” said Maria Raven, an emergency room doctor in San Francisco who co-wrote a study about homeless deaths.The four co-CEOs of the Lede Company at their New York City office.OK McCausland for The New York Times7. Meet the women of the Lede Company. They’re some of Hollywood’s top publicists (just don’t ask why).Their clients include Lady Gaga, Pharrell Williams, Emma Stone, Ariana Grande, Charlize Theron and the Obamas. And oh yes, an actor named Will Smith (about whom they have no comment). Discretion is their craft, making it tough for our reporter to get her subjects to open up.Marcy Engelman, Julia Roberts’s longtime publicist, did say of Amanda Silverman, one of Lede’s heads: “She knows how to play the game. She is very well liked, so she must take care of people.”Workers on the production line of the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning.Sylvia Jarrus for The New York Times8. Ford’s new pickup truck could determine whether the automaker can survive in an industry dominated by Tesla.Driven by the dizzying success of Tesla, sales of electric vehicles appear to be on an unstoppable rise, and automakers are spending tens of billions of dollars to prepare to meet that demand.The question for Ford is whether Jim Farley, the company’s chief executive and a car guy from the Detroit area, can channel his inner Elon Musk. Farley, and Ford, are betting big on the F-150 Lightning, an electric version of the company’s signature pickup that could become one of the most important vehicles in the company’s 113-year history.The Gravity Diagnostics lab in Kentucky where an unwanted birthday party was thrown. Liz Dufour/The Enquirer via Imagn Content Services, LLC9. They wished him a “Happy Birthday!” he didn’t want. He sued and won $450,000.A Kentucky man, Kevin Berling, asked his manager at a medical lab to be sure no one threw him a birthday party. Berling has an anxiety disorder and knew the party would trigger it. But while the manager was away, Berling’s colleagues planned a celebration.After hearing of it, Berling spent the time in his car. Two supervisors confronted him about his “somber behavior.” After having a panic attack in the meeting, he was fired. A month later, he sued the company for disability discrimination.In other acts of workplace dissent, a Dollar General employee who loved her job but thought it needed improvements opened up on a TikTok series that went viral. She was fired.We say we like creative thinking and thinkers but our gut response isn’t always in sync.Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka10. And finally, we look up to great artists, scientists and inventors. Or do we?The new science of implicit bias suggests we may talk a good game about admiring creativity but many of us are suspicious of it. Without realizing it, we may see creativity as disturbing.“People actually have strong associations between the concept of creativity and other negative associations like vomit and poison,” said Dr. Jack Goncalo, a business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Goncalo has looked at what spurs or hinders creators in studies. One main conclusion? Often, people’s subconscious views of creativity reflect a fear of change or uncertainty; creativity disrupts, and we like stability.Have an original eveningHannah Yoon and Eve Edelheit compiled photos for this briefing. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.Want to catch up on past briefings? You can browse them here.What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com.Here are today’s Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee and Wordle. If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here. More

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    Captured Ukrainian Oligarch Was Figure in Russian Election Meddling Investigation

    His name had surfaced as an influential figure in Ukraine with potential inside knowledge of Russian electoral meddling in the United States, though for years he had steadfastly denied it.But in recent days, the ground has shifted dramatically under Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian politician who is a close confidant of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and who had also been a client of the Republican political consultant Paul J. Manafort.Mr. Medvedchuk went into hiding early in the war, Ukrainian officials say, and was detained this week. President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on Tuesday a picture on Telegram of the politician, looking tired and disheveled, wearing handcuffs. He was arrested after violating terms of his house arrest while awaiting trial for treason, in a case opened last year.That case is related to coal trading with pro-Russian separatists, but more broadly it has to do with the swirl of financial and political intrigue surrounding Moscow’s operations to influence politics in foreign countries.For now, it’s unclear whether Mr. Medvedchuk will ever testify in court in Ukraine or be interviewed by investigators looking into Russian influence operations elsewhere. Mr. Zelensky said he would seek to trade Mr. Medvedchuk to Russia for Ukrainian prisoners of war.“I offer the Russian Federation to trade your man for our boys and girls now in captivity,” Mr. Zelensky said. “It’s important our law enforcement and military study such a possibility.”A trade would presumably put Mr. Medvedchuk in Russia, out of reach of researchers tracking Russian attempts to influence political outcomes abroad, in which Mr. Medvedchuk is said to have played a central role in Ukraine.A photo released by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office Tuesday shows Viktor Medvedchuk in handcuffs after he was detained.Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, via Associated PressHis relevance to Russian electoral meddling in the United States related to his ties to Mr. Manafort, and he was not described as playing a central role in a special prosecutor’s report or in two federal trials of Mr. Manafort.Still, Mr. Medvedchuk has been close both politically and personally to Mr. Putin for more than two decades, and he was a prominent figure in the pro-Russian wing of Ukrainian politics, a circle where Mr. Manafort found several clients.Mr. Putin is the godfather to Mr. Medvedchuk’s daughter. The two men met frequently over the years, and Russian air traffic control authorities granted special exemptions for Mr. Medvedchuk’s private jet on flights to Moscow, he said in an interview in 2017.Some European politicians, including the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, had publicly endorsed a role for Mr. Medvedchuk as an intermediary in the standoff between Russia and Ukraine, given his personal ties to Mr. Putin.But in Ukraine, outside of a narrow base of support mostly in the country’s east, he was widely viewed as a loathsome quisling who had reaped wealth from energy deals with the Kremlin while promoting Russian foreign policy goals, including weakening the central government under a federalization overhaul that he had championed for years.At various times, he had served as deputy speaker of Parliament, a presidential adviser and a negotiator in prisoner exchanges with Russia. And as a figure at the nexus of various financial and political influence operations run by the Kremlin, Mr. Medvedchuk’s importance extended beyond Ukraine.Mr. Manafort, before he became chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, worked for a decade as a consultant for Russian-leaning politicians in Ukraine, including the Opposition Bloc party, in which Mr. Medvedchuk was one of three leading figures.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4U.S. support. More

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    In French Election, Le Pen and Macron Court Voters With Emotion

    PARIS — The future of democracy in Europe is being decided simultaneously on the battlefields of Ukraine and in the ballot boxes of France.From afar, France’s presidential elections this month might look like merely a repeat of our last elections in 2017, with the centrist leader Emmanuel Macron once again facing Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party. But there are major differences that are revealing about France and about Western pluralism, having to do with the return of war in Europe; the uncertainty created by the two candidates running so closely in Sunday’s first-round election; and the widespread disaffection for both candidates.Indeed, the April 24 runoff election may be France’s most consequential turning point in the past 40 years. It could usher in an entirely new political and social era, in which illiberal democracy, personified in Ms. Le Pen, could gain the upper hand in one of the founding members of the European Union. And regardless of the winner, the country faces a deep paralysis because it’s unclear whether either candidate will gain a majority in legislative elections later this spring. That means neither Ms. Le Pen’s nativist hopes will be met nor will Mr. Macron’s efforts to further liberalize the French economy materialize, a result that could further alienate citizens from politics.Where the 2017 election was about the hope of reforming France and remaining a liberal democracy, 2022 is a tight contest between two emotions: anger against Mr. Macron, who is perceived as a technocrat out of touch with the people, and fear of Ms. Le Pen, who is still seen by many as a dangerous far-right candidate. In both cases most voters will vote against, rather than for, a candidate. The question of the day remains: Do you hate Mr. Macron more than you fear Ms. Le Pen, or vice versa?What is yet to be seen is whether Ms. Le Pen will fully capitalize on voters’ anger toward Mr. Macron for his perceived aloofness and closeness to the richest segment of French society, as well as for the contours of his policy. His emphasis on pushing back the retirement age from 62 to 65, even if he has started to retreat on that promise, speaking of 64 as a reasonable compromise, has rankled voters.In her effort to pick up centrist votes, Ms. Le Pen appeared at times almost moderate, particularly compared with her more radical rival Éric Zemmour. In the run-up to Sunday’s first-round election, Ms. Le Pen benefited from Mr. Zemmour’s penchant for furiously railing about defending French identity and the need to create a ministry charged with expelling foreigners. Meanwhile, she was appearing on social media, speaking of her love for her cats.That worked for Ms. Le Pen in round one. But to gain enough votes to become president of France, she will most likely have to rally the extreme edges of her party, in part by returning to espousing hard-line views. It may not be that difficult. Behind her reassuring rhetoric, her more extreme policies remain intact. She has promised to ban the hijab in all public places, a nod toward her longstanding public antipathy to Islam; she has long spoken of curbing immigration and has said she will prioritize the native-born French for welfare benefits over immigrants.To be sure, by appealing to the extreme right, Ms. Le Pen also runs the risk of failing to win over middle-of-the-road French voters who are more likely to vote for Mr. Macron or abstain rather than vote for her.The dilemma of Mr. Macron is just the reverse. He needs the support of the far left, which now largely means supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — who came in a very close third in round one — to win. It will be difficult for Mr. Macron to do so without diluting his economic program, which might lose him significant votes on the right.Complicating matters further, the coming runoff election may prove to be the closest since the victory of our longest-serving president, the socialist François Mitterrand, over the conservative Valery Giscard d’Estaing in 1981. It would be tempting to see the elections of 2022 as a distorted mirror of that fateful year. But 1981 was the triumph of hope bringing the socialists to power, which was, until then, an unheard-of possibility. Should Ms. Le Pen succeed, it would be a victory of anger.Such an outcome is not impossible. The voices of the extreme-right and extreme-left candidates together now add up to more than 50 percent of the vote. Those strengthening extremes signal that one in two French people no longer believes in classical liberal democracy as this country once knew it or in the future of the European project in which France has played an integral part.After all, Ms. Le Pen has long expressed her disdain for the European Union, once suggested leaving the common currency and still hopes France might all but abandon NATO.Then there’s the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Initially the prospect of war worked in favor of the incumbent president. Mr. Macron’s early efforts at diplomacy and meeting with Vladimir Putin gave him an early advantage with voters. Then he found himself facing the economic consequences of the conflict, including the steep rise in the cost of living across France, the very subject chosen by Ms. Le Pen as her core campaign topic.Yet it is unclear whether the reality of the war so close to France will discredit Ms. Le Pen (who, despite having denounced the invasion, had close ties with Russia in the past and whose party received loans from a Russian bank). In the end, as they say, all politics is local. The French will not be voting for Ukraine, and a majority of them may not care that much about the future of Europe, either.For Mr. Macron, however, his fortunes are bound up with Europe’s, and his challenge is energizing the electorate to care enough about both him and the continent. In the coming days, he is likely to try to convince more French voters that a victory for Ms. Le Pen is a victory for Mr. Putin and that Ukraine and democracy will only suffer if she takes up residence in the Élysée Palace. Whether he can do so will be a test of France’s deep polarization. The haves — those with more wealth and education — skew disproportionately toward Mr. Macron, while the have-nots lean toward Ms. Le Pen. But even this doesn’t give the full picture: Beyond anger, we are also seeing a profound disillusionment with politics. More than 26 percent of voters abstained in the first round of elections, the lowest turnout for a presidential election since 2002.In 2017, after the triumph of Brexit in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in America, the election of Mr. Macron appeared as an oasis of hope in a desert of Anglo-Saxon despair. Now, in 2022, the West is right to remain concerned about the political future of France.With two weeks left to go, the election of a far-right leader in France remains possible but not probable. But let us be clear. What is at stake on April 24 is nothing less than the future of democracy in France and in Europe.Dominique Moïsi is a senior adviser at the Institut Montaigne, a Paris-based think tank.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Trump and Ukraine: Former Advisers Revisit What Happened

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Fiona Hill vividly recalls the first time she stepped into the Oval Office to discuss the thorny subject of Ukraine with the president. It was February of 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s administration. Hill, then the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia for the National Intelligence Council, was summoned for a strategy session on the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. Among the matters up for discussion was the possibility of Ukraine and another former Soviet state, Georgia, beginning the process of obtaining NATO membership.In the Oval Office, Hill recalls, describing a scene that has not been previously reported, she told Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that offering a membership path to Ukraine and Georgia could be problematic. While Bush’s appetite for promoting the spread of democracy had not been dampened by the Iraq war, President Vladimir Putin of Russia viewed NATO with suspicion and was vehemently opposed to neighboring countries joining its ranks. He would regard it as a provocation, which was one reason the United States’ key NATO allies opposed the idea. Cheney took umbrage at Hill’s assessment. “So, you’re telling me you’re opposed to freedom and democracy,” she says he snapped. According to Hill, he abruptly gathered his materials and walked out of the Oval Office.“He’s just yanking your chain,” she remembers Bush telling her. “Go on with what you were saying.” But the president seemed confident that he could win over the other NATO leaders, saying, “I like it when diplomacy is tough.” Ignoring the advice of Hill and the U.S. intelligence community, Bush announced in Bucharest that “NATO should welcome Georgia and Ukraine into the Membership Action Plan.” Hill’s prediction came true: Several other leaders at the summit objected to Bush’s recommendation. NATO ultimately issued a compromise declaration that would prove unsatisfying to nearly everyone, stating that the two countries “will become members” without specifying how and when they would do so — and still in defiance of Putin’s wishes. (They still have not become members.)“It was the worst of all possible worlds,” Hill said to me in her austere English accent as she recalled the episode over lunch this March. As one of the foremost experts on Putin and a current unofficial adviser to the Biden administration on the Russia-Ukraine war, Hill, 56, has already made a specialty of issuing warnings about the Russian leader that have gone unheeded by American presidents. As she feared, the carrot dangled by Bush to two countries — each of which gained independence in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and afterward espoused democratic ambitions — did not sit well with Putin. Four months after the 2008 NATO summit, Russian troops crossed the border and launched an attack on the South Ossetia region of Georgia. Though the war lasted only five days, a Russian military presence would continue in nearly 20 percent of Georgia’s territory. And after the West’s weak pushback against his aggression, Putin then set his sights on Ukraine — a sovereign nation that, Putin claimed to Bush at the Bucharest summit, “is not a country.”Hill would stay on in the same role in the Obama administration for close to a year. Obama’s handling of Putin did not always strike her as judicious. When Chuck Todd of NBC asked Obama at a news conference in 2013 about his working relationship with Putin, Obama replied, “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Hill told me that she “winced” when she heard his remark, and when Obama responded to Putin’s invasion and annexation of the Ukrainian region Crimea a year later by referring to Russia as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,” she winced again. “We said openly, ‘Don’t dis the guy — he’s thin-skinned and quick to take insults,’” Hill said of this counsel to Obama about Putin. “He either didn’t understand the man or willfully ignored the advice.”Hill was sharing these accounts at an Indian restaurant in Colorado, where she had selected some of the least spicy items on the menu, reminding me, “I’m still English,” though she is a naturalized U.S. citizen. The restaurant was a few blocks from the University of Denver campus, where Hill had just given a talk about Russia and Ukraine, one of several she would give that week.Her descriptions of Russia’s president to her audience that morning — “living in his own bubble”; “a germaphobe”; “a shoot-the-messenger kind of person” — were both penetrating and eerily reminiscent of another domineering leader she came to know while serving as the National Security Council’s senior director of Russian and European affairs from April 2017 to July 2019. Though it stood to reason that a Putinologist of Fiona Hill’s renown would be much in demand after the invasion of Ukraine this February, it surprised me that her tenure in the Trump administration almost never came up in these discussions.The Colorado events were part of a book tour that was scheduled long before the Russian attack. Her memoir, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century,” traces the journey of a literal coal miner’s daughter from working-class England to the White House. But it covers a period that can be understood as a prelude to the current conflict — Hill was present for the initial phase of Trump’s scheme to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who was elected in 2019, by withholding military aid in exchange for political favors. It is also an insider’s look at a chaotic, reckless and at times antidemocratic chief executive. (In response to queries for this article, Trump said of Hill: “She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about. If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing.”)Her assessment of the former president has new resonance in the current moment: “In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.”Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin arriving for a joint news conference in Helsinki in 2018.Photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times
    Looking back on the Trump years, Hill has slowly come to recognize the unsettling significance in disparate incidents and episodes that she did not have the arm’s-length view to appreciate in the moment. During our lunch, we discussed what it was like for her and others to have worked for Trump after having done the same for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Her meeting in the Bush White House in 2008, Hill told me, offered a sharp contrast to the briefings she sat in on during her tumultuous two years of service in the Trump administration. Unlike Trump, President Bush had read his briefing materials. His questions were respectful. She offered him an unpopular opinion and was not punished or frozen out for it. Even the vice president’s dyspeptic behavior that day did not unnerve her, she told me. “His emphasis was on the power of the executive branch,” she said. “It wasn’t on the unchecked power of one executive. And it was never to overturn the Constitution.”Of her experience trying to steer policy during her two years in the Trump White House, Hill said: “It was extraordinarily difficult. Certainly, that was the case for those of us who were serving in the administration with the hopes of pushing back against the Russians, to make sure that their intervention in 2016 didn’t happen again. And along the way, some people kind of lost their sense of self.”With a flash of a smile, she said: “We used to have this running shtick in our office at the N.S.C. As a kid, I was a great fan of Tolkien and ‘Lord of the Rings.’ So, in the Trump administration, we’d talk about the ring, and the fear of becoming Gollum” — the character deformed by his attachment to the powerful treasure — “obsessing over ‘my precious,’ the excitement and the power of being in the White House. And I did see a lot of people slipping into that.” When I asked Hill whom she saw as the Gollums in the Trump White House, she replied crisply: “The ones who wouldn’t testify in his impeachment hearing. Quite a few people, in other words.”Fiona Hill emerged as a U.S. government expert on Russia amid a generation in which the subjects of Russia and Eastern Europe all but disappeared from America’s collective consciousness. Raised in economically depressed North East England, Hill, as a brainy teenager, was admonished by her father, who was then a hospital porter, “There is nothing for you here,” and so she moved to the United States in 1989 after a year’s study in Moscow. Hill received a Ph.D. in history from Harvard and later got a job at the Brookings Institution. In 2006, she became the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. By that time, the Bush administration was keenly focused on post-Cold War and post-Sept. 11 adversaries both real and imagined, in Afghanistan and Iraq.The ambitions of Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, were steadily made manifest. On March 19, 2016, two years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, a hacker working with Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U., sent an email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, from the address no-reply@accounts.googlemail.com. The email, which claimed that a Ukrainian had compromised Podesta’s password, turned out to be a successful act of spearphishing. It allowed Russia to obtain and release, through WikiLeaks, 50,000 of Podesta’s emails, all in the furtherance of Russia’s desire that Clinton would become, if not a defeated presidential candidate, then at minimum a damaged one.The relationship between the Trump campaign, and then the Trump administration, and Russia would have implications not just for the United States but, eventually, for Ukraine as well. The litany of Trump-Russia intersections remains remarkable: Citizen Trump’s business pursuits in Moscow, which continued throughout his candidacy. Candidate Trump’s abiding affinity for Putin. The incident in which the Trump campaign’s national security director, J.D. Gordon, watered down language in the 2016 Republican Party platform pledging to provide Ukraine with “lethal defense weapons” to combat Russian interference — and did so the same week Gordon dined with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, at an event. Trump’s longtime political consigliere Roger Stone’s reaching out to WikiLeaks through an intermediary and requesting “the pending emails,” an apparent reference to the Clinton campaign emails pirated by Russia, which the site had started to post. Trump’s chiming in: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The meeting in the Seychelles islands between Erik Prince (the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and a Trump-campaign supporter whose sister Betsy DeVos would become Trump’s secretary of education) and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in an effort to facilitate a back-channel dialogue between the two countries before Trump’s inauguration. The former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s consistent lying to federal investigators about his own secretive dealings with the Russian political consultant and intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom he shared Trump campaign polling. Trump’s two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in the summer of 2018, unattended by staff. Trump’s public declaration, at a joint news conference in Helsinki, that he was more inclined to believe Putin than the U.S. intelligence team when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The dissemination by Trump and his allies in 2019 of the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election, in support of the Clinton campaign. Trump’s pardoning of Manafort and Stone in December 2020. And most recently, on March 29, Trump’s saying yet again that Putin “should release” dirt on a political opponent — this time President Biden, who, Trump asserted without evidence, had received, along with his son Hunter Biden, $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor.Trump and Putin at a working lunch in Helsinki. Fiona Hill is second from left.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHill had not expected to be a fly on the White House wall for several of these moments. She even participated in the Women’s March in Washington the day following Trump’s inauguration. But then, the next day, she was called in for an interview with Keith Kellogg, at the time the N.S.C. chief of staff. Hill had previously worked with Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and several times had been on the Fox News foreign-policy online show hosted by K.T. McFarland, who had become the deputy national security adviser; the expectation was that she could become an in-house counterweight to Putin’s influence. She soon joined the administration on a two-year assignment.Just four months into his presidency, Trump welcomed two of Putin’s top subordinates — Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — into the Oval Office. Their meeting became public only because a photographer with the Russian news agency Tass released an image of the three men laughing together.As N.S.C. senior director for European and Russian affairs, Hill was supposed to be in the Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak. But that plan was scotched after her previous sit-down with Trump did not go well: The president had mistaken her for a secretary and became angry that she did not immediately agree to retype a news release for him. Just after the Russians left the Oval Office, Hill learned that Trump boasted to them about firing James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., saying that he had removed a source of “great pressure” — and that he continued to do so in his next meeting, with Henry Kissinger, though the former secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford had come to the White House to discuss Russia.Hill never developed the rapport with Trump that McFarland, Kellogg and H.R. McMaster (who replaced Flynn), her direct superiors, had presumably hoped for. Instead, Trump seemed more impressed with the former Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state. “He’s done billion-dollar energy deals with Putin,” Hill says Trump exclaimed at a meeting.‘The domestic political errands, the way Trump had privatized foreign policy for his own purposes. It was this narrow goal: his desire to stay in power, irrespective of what other people wanted.’Trump’s ignorance of world affairs would have been a liability under any circumstance. But it put him at a pronounced disadvantage when it came to dealing with those strongmen for whom he felt a natural affinity, like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Once, while Trump was discussing Syria with Erdogan, Hill recalled: “Erdogan goes from talking about the history of the Ottoman Empire to when he was mayor of Istanbul. And you can see he’s not listening and has no idea what Erdogan’s talking about.” On another occasion, she told me, Trump cheerfully joked to Erdogan that the basis of most Americans’ knowledge about Turkey was “Midnight Express,” a 1978 movie that primarily takes place inside a Turkish prison. “Bad image — you need to make a different film,” Hill recalled Trump telling Turkey’s president while she thought to herself, Oh, my God, really?When I mentioned to Hill that former White House aides had told me about Trump’s clear preference for visual materials over text, she exclaimed: “That’s spot on. There were several moments of just utter embarrassment where he would see a magazine story about one of his favorite leaders, be it Erdogan or Macron. He’d see a picture of them, and he’d want it sent to them through the embassies. And when we’d read the articles, the articles are not flattering. They’re quite critical. Obviously, we can’t send this! But then he’d want to know if they’d gotten the picture and the article, which he’d signed: ‘Emmanuel, you look wonderful. Looking so strong.’”Hill found it dubious that a man so self-​interested and lacking in discipline could have colluded with Russia to gain electoral victory in 2016, a concern that led to investigations by both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Robert Mueller, the special counsel. For that matter, she told me, she had met the Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page a few times in Moscow. “I was incredulous as to how anyone could think he could be a spy. I thought he was way out of his depth.” The same held true for George Papadopoulos, another foreign-​policy adviser. “Every campaign has loads of clueless people,” she said.Still, she came to see in Trump a kind of aspirational authoritarianism in which Putin, Erdogan, Orban and other autocrats were admired models. She could see that he regarded the U.S. government as his family-run business. In viewing how Trump’s coterie acted in his presence, Hill settled on the word “thrall,” evoking both a mystical attraction and servitude. Trump’s speeches habitually emphasized mood over thought, to powerful effect. It did not escape Hill’s attention that Trump’s chief speechwriter — indeed, the gatekeeper of whatever made its way into the president’s speeches — was Stephen Miller, who always seemed near Trump and whose influence on administration policy was “immense,” she says. Hill recalled for me a time in 2019 when Trump was visiting London and she found herself traveling through the city in a vehicle with Miller. “He was talking about all the knife fights that immigrants were causing in these areas,” she said. “And I told him: ‘These streets were a lot rougher when I was growing up and they were run by white gangs. The immigrants have actually calmed things down.’” (Miller declined to comment on the record.)More than once during our conversations, Hill made references to the Coen brothers filmmaking team. In particular, she seemed to relate to the character played by Frances McDormand in the movie “Fargo”: a habitually unflappable police chief thrust into a narrative of bizarre misdeeds for which nothing in her long experience has prepared her. Hill was dismayed, but not surprised, she told me, when President Trump carried on about a Democratic rival, Senator Elizabeth Warren, to a foreign leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — referring to Warren as “Senator Pocahontas,” while Merkel gaped in astonishment. Or when, upon learning from Prime Minister Erna Solberg of Norway of her country’s reliance on hydropower, Trump took the opportunity to share his standard riff on the evils of wind turbines.But she was alarmed, Hill told me, by Trump’s antidemocratic monologues. “He would constantly tell world leaders that he deserved a redo of his first two years,” she recalled. “He’d say that his first two years had been taken away from him because of the ‘Russia hoax.’ And he’d say that he wanted more than two terms.”“He said it as a joke,” I suggested.“Except that he clearly meant it,” Hill insisted. She mentioned David Cornstein, a jeweler by trade and longtime friend of Trump’s whom the president appointed as his ambassador to Hungary. “Ambassador Cornstein openly talked about the fact that Trump wanted the same arrangement as Viktor Orban” — referring to the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, who has held his position since 2010 — “where he could push the margins and stay in power without any checks and balances.” (Cornstein could not be reached for comment.)During Trump’s first year in office, he initially resisted meeting with President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine. Obama received Poroshenko in the Oval Office in June 2014, and the United States offered Ukraine financial and diplomatic support, while stopping short of providing requested Javelin anti-tank missiles, in part out of concerns that Russian assets within Ukraine’s intelligence community would have access to the technology, according to a 2019 NBC News interview with the former C.I.A. director John Brennan. Now, with Trump’s refusal to meet with Poroshenko, it instead fell to Vice President Mike Pence to welcome the Ukrainian leader to the White House on June 20, 2017. After their meeting, Poroshenko lingered in a West Wing conference room, waiting to see if Trump would give him a few minutes.Finally, the president did so. The two men shook hands and exchanged pleasantries in front of the White House press corps. Once the reporters were ushered out, Trump flatly told Poroshenko that Ukraine was a corrupt country. Trump knew this, he said, because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him so.Poroshenko said that his administration was addressing the corruption. Trump shared another observation. He said, echoing a Putin talking point, that Crimea, annexed three years earlier through Putin’s act of aggression, was rightfully Russia’s — because, after all, the people there spoke Russian.Poroshenko protested, saying that he, too, spoke Russian. So, for that matter, did one of the witnesses to this conversation: Marie Yovanovitch, then the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who was born in Canada, later acquiring U.S. citizenship, and who recounted the episode in her recent memoir, “Lessons From the Edge.” Recalling Trump’s words to me, Yovanovitch laughed in disbelief and said, “I mean, in America, we speak English, but it doesn’t make us British!”Trump in the Oval Office in 2017 with Petro Poroshenko, who was the president of Ukraine at the time.Evan Vucci/Associated PressThe encounter with Poroshenko would portend other unsettling interactions with Ukraine during the Trump era. “There were all sorts of tells going on that, while official U.S. policy toward Ukraine was quite good, that he didn’t personally love that policy,” Yovanovitch told me. “So there was always the feeling of, What’s going to happen next?”What happened next was that Trump began to treat Ukraine as a political enemy. Bridling at the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in hopes of damaging his opponent or helping his campaign, he was receptive to the suggestion of an appealing counternarrative. “By early 2018, he began to hear and repeat the assertion that it was Ukraine and not Russia that had interfered in the election, and that they had done so to try to help Clinton,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland security adviser, told me. “I knew he heard that from, among others, Rudy Giuliani. Each time that inaccurate theory was raised, I disputed it and reminded the president that it was not true, including one time when I said so in front of Mr. Giuliani.”By 2019, a number of once-obscure Trump foreign-policy aides — among them Fiona Hill; her successor, Timothy Morrison; Yovanovitch; Yovanovitch’s deputy, George P. Kent; her political counselor, David Holmes; her successor, William B. Taylor Jr.; the N.S.C.’s director for European affairs, Alexander Vindman; the special adviser to the vice president on European and Russian affairs, Jennifer Williams; and the U.S. special representative to Ukraine, Kurt D. Volker — would be tugged into the vortex of a sub rosa scheme. It was, as Hill would memorably testify to Congress later that year, “a domestic political errand” in Ukraine on behalf of President Trump. That errand, chiefly undertaken by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, would garishly illustrate how “Trump was using Ukraine as a plaything for his own purposes,” Hill told me.The first notable disruption in U.S.-Ukraine relations during Trump’s presidency came when Yovanovitch was removed from her ambassadorial post at Trump’s orders. Though she was widely respected in diplomatic circles, Yovanovitch’s ongoing efforts to root out corruption in Ukraine had put her in the cross hairs of two Soviet-born associates of Giuliani who were doing business in the country. Those associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, told Trump that Yovanovitch — who had served in the State Department going back to the Reagan administration — was critical of Trump. She soon became the target of negative pieces in the publication The Hill by John Solomon, a conservative writer with connections to Giuliani, including an allegation by Yuriy Lutsenko, the prosecutor general of Ukraine, that the ambassador had given him a “do not prosecute list” — which Lutsenko later recanted to a Ukrainian publication. The same month that he did so, April 2019, Yovanovitch was recalled from her post.Marie Yovanovitch during impeachment-inquiry hearings in November 2019.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe career ambassador and other officials urgently requested that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had replaced Tillerson, issue a statement of support for her. Pompeo did not do so; according to a former senior White House official, he was eager to develop a closer bond with Trump and knew that Giuliani had the president’s ear. Subsequently, a top adviser to the secretary, Michael McKinley, resigned in protest. According to a source familiar with the matter, Pompeo responded angrily, telling McKinley that his resignation stood as proof that State Department careerists could not be counted on to loyally support President Trump’s policies. (Through a spokesman, Pompeo declined to comment on the record.)By the spring of 2019, Trump seemed to be persuaded not only that Yovanovitch was, as Trump would later tell Zelensky, “bad news” but that Ukraine was demonstrably anti-Trump. On April 21, 2019, the president called Zelensky, who had just been elected, to congratulate him on his victory. Trump decided that he would send Pence to attend Zelensky’s inauguration. Less than three weeks later, Giuliani disclosed to The Times that he planned to soon visit Ukraine to encourage Zelensky to pursue inquiries into the origins of the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and into Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and whose father, Joe Biden, had just announced his campaign for the Democratic nomination. (Giuliani later canceled his travel plans.)At about the same time, Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, announced to the vice president’s senior staff, “The president doesn’t want him to attend” Zelensky’s inauguration, according to someone present at the meeting. He did not — a slight to a European head of state.On May 23, 2019, Charles Kupperman, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, and others discussed Ukraine with Trump in the Oval Office. Speaking to the press about the matter for the first time, Kupperman told me that the very subject of Ukraine threw the president into a rage: “He just let loose — ‘They’re [expletive] corrupt. They [expletive] tried to screw me.’”Because Kupperman had seen how disdainfully Trump treated allies like Merkel, Macron, Theresa May of Britain and Moon Jae-in of South Korea, he knew how unlikely it was that the president could come to see the geopolitical value of Ukraine. “He felt like our allies were screwing us, and he had no sense as to why these alliances benefited us or why you need a global footprint for military and strategic capabilities,” Kupperman told me. “If one were to ask him to define ‘balance of power,’ he wouldn’t know what that concept was. He’d have no idea about the history of Ukraine and why it’s in the front pages today. He wouldn’t know that Stalin starved that country. Those are the contextual points one has to take into account in the making of foreign policy. But he wasn’t capable of it, because he had no understanding of history: how these countries and their leadership evolved, what makes these countries tick.”In July 2019, Trump ordered that a hold be placed on nearly $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine that had already been appropriated by Congress. The president stood essentially alone in his opposition to such assistance, Kupperman told me: “Everyone in the interagency process was uniformly united to release the aid. We needed to do this, there was no controversy to it, but it got held up anyway.” News of the freeze became public that September, and the White House variously claimed that the funds had been withheld because of Ukraine’s corruption and because other NATO countries should be contributing more to Ukraine. Alyssa Farah Griffin, then the Pentagon press secretary, recalled to me that she asked Laura Cooper, the Department of Defense deputy assistant secretary for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, whether the hold was part of the standard review process.“Absolutely not,” Cooper replied to her. “Nothing about this is normal.”A few days later, the Trump White House released a reconstructed transcript of the president’s July 25 phone conversation with Zelensky. In it, Trump responded to the Ukrainian leader’s interest in purchasing Javelin missiles by saying: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike” — a reference to the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate its 2016 email security breach, which became a facet of Giuliani’s hallucinatory claim that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that stole the emails. In the same conversation, Trump requested that Zelensky help Giuliani investigate “Biden’s son,” referring to Hunter Biden, and ominously said of his recently fired ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, that “she’s going to go through some things.”“My first reaction to it,” Farah Griffin told me in speaking about the phone call for the first time publicly, “was that it was wildly inappropriate to be bringing up domestic political concerns, and it seemed to border on the conspiratorial. I’d been around for a lot of head-of-state meetings and calls, and they’re pretty pro forma. You know the things that you’re not supposed to say. It seemed like such a bizarre breach of diplomacy.” She went on: “But then, once it became clear that the Office of Management and Budget had actually blocked the money prior to the conversation, I thought: Wow. This is bad.”Fiona Hill and most of the others who testified in 2019 during Trump’s first impeachment hearings were unknown to ordinary Americans — and, for that matter, to Trump himself, who protested on Twitter that his accusers were essentially nobodies. It was their fidelity to their specialized labors that made them such effective witnesses. “One benefit to our investigation,” said Daniel Goldman, who served as the lead majority counsel to the House impeachment inquiry, “was that these were for the most part career public servants who took extensive contemporaneous notes every day. As a result, we received very detailed testimony that helped us figure out what happened.”Hill being sworn in as a witness during impeachment-inquiry hearings in November 2019.Al Drago/Bloomberg, via Getty ImagesIn reality, however, what happened in the Ukraine episode was not evident to much of the public. Trump prevailed in his impeachment trial, seeming to emerge from the ordeal without a political scratch. This, his former national security adviser John Bolton told me, distinguished the inquiry from the investigation into the conduct of President Richard Nixon 45 years earlier, which resulted in Nixon’s fellow Republicans deserting him. The Senate’s acquittal of Trump in his first impeachment trial “clearly did embolden him,” Bolton said. “This is Trump saying, ‘I got away with it.’ And thinking, If I got away with it once, I can get away with it again. And he did get away with it again.” (Bolton did not testify before the House committee; at the time, his lawyer said he was “not willing to appear voluntarily.”)Hill, for her part, emerged from the events of 2019 rather dazed by her sudden fame — but just as much so, she told me, by the implications of what she and other White House colleagues had experienced that culminated in Trump’s impeachment. “In real time, I was putting things together,” she said. “The domestic political errands, the way Trump had privatized foreign policy for his own purposes. It was this narrow goal: his desire to stay in power, irrespective of what other people wanted.”Hill was at her desk at home on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, writing her memoir, when a journalist friend she first met in Russia called. The friend told her to turn on the television. Once she did so, a burst of horrific clarity overtook her. “I saw the thread,” she told me. “The thread connecting the Zelensky phone call to Jan. 6. And I remembered how, in 2020, Putin had changed Russia’s Constitution to allow him to stay in power longer. This was Trump pulling a Putin.”Alexander Vindman, who was removed from his job as N.S.C. director for European affairs months after testifying against Trump (the president, his son Don Jr. and other supporters accused Vindman, a Soviet émigré and Army officer, of disloyalty, perjury and espionage), told me he experienced a similar epiphany in the wake of Jan. 6. Vindman was exercising at a gym in Virginia that afternoon when his wife, Rachel, called him to say that a mob had attacked the U.S. Capitol. After recovering from his stupefaction, “my first impulse was to counterprotest,” Vindman recalled. “I was thinking, What can I do to defend the Capitol? Then I realized that would be a recipe for disaster. It might give the president cause to invoke martial law.”In Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election results, Vindman told me, the president revealed himself as “incompetent, his own worst enemy, faced with too many checks in a 240-plus-year-old democracy to be able to operate with a free hand.” At the same time, he went on: “I came to see these seemingly individual events — the Ukraine scandal, the attempt to steal the 2020 election — as part of a broader tapestry. And the domestic effects of all this are bad enough. But there’s also a geopolitical impact. We missed an opportunity to harden Ukraine against Russian aggression.”Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testifying before the House Intelligence Committee during the impeachment inquiry in November 2019.David Butow/ReduxInstead, Vindman said, the opposite occurred: “Ukraine became radioactive for the duration of the Trump administration. There wasn’t serious engagement. Putin had been wanting to reclaim Ukraine for eight years, but he was trying to gauge when was the right time to do it. Starting just months after Jan. 6, Putin began building up forces on the border. He saw the discord here. He saw the huge opportunity presented by Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys. I’m not pulling any punches here. I’m not using diplomatic niceties. These folks sent the signal Putin was waiting for.”Bolton, a renowned foreign-policy hawk who also served in the administrations of Reagan and George W. Bush, also told me that Trump’s behavior had dealt damage to both Ukraine and America. The refusal to lend aid to Ukraine, the subsequent disclosure of the heavy-handed conversation with Zelensky and then the impeachment hearing all served to undermine Ukraine’s new president, Bolton told me. “It made it impossible for Zelensky to establish any kind of relationship with the president of the United States — who, faced with a Russian Army on his eastern border, any Ukrainian president would have as his highest priority. So basically that means Ukraine loses a year and a half of contact with the president.”Trump, Bolton went on to say, “is a complete aberration in the American system. We’ve had good and bad presidents, competent and incompetent presidents. But none of them was as centered on their own interest, as opposed to the national interest, except Trump. And his concept of what the national interest was really changed from day to day and had a lot more to do with what his political fortunes were.” This was certainly the case with Trump’s view of Ukraine, which, Bolton said, describing fantasies that preoccupied the president, “he saw entirely through the prism of Hillary Clinton’s server and Hunter Biden’s income — what role Ukraine had in Hillary’s efforts to steal the 2016 election and what role Ukraine had in Biden’s efforts to steal the 2020 election.”Bolton acknowledged to me that he found Trump’s conduct both in the Ukraine scandal and on Jan. 6 to be arguably worthy of impeachment. Still, he offered a rather tangled assessment of the two processes — finding fault with Democrats in the first inquiry for “trying to ram it through quickly” and, in the second impeachment, for not pressing quickly enough and “trying him before January the 20th.”But Bolton seems to regard the former president’s abuses of power as validation of America’s institutional strengths rather than a warning sign. “I think he did damage to the United States before and because of January the 6th,” Bolton told me. “I don’t think there’s any question about that. But I think all that damage was reparable. I think that constitutions are written with human beings involved, and occasionally you get bad actors. This was a particularly bad actor. So with all the stress and strain on the Constitution, it held up pretty well.”When I asked whether he believed Trump could be viewed as an authoritarian, Bolton replied, “He’s not smart enough to be an authoritarian.” But had Donald Trump won in 2020, Bolton told me, in his second term he might well have inflicted “damage that might not be reparable.” I asked whether his same concerns would apply if Trump were to gain another term in 2024, and Bolton answered with one word: “Yes.”At the moment, Trump’s chances of victory are favorable. He remains the putative lead candidate for the G.O.P.’s nomination and would most likely face an 81-year-old incumbent whose approval ratings are underwater. Even in defeat, there is little reason to believe that Trump will concede at all, much less do so gracefully. This January, President Biden said: “I know the majority of the world leaders — the good and the bad ones, adversaries and allies alike. They’re watching American democracy and seeing whether we can meet this moment.” Biden went on to say that at the G7 Summit in Cornwall, England, the previous summer, his assurances that America was back were met by his foreign counterparts with the response, “For how long?”One former foreign-policy official who played a role in the Trump-Ukraine tensions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about the former president, was unsettled but also unsurprised by Biden’s account. “In the back of their minds,” this former official said of America’s allies, “if Trump is elected again in 2024, where will we be? I think it would be seen among struggling democracies as a disaster. They would see Trump as someone who went through two impeachment inquiries, orchestrated a conspiracy to undo a failed election and then, somehow, is re-elected. They would see it as Trump truly unbound. But to them, it would also say something about us and our values.”Hill agreed with that assessment when I described it to her. “We’ve been the gold standard of democratic elections,” she told me. “All of that will be rolled back if Trump returns to power after claiming that the only way he could ever lose is if someone steals it from him. It’ll be more than diplomatic shock. I think it would mean the total loss of America’s leadership position in the world arena.”A couple of months ago, Hill told me, she attended a book event in Louisville, Ky. Onstage with her was another recent author, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who was the House Democrats’ lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Raskin, who happens to be Hill’s congressman, had also been among the managers in the first trial.Their event took place on Jan. 24, exactly one month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Though Putin’s troops had been massed along the border for several months, speculation of war was not a public preoccupation. For the moment, Hill’s expertise was in lesser demand than that of Raskin, who is now a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. For much of their hourlong colloquy, it was Hill who asked searching questions of Raskin — who, she told me, “was deeply disturbed by how close we came to basically not having a transfer of power.”At one point, Hill acknowledged to Raskin and the live audience that she had been thinking lately of the “Hamilton” song “You’ll Be Back,” crooned maliciously by King George to his American subjects. “I have been worried over whether we might be back to that kind of period,” she said. Hill went on to describe the United States as being in a state of de-evolution, with the checks on executive power flagging and the concept of governmental experience regarded with scorn rather than admiration.What she did not say then was something that Hill has told me more than once since that time. Throughout all our changes, presidents and senior staff in government, she said: “Putin has been there for 22 years. He’s the same guy, with the same people around him. And he’s watching everything.”Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine. More

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    With a Neutral Stance on Ukraine, Viktor Orban Pulled in Voters

    BUDAPEST — Savoring the election victory of a rare European leader who has not condemned him as a war criminal, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday congratulated Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for winning a fourth term and said he looked forward to an expansion of “partnership ties.”At a time when Russia’s relations with the European Union and the United States are unraveling over the war in Ukraine, Hungary, a member of the European bloc, has mostly sat on the fence in response to the Russian invasion, in part to avoid upsetting a natural gas deal cemented by Mr. Orban during talks with Mr. Putin in Moscow shortly before Russia invaded.A thumping victory in Sunday’s election for Mr. Orban’s party, Fidesz, suggested that the Hungarian leader would stick with a policy strongly endorsed by voters.But following a vote that independent election observers said was unfairly tilted in the governing party’s favor, there is also growing pressure on Mr. Orban to change course or risk not only alienating Hungary’s allies but losing billions of dollars in badly needed funding from the European Union for failing to uphold the rule of law.Guy Verhofstadt, a prominent liberal in the European Parliament, described the election as “a dark day for liberal democracy, for Hungary and the E.U., at a perilous time.”Mr. Putin got more mixed news from elections Sunday in Serbia, where Aleksandar Vucic, the country’s populist pro-Russia president, won re-election, according to preliminary official results issued on Monday. But it looked as if President Vucic could lose his increasingly authoritarian grip on power after his governing party failed to win a clear majority in Parliament.The Kremlin congratulated Mr. Vucic nonetheless, calling for a strengthening of what it described as a “strategic partnership” in the interests of “brotherly Russian and Serb people.”Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s pro-Russia president, won re-election on Sunday, but could lose his grip on power after his governing party failed to win a clear majority in Parliament.Andrej Cukic/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Orban’s Fidesz party has been divided over how to respond to Russia’s aggression, with its more traditional nationalist wing, steeped in the history of Hungary’s own past suffering at Russia’s hands, uncomfortable with cozying up to Mr. Putin.But its hopes that Mr. Orban, who went from being an anti-Kremlin liberal firebrand in 1989 to Mr. Putin’s closest partner in Europe, might again change direction after the election seems to have been diminished by the scale of his party’s victory. It won more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament while an openly pro-Putin, far-right party, Our Homeland Movement, secured enough votes to enter Parliament for the first time.“Putin is right. Ukraine is getting what it deserves,” Janos Horvath, a supporter of the far-right party, said after casting his vote. Ukraine, he said, echoing a favorite Kremlin talking point, mistreats its ethnic minorities, including Russians and Hungarians, and “must be stopped.”The crushing defeat of Mr. Orban’s opponents, who campaigned on pledges to show more solidarity with Ukraine and Hungary’s allies, makes it unlikely that Hungary will now join NATO and the European Union in condemning Mr. Putin over his military onslaught or in supplying weapons to help Ukraine defend itself. Hungary, unlike Poland, has steadfastly refused to let weapons pass through its territory to Ukraine.While increasingly isolated from his foreign allies, Mr. Orban won strong domestic support for his neutral stance on the war, turning what had initially threatened to become an electoral liability into a vote-getter. He did this through relentless misrepresentation of his opponents’ position, deploying a vast apparatus of loyal media outlets to convince voters that his rivals wanted to send Hungarian troops to Ukraine to fight against Russia, something that nobody has suggested doing.Supporters of Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party on Sunday.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesAt the opposition’s final rally in Budapest on election eve, Fidesz activists masquerading as journalists presented the opposition’s main candidate, Peter Maki Zay, with a white T-shirt emblazoned with a red target, shouting that this was what Hungary would become if he won. A video of the encounter was later posted online by Fidesz-friendly media outlets, which repeatedly cast the election as a choice between “war and peace.”Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Russian atrocities. More

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    With Ukraine Invasion, Hungary’s Leader Softens His Embrace of Russia

    Facing an election on Sunday, Viktor Orban plays neutral peacemaker while campaigning against the “gender insanity” that he says is creeping in from the West.DEBRECEN, Hungary — The towering memorial, erected on the battlefield where the Russian imperial army routed Hungarian troops, mourns Russia’s 1849 victory over “brave homeland defenders.” It is a reminder of how, for centuries, the Hungarian psyche has been shaped and scarred by the specter of Russian domination.“There has been a constant fear of Russia,” said Gyorgy Miru, a history professor in Debrecen, a Hungarian city near the border with Ukraine where the battle took place.Under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, however, this fear has turned into a trusting embrace. Mr. Orban, a political bruiser who revels in defying what he scorns as liberal conventions, has for years looked to Russia as a reliable source of energy and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, as a beacon of no-nonsense nationalism and muscular leadership, emulating in a milder form the Kremlin’s stranglehold on media and its one-party system.Amid the agonies inflicted on neighboring Ukraine over the past five weeks by Moscow, Mr. Orban’s stance has left many in Hungary and beyond dismayed and angry that a nation with such a long and painful experience of Russian aggression could fall so far out of step with the rest of Europe.Facing an election on Sunday against an unusually united opposition, Mr. Orban has cast himself as a neutral peacemaker who does not want to fan the war by sending weapons to Ukraine or to hurt Hungarian interests by imposing a ban on Russian oil imports.“As a historian, I am surprised and shocked,” Professor Miru said, recalling that Russian troops not only crushed Hungary’s 1848-49 revolt against imperial rule by Austria but also an anti-communist rebellion in 1956.The memorial in Debrecen remembering Hungarians killed by Russian troops in 1849.The New York TimesIn a speech in Budapest on March 15, a national holiday to mark the start of the 1848 revolt, Mr. Orban turned what is usually a solemn occasion into an election rally featuring a call to arms against liberal values and Western solidarity against Russia over Ukraine.He vowed to “stop at Hungary’s border the gender insanity sweeping across the Western world” and to protect Hungarian national interests against the competing interests of Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union. “We must represent our own interests, calmly and bravely,” he said, without mentioning Russia’s invasion.Mr. Orban has hardly applauded Russia’s military onslaught, which his government describes as “aggression.” But neither has he criticized Mr. Putin nor joined Poland, Britain, Germany and other European countries in helping Ukraine defend itself.Irpin, Ukraine, on Friday. Previous weeks of fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces has damaged the city, which is northwest of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.Daniel Berehulak for The New York TimesHis opposition to a ban on Russian oil has infuriated Poland, whose conservative governing party previously stood shoulder to shoulder with Hungary in Europe’s culture wars. It was enough to lead the Czech defense minister, Jana Cernochova, to declare last week that she was “very sorry that cheap Russian oil is now more important to Hungarian politicians than Ukrainian blood.”The Czech minister canceled a trip to Hungary for a planned gathering of the Visegrad Group, comprising four previously close Central European states. Poland and Slovakia, the other scheduled attendees, also stayed away.The leader of Poland’s governing party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Mr. Orban’s closest ally in the European Union, has tried to calm the rift, but even he has expressed dismay at Hungary’s fence-sitting on the war in Ukraine. “We view Hungary’s attitude with criticism, and we hope that it will become more involved,” Mr. Kaczynski told a conservative Polish weekly.Suspicion of Hungary over its ties to Moscow is so intense that some now see Mr. Orban’s nation, a member of NATO since 1999, as a weak link in the alliance.An exercise with NATO special forces troops in 2019 in Hungary. Some now consider Hungary a weak link in the alliance. The New York TimesAsked about Hungary’s hesitant support for Ukraine, Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Lithuanian foreign minister, lamented that “unwavering trust in some of our allies could be an unfortunate victim of Russia’s war against Ukraine.”Instead of rallying to help Ukraine, Mr. Orban has gone on the offensive against it, claiming on Friday that it had “made a pact” with his election rivals. This followed an earlier claim by his foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, that the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, recently called Ukraine’s ambassador in Budapest to “consult on the possibility of influencing the election results in Hungary” in cahoots with the opposition. Mr. Kuleba responded by accusing his Hungarian counterpart of “inventing nonsense” for “short-term benefit before the elections” and “destroying the long-term relationship between us.”Mr. Orban, hailed as a hero by many American conservatives, has taken broad steps in recent years to use his power to erode democratic norms, but his moves to revise election laws to benefit his party and mute critical voices in the media have been especially notable as the vote nears on Sunday. Opinion polls suggest Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party will again win, though it may fall short of the two-thirds majority in Parliament that had allowed Mr. Orban to rewrite the Constitution and turn Hungary into a semi-autocratic state.At a closed-door meeting on Thursday in Slovakia of nine regional foreign ministers, Mr. Szijjarto complained irritably that Hungary had been misunderstood and denied it was siding with Russia, according to a minister who was present.Seeking to rally Mr. Orban’s base ahead of the election, Mr. Szijjarto traveled the previous day to Debrecen and visited a campaign office for the Fidesz party. Asked as he was leaving whether Hungary’s policy toward Russia had left his country isolated, he shouted, “No, no, no,” and rushed out of the building to a waiting limousine.Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, center, on Wednesday in Debrecen.The New York TimesFamous across Hungary as the place where anti-imperial rebels issued Hungary’s declaration of independence in 1849, Debrecen has long been associated with Hungarian nationalism. The city, said Robert Hermann, a leading Hungarian scholar of the 1848 revolution, “is our Philadelphia,” a reference to the city where rebellious American colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776.Hungary, he added, was never as passionately hostile to Russia as Poland was, in part because Russian troops who fought in Debrecen and other rebel strongholds in the 19th century tended to treat Hungarian captives relatively well. But wariness of Moscow, amplified by its brutal crushing of Hungary’s 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, he said, still runs deep, particularly on the right.Under Mr. Orban, however, “distrust of Russia on the right went into the background,” Mr. Hermann said, as Fidesz, despite its strongly nationalist tinge, embraced a view of Russia that had previously been confined to the left. Describing himself as a “liberal nationalist,” Mr. Hermann said he had been “very confused” by Mr. Orban’s sharp tilt toward Moscow after he took power in 2010.Also confused has been Debrecen University, which in 2017 awarded Mr. Putin the title of “honorary citizen” as part of Hungary’s courtship of the Kremlin. A week after he invaded Ukraine, it issued a statement that avoided criticizing the Russian leader but subtly declared his title void, since he had not visited in person to collect it.Ukrainian refugees on Thursday at a shelter in Budapest.The New York TimesDespite first making his name as an anti-Moscow firebrand who in 1989 demanded that 80,000 Soviet troops then in Hungary go home, Mr. Orban has repeatedly spoken in recent years of the need to get along with Mr. Putin. In an interview with an Italian newspaper in 2018, he acknowledged that “in the past, we Hungarians have suffered a lot under Russia.” But he added that “it needs to be recognized that Putin has made his country great again” and that he should not be viewed as a devil “with hooves and horns” but as a leader who “rules a great and ancient empire.”Mr. Orban’s outreach to Mr. Putin has been driven in part by close cooperation on energy. Russia lent Hungary $10 billion to finance the construction of a nuclear power plant by a Russian company and provided it with natural gas at favorable prices. But there has also been a political dimension, with Mr. Orban looking to Moscow as an ally in the struggle against progressive ideas seeping in from Western Europe. Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Orban has often spoken about what he sees as the threat posed by gay men, lesbians and transgender people and their advocates.Supporters of Mr. Orban in Szekesfehervar, Hungary, on Friday during the rally.The New York TimesWhile Poland has been plastered in recent weeks with Ukrainian flags and other signs of solidarity with its eastern neighbor, streets across Hungary have been decked with placards trumpeting the need to “protect our children.” Alongside a vote on Sunday for Parliament, Hungarians are also being asked to vote on a series of inflammatory questions, like, “Do you support the promotion of sex reassignment therapy for underage children?”In early February, as fears mounted of a coming Russian invasion of Ukraine and European leaders warned of severe sanctions if an attack occurred, Mr. Orban visited Moscow to cement his country’s energy ties with Russia. For his efforts, he secured a promise from Mr. Putin that Hungary, unlike other European countries, had no need to worry about running short of natural gas.Mr. Orban described Mr. Putin’s security demands as “normal” and sanctions as pointless. The Russian president returned the favor, telling Mr. Orban that while Russia did not usually take sides in foreign elections: “You have done so much in your work on the Russia track, both in the interest of Hungary and Russia. I hope our cooperation will continue.”After Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Hungary joined fellow members of the European Union in imposing sanctions on Moscow, but it has since refused to let weapons destined for Ukraine pass through its territory and resisted efforts to impose restrictions on Russian energy imports.With television stations and many print outlets controlled directly by the state or by government-friendly tycoons, Hungary’s governing party, Fidesz, has shifted its nationalist base away from its traditional fear of Russia toward the belief that Mr. Putin stands on the same side of the barricades in defending traditional values.Outside the House of Terror, a museum in Budapest focusing on the fascist and communist governments in 20th-century Hungary. The museum is also a memorial to the victims.The New York Times“Thanks to Orban’s media, Putin is now more popular in this segment of the population than the American president or the German chancellor,” said Zoltan Biro, a Russia expert at the Corvinus University in Budapest.Speaking outside the Fidesz election headquarters in Debrecen this past week, Tibor Tisza, a taxi company owner and enthusiastic party supporter, said he had visited the local memorial to Hungarians killed by Russian troops in 1849. But he said he felt no ill will toward Russia because it “finally has a real, powerful and patriotic leader” who battles to protect children and national interests just as Mr. Orban does.Mr. Tisza said he regretted the bloodshed in Ukraine but, echoing a theme regularly promoted by Fidesz-friendly news media outlets, accused Kyiv of harboring Nazis and restricting the rights of both ethnic Russians and ethnic Hungarians to live in peace.He added that he was not against Ukraine but did not want Hungary to get sucked into its war with Russia. “If my neighbor’s house is on fire,” Mr. Tisza, “should I set my own house on fire, too?”Tomas Dapkus More

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    The Battle for the Mural — and the Future of Belarus

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.As his family slept, the man spent his nights planning. There were about 40 security cameras among the three buildings in central Minsk, maybe even more. He had long ago calculated their blind spots. He knew there was only one place in the shared courtyard they didn’t see. It took him a day to map out the best approach. The group had decided that they would act in the evening, when there would be enough people on the street so that their actions would not arouse suspicion but not so many that someone would be likely to report them to the police. He wasn’t afraid for himself as much as for the rest of them. If they got caught, it would be his fault.They positioned their spotters to watch for the Belarusian security services, the siloviki. They agreed on a plan to create an emergency diversion if they arrived.On the morning of Feb. 25, he took a white piece of cloth the size of a flag and painted it quickly. It would take four hours to dry. When it was ready, he folded it deliberately, carefully aligning the fabric to make sure it would take the least amount of time to unfurl. He attached carabiners to the corners and put it in a bag.As he made his way to the fence next to the utility shed, the man felt only anger — a voice in his head that demanded to know how can a person be afraid to do something like this? When he reached the fence, he hooked up the carabiners, then threw the cloth over the top. It unfurled in seconds. He fastened the bottom and stepped back. Weeks of planning ended in minutes. In the purple light, the banner was ethereal and simple — the logo of their group, a peace sign and the words NO WAR.An hour and a half later, a minibus with tinted windows arrived. Plainclothes officers stormed out and tore down the banner. The next morning, investigators from the local branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs arrived. They started collecting security footage from the buildings as well as nearby stores and combing over the tape. The man believed they wouldn’t be found. They had followed protocol and stuck to the route.They had been shouting for more than a year and a half that their country was a dictatorship, that Belarus was under occupation, that everything would be disastrous if Aleksandr Lukashenko were not stopped. No one had listened. There were more than 1,000 political prisoners in detention; sentences for those who opposed Lukashenko’s regime stretched into decades. Now Russia had launched an assault on Ukraine, and Lukashenko had sold their country to the Kremlin as a giant military base.If they had overthrown Lukashenko, the man thought, probably none of this would be happening. Vladimir Putin would not have had the strategic assets to be able to carry out this war — no support from the northern flank, no airfields for refueling planes, no silos to keep the missiles. If the world thought Belarusians to be collaborators, he needed to show they were anything but. They had been fighting against this for far longer than people realized. They had taken far greater risks than people knew.Sept. 3, 2020 Repainting the mural in the Square of Change in Minsk.Yauhen AttsetskiOn weekday mornings, the elevators in Diana Karankevich’s building were so crowded with young parents bringing their children to school, she often took the stairs. With 20 floors, the prefabricated high-rise had loomed over the nearby squat, beige Soviet-era buildings in the New Lake neighborhood almost as soon as construction started around 2011. By the time everyone moved in, the new development’s three identical buildings on the intersection of Smorgovsky Tract and Chervyakova Street teemed with young, upper-middle-class families. The appeal of buying there was obvious — it was a 10-minute drive from downtown Minsk, with a supermarket across the street and good schools nearby. It was a short walk to the Belarusian capital’s largest park and the shores of the big lake that locals in the landlocked country referred to as the Minsk Sea.Before 2020, whether because of Belarus’s long Soviet hangover or their busy, phone-absorbed lives, most people in the buildings never knew their neighbors. Diana, a 30-year-old nail technician who had worked in a beauty salon on the first floor, was an exception. Outgoing and opinionated, she was always saying hello to someone. From the apartment she shared with her mother and her then 5-year-old son, Timofey, Tima for short, Diana could see the road that led to the three buildings’ shared courtyard, where there was a small, multicolored playground surrounded by benches. In the afternoons, the congestion reversed — the same parents bringing their children home, sometimes stopping at the swing set or the seesaw.On Aug. 6, 2020, Diana was walking Tima home from kindergarten, through the verdant birch trees of a smaller square nearby called Peoples’ Friendship Park.“Why are there so many people?” Tima asked, confused.“Because they came out,” she answered absent-mindedly.It was a few days before the August 2020 presidential elections, which until recently Diana and pretty much everyone else in Belarus had expected to be the sixth straight election President Lukashenko would win through a combination of voter apathy, oppositional disarray, electoral suppression and outright fraud. But for the first time in his 26 years in power, the usual script of the regime’s election interference had gone awry.A few weeks earlier, the opposition united around a single candidate: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a 39-year-old housewife married to a popular video blogger, who had surprised even herself by registering to run for president after her husband was disqualified on charges that were largely viewed as political. Tsikhanouskaya, whom many just called Sviatlana, had rocketed to a level of popularity unheard-of since Lukashenko himself came to power in 1994 in the only free elections Belarus had ever held.Sviatlana had called for a rally in Friendship Park, one of the few venues to allow political gatherings in Minsk, but the city authorities refused to issue a permit. They had announced a musical concert in honor of “Railway Troops Day” instead. When Diana heard, she could only laugh. There had been no railway troops in Belarus since 2006. It was exactly the kind of absurdism Belarusians had become inured to over the years.Diana noticed that the regime’s concert was sparsely attended, the cordoned-off area empty aside from the state-employed D.J.s and a few pensioners, the kind who came to every Lukashenko rally, waving the red-and-green flag Lukashenko had resurrected from Soviet times. The rest of the park, however, was unusually crowded. Diana thought maybe they were hopefuls waiting for Sviatlana to show up. Diana was leading Tima away when a loud cheer went up. Maybe she came after all? Diana moved closer and heard lyrics from a song that anyone who grew up in the former Soviet Union knows by heart:Changes!It’s the demand of our hearts.Changes!It’s the demand of our eyes.Aug. 6, 2020 The D.J.s Vladislav Sokolovsky and Kirill Galanov, who inspired the mural in the Square of Change.Nadia BuzhanThe rock band Kino’s 1986 song “Changes” was a famous anthem across Eastern Europe that presaged the Soviet Union’s collapse. It was blocked from Belarusian radio airwaves during past periods of protest. The crowd cheered louder, emboldened by one another’s enthusiasm. Diana pushed forward with Tima in her arms. The two young D.J.s stood with their arms raised above their turntables in silence, unflinching, as the music blasted. One had his fingers up in a V for victory with a bit of white cloth — the color of the opposition — wrapped around it; the other had made a fist around a white bracelet.Journalists surged forward: “Whose idea was this?” “Aren’t you scared?” “You’re not afraid of losing your job?”The D.J.s replied that they were just doing what they thought was right. Almost immediately, they were arrested. Roughly a week later, residents woke up to a large black-and-white mural of the D.J.s with their arms raised.Diana would eventually learn it had all been an accident — the mural was never meant to be there. Some guys had wanted to stick it on the wall where the D.J.s played the song, but the cops drove by, and they lost their nerve. Since they had everything ready to go, they glued the mural to the first safe place they encountered — their buildings’ own playground.But if it had started as an accident, perhaps the rest of it was fated. If the mural had been placed elsewhere, Diana thought, maybe it would have vanished. Maybe when the authorities decided to paint over it, as they had so much other revolutionary graffiti, no one would have stopped them. But the residents of the newly named Square of Change noticed. The mural meant something to them, and they would ensure it would come to mean something to the entire nation.For more than two decades, Belarusians had existed in an equilibrium of quiet authoritarianism. If the repressions didn’t directly touch them, most people tolerated them. The country’s national anthem started with “We, Belarusians, are a peaceful people,” and a common proverb to describe the national psyche was “maya hata s krau” — which translates roughly to “my house is on the side.” Whatever is happening outside my family is none of my business. But over the course of 2020, a country whose history and identity never much interested a majority of people who lived there became something they would sacrifice their lives for. Before the battle over the mural became a symbol of the nation they would call New Belarus, there were just three nondescript buildings in the middle of a city of two million, a courtyard set around a children’s playground: swings, a seesaw and a roundabout, surrounded by benches.Diana Karankevich and her son, Tima, at their home in Warsaw.Emile Ducke for The New York Times In 1991, the year before Diana was born, the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine negotiated the end to the U.S.S.R. at a hunting lodge in western Belarus. Diana’s compatriots were among the least interested in independence — 83 percent of Belarusians had voted against it. Still, they emerged one day into a new reality of seismic proportions; their state, their ideology and all the order they knew had melted away. As an only child after perestroika, Diana was allowed to do whatever she wanted, too young and too loved to realize the real toll of the upheaval running through the former Soviet empire.Diana grew up on the outskirts of Mogilev, a city roughly 120 miles from Minsk, due east toward the Russian border. Her neighborhood, the Eighth, was split — half was cop territory, with a police academy and officer housing, and the other half, where she lived, was called banditski. In the chaos of the 1990s, she recalls, everyone knew that if a cop came to the bandits’ side, it would end poorly. Her parents straddled the new divide neatly — her mother worked for the state, while her father worked the corner. He tried everything to get in on the new economy. He drove plush toys from Smolensk, Russia, hawked meat at an open-air market and thumbed stacks of rubles on the black-market currency exchange.Their family, like most Belarusian families, spoke Russian at home. Belarus had not existed autonomously within its present borders before it belonged to the U.S.S.R. It had been part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — sharing its medieval capital, writers and historic heroes with present-day Lithuania and Poland — before being absorbed into the Russian empire. In 1918, an independent Belarusian state was declared and existed for a few months, before being swallowed into the Soviet project.During World War II, Belarus was the center of hostilities between the Nazis and the Soviets — at least two million people were killed on Belarus’s land. Minsk was bombed so brutally, the Wehrmacht had to wait for the fires to subside so they could enter the city. Whether because of extermination, displacement or deportation, by the end of the war, Belarus was missing half its population. Under Stalin, Belarus underwent rapid industrialization, urbanization and Russification. The capital was rebuilt and later awarded “Hero City” status for its suffering in what the Soviet Union called the Great Patriotic War. By the mid-1980s, only a third of the country spoke Belarusian in daily life.After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new generation of leaders rose in the former republics, but Belarus remained under old Soviet nomenklatura rule even after independence. Though the red-and-green Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic flag was swapped for the red-and-white flag of the Belarusian National Republic that existed for a few months in 1918, previous institutions other than the Communist Party remained intact.Belarus’s leadership was slower to embark on market reforms than Russia or Ukraine, whose torturous adventures into unfettered capitalism in the ’90s Belarusians watched with trepidation. In Belarus, too, as the economy was liberalized, standards of living dropped, while criminality climbed. Diana didn’t remember the food lines, but her grandmother often told her that while life in the Soviet Union was difficult, it was stable, and the people were kinder.Lukashenko made his entrance into this morass. The former head of a small collective farm, he was elected to Parliament in 1990 but remained unknown until he became head of an anticorruption committee three years later. He shot to fame after giving a speech denouncing high-level corruption on the floor of the legislature when he was 39. Lukashenko presented himself as a mix of everyman populist and cherry-picked Soviet-nostalgist, bellicose and bombastic. He defeated Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich with 80 percent of the vote in the 1994 presidential election.Almost immediately after taking power, Lukashenko began to impose autocratic rule. He censored state media; he closed Belarus’s only independent radio station and several newspapers. Lukashenko stripped powers from the Parliament. He oversaw a referendum to resurrect Soviet national symbols and made Russian a state language. In 1999, Belarus and Russia signed a treaty that committed them to merging into a confederal state at some future point. (At the time, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia was so sick and unpopular, Lukashenko believed he might head the eventual union.)While Putin’s Russia worked hard to rehabilitate discredited Soviet symbolism, Lukashenko’s Belarus easily revived his favorite old Soviet traditions — unpaid working Saturdays called subbotniks and holidays like the Great Patriotic War’s Victory Day on May 9. By the end of the ’90s, Lukashenko controlled all executive and judicial authorities, the Central Election Commission, unions and the military and law-enforcement structures. Through a 2004 constitutional referendum, he abolished presidential term limits.In some ways, Lukashenko’s autocracy outgrew even the U.S.S.R.’s model. Belarus had no ruling party, no place to incubate rivals or create factions — the elites existed at Lukashenko’s pleasure. The president made all key personnel and economic decisions, including the appointment and dismissal of heads of cities and districts, lower-court judges and directors of major factories. The K.G.B. was never disbanded. Instead, “curators” were placed in important institutions.Because Belarus was slow to privatize, oligarchs never had much of a chance to materialize. Half of the economy remained under state control. Lukashenko instituted a short-term job-contract scheme in the state sector, which was used to target anyone who became too political. Placements in institutions of higher learning were similarly weaponized. Independent journalists were jailed intermittently and then released, the steady two-step of a repressive state.By the time Diana was in seventh grade, even she could sense it. Every year, the same droll history class on the first day of school — the Belarusian flag is red and green, the president is Lukashenko, they would intone. “Lukashenko, Lukashenko. Will we ever hear someone else’s name?” Diana joked, drawing laughter from the other students.Lukashenko’s was a soft authoritarian system, with the requisite window dressings. If you were a private nonpolitical citizen, you were unlikely to encounter the K.G.B. There was little fear of serious consequence for an ordinary citizen making a joke. People could openly talk about hating the president in cafes; they could make fun of his often nonsensical ramblings. They could mock his mustache, his combover and his rural accent.There were small, unpopular opposition parties, which were allowed to rent office space in the capital. They registered for elections. There was no personality cult — no portraits, streets or statues dedicated to the Great Leader. Instead, the regime relied on technicalities, like an article in the criminal code covering insults to the president, which it used to persecute critics. The authorities rarely shuttered publications outright, preferring to impose crippling fines instead.But most crucially, for well over a decade, Lukashenko was genuinely popular. A level of propaganda undergirded his rule, reinforcing the perception of a social pact in which the state would provide for the citizen. Lukashenko relished his supporters’ calling him Batka — Father. Most experts agree he would have won elections without rigging them. Belarus’s economic growth hovered in and around the double digits. The economy was buttressed by money the state earned refining duty-free Russian oil and gas and reselling it. Excluding the Baltics, Belarus was the former Soviet republic with the highest standard of living. Belarus’s per capita G.D.P. was nearly twice that of neighboring Ukraine. Life expectancy was higher than in Russia.For a long time, Belarusians had some faith in their justice system. Everyone knew there were two parallel tracks — cases involving the government and everything else. The country had escaped much of the petty corruption of the post-Soviet neighborhood — under Lukashenko, the traffic police did not make it a practice to shake down drivers; the bureaucracy didn’t operate on bribes. Courts ruled relatively impartially in civil cases. Even the political cases had a certain logic to them. Independent lawyers fumed at the sentences for activists and politicians, and international human rights groups slammed politically motivated verdicts, but only those in the “opposition ghetto,” as it was called, received outlandish sentences.The opposition itself was not very popular, embroiled in its own internal scandals — often tarred by the regime as being made up of nationalists, fascists or hooligans. They were in a minority anyway. Most citizens steered clear of anything political, and many believed what their TVs told them. Diana did her best to avoid her high school boyfriend’s brother, who she knew traveled to Minsk to attend protests. She would see people on TV scuffling with the police and throwing Molotov cocktails. “Aren’t you afraid of him?” she asked her boyfriend. What if he’s hiding something in his room, like a grenade? She tried to make sure they didn’t cross paths.When she got to university in Minsk, where she studied materials science, Diana realized she had been fooled by state television. In 2011, runaway inflation struck the country — there was a major currency devaluation, and the regime imposed price controls on basic goods and food. People in Minsk gathered to clap in civil disobedience. Diana was curious and went out to watch. The assembled were absolutely peaceful, she marveled, nothing like how they were portrayed on TV, but nearly 2,000 people were detained, more than 500 of whom were given five-to-15-day sentences.The authorities responded with their usual farce — they banned applause unless directed at veterans. They arrested a one-armed man for clapping. They accused a deaf and mute man of shouting anti-government slogans. When people started to protest by flash mob, the authorities banned standing around doing nothing in a group.Diana graduated in 2014 directly into a process-engineering job at Minsk Gear Works, part of the Minsk Tractor Works — one of Belarus’s largest manufacturers. Every morning at work, Diana opened Tut.by — the country’s most popular news portal — and read the headlines over coffee. She couldn’t open other independent media on the government computers, but Tut.by was allowed. The portal was started in 2000 by the businessman Yuri Zisser, often referred to as Belarus’s Steve Jobs, and was read by 62 percent of the population, reaching people across the political spectrum. The regime had invested heavily in telecommunications infrastructure and left most of it alone, focusing efforts on television propaganda.The year Diana started her job, Ukrainians staged mass protests that toppled the government after President Viktor Yanukovych bowed to Russian pressure and halted plans for an economic-alignment agreement with the European Union. Taking advantage of the chaos, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Fighting broke out with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. It was nonstop news in Minsk, with everyone glued to the daily developments.Lukashenko, who often played Russia and Europe against each other for his own gain, did not recognize the annexation of Crimea and refused to join the Kremlin’s boycott of the West. Since Putin’s election in 2000, relations between the two presidents had been strained. Russia subsidized the Belarusian economy and by extension kept Lukashenko in power, but Lukashenko rarely made it easy for the Kremlin. Belarus was an important transit country for Russian gas exports to Europe, and Lukashenko knew Putin was loath to see political instability along the border. For years, Putin had pushed for closer ties, economic and military, based on the 1999 union agreement, but Lukashenko balked. Though Belarus agreed in 2014 to join Russia’s version of the E.U., the Eurasian Economic Union, Lukashenko stalled Russian demands for a new air base in Belarus. He wavered on extending leases on two military facilities.Watching the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Lukashenko seemed to decide that an overreliance on the Kremlin could lead Belarus to the same fate. He flirted with the European Union and the United States and began a limited political liberalization, marketing Belarus as a Slavic Switzerland — a neutral country where negotiations and peace talks, like the Minsk Accords for a cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, could be held. Most Belarusians agreed — they didn’t want to be part of the E.U., nor did they want to merge with Russia. The status quo was fine.Lukashenko began to tolerate more expressions of Belarusian national identity, encouraging the Belarusian language, elements of pre-Soviet history and national symbols, like traditional embroidery on the national soccer team’s uniforms. For the first time since the 1990s, he gave a speech in Belarusian.In 2018, after a three-year state-subsidized maternity leave, Diana found it difficult to go back to the factory. Most people just sat around doing nothing but drinking tea and living the Soviet adage, “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” She had divorced her husband, a college boyfriend of two and a half years, and was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease shortly after Tima was born. She needed a job that could provide her with paid time off and sick leave.The first vacation she took, Diana and Tima went to Cyprus to sit by the sea. She was on her hotel balcony while Tima napped, when she read an article on Tut.by about the average salary in Belarus. She was shocked to learn that it was three times what she was making as an engineer at a state factory. She had been doing nails on the side ever since university, having fallen in love with it when she got her first manicure for high school graduation, and thought she could make more as a full-time nail technician in the private sector. The first thing she did when she got back to Minsk was put in her notice.Sept. 2, 2020 A gathering in the Square, not long after the election fixed in Lukashenko’s favor gave way to widespread protests.Yauhen AttsetskiDiana had been active on her building’s Telegram group chat as soon as she moved into her apartment in 2018. People were polite, willing to help out when asked — like when she had a problem with her radiator or needed to borrow a carrot to finish making soup. In March 2020, when Covid hit, Lukashenko dismissed the virus as “psychosis” that could be treated with a shot of vodka, a tractor ride or a sauna visit. There was no lockdown, and citizens were left to fend for themselves. The residents’ chat exploded with news — true and false. When people began damaging the elevator by using their keys to press the buttons, other residents implored them to use their knuckles. Arguments broke out.Stepan Latypov, who lived on the 16th floor, chimed in. He explained that he was an arborist and took it upon himself to message the group with information. Hospitals were running out of supplies, infection rates were spiking, doctors were being silenced for speaking the truth and deaths were being covered up. Stepan, an outgoing 41-year-old divorcé with a pet hedgehog, posted photos of oxygen cylinders and explained that he had three in his apartment. If anyone needed them in an emergency, they could write to him.Vasili Logvinov, a 38-year-old computer programmer on the 13th floor, followed along avidly. He and his wife had a toddler. Vasili had never really bothered to meet any of his neighbors before but was relieved to learn that there was someone in the building they could trust.In April 2020, a group of activists started ByCovid-19, a crowd-funded volunteer initiative that raised 370,000 euros to purchase 450,000 pieces of personal protective equipment, oxygen cylinders, oxygen splitters, pulse oximeters and more. The regime could have blocked the effort in a pen stroke, but instead the Health Ministry coordinated with ByCovid-19. State TV praised their work. It was the largest and most successful civic action that Belarusians had ever coordinated.Covid was the great equalizer — it was impossible to stay detached, to maintain maya hata s krau. The regime must have sensed that something was amiss, that the social contract Batka had relied on for so long was fraying.After the elections were scheduled for August, a handful of new candidates with no political experience announced that they would run. Sviatlana’s husband, Sergei, the populist video blogger, traveled the country talking to ordinary citizens, documenting poverty and highlighting the failures of the regime. He carried around a slipper and shouted, “Stop the cockroach!” Diana found him crude, and like many young professionals, she preferred Viktor Babariko, the chairman of Belgazprombank. Vasili, the coder, preferred Valery Tsepkalo, a former diplomat who started Hi-Tech Park in 2005, Belarus’s successful version of Silicon Valley.No one understood where these neophytes had come from. Rumors swirled that they were Russian plants sent to remove Putin’s disdained ally. After Lukashenko distanced himself from Russia in the wake of the Crimean annexation, Moscow had shown its ire. The Kremlin tried to increase the price Belarus paid for oil, while Belarus tried to raise gas transit taxes. Lukashenko repeatedly complained that the Kremlin was trying to bully Minsk into a union with Russia. As relations deteriorated, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became the highest-level U.S. official to visit Belarus in decades. When the presidential campaign began, Lukashenko openly accused Russian oligarchs and “higher” people of interference. He detained 33 mercenaries from a Kremlin-linked security contractor, the Wagner Group, whom he claimed had been dispatched to depose him.By mid-July, all three candidates had been removed from the ballot — two were in jail, and one fled the country in anticipation of his own detention. The campaigns united under Sviatlana, who was running on three demands — release of political prisoners, curtailed powers for the president and free elections. Charismatic and earnest, she was adored for her image as a Decembrist’s wife — women who had given up their lives and followed their husbands to exile in Siberia.The day of the vote, Diana waited in line for hours at her polling place. Sviatlana’s Telegram channel had asked supporters to come with a white ribbon so independent observers could keep track of them. Around her, everyone was wearing white bracelets, some made of torn shirts, even medical gauze. A platform called Golos, a word that means both vote and voice, asked everyone to take photos of both sides of the ballot paper and then upload them to the platform, which would provide an alternative poll count. Diana took photos of her ballot as Golos requested.The next day the Central Election Commission announced preliminary results that Lukashenko had won with 80 percent. Golos later tabulated that Sviatlana won at least 56 percent of the vote. If the results had been less lopsided, perhaps nothing would have happened, but now there was a general feeling of indignation: Did they really expect people to doubt their own eyes? Did they really think Belarusians would accept this outrageous figure meekly? In seven years of relative liberalization, as Belarusians like Diana had come of age, they had forgotten what totalitarianism was capable of.September 2020 Police officers and opponents of President Aleksandr Lukashenko at the Square in Minsk, Belarus.Valery Sharifulin/AlamyFor three days, the wide boulevards and tidy parks of downtown Minsk were full of protesters, most of whom had ventured into the streets for the first time. They were met by riot police, tear gas and stun grenades so loud the residents could hear the echoes in their homes. The authorities cut off the internet — the only way to understand what was happening was to go outside.One of Diana’s neighbors, a mother in her 40s, drove downtown with a friend. On one corner, she watched five siloviki beat one unarmed protester. On another, she saw two young men running away as the siloviki sicced dogs on them. At a junction, a silovik in full riot gear was running after someone; when he missed the protester, he started beating the mother’s car instead. She curled into a ball and waited for the assault to end. She had never had a reason to fear the siloviki before.Nearly 7,000 protesters were arrested in four days. Hundreds were beaten and tortured. Lukashenko called protesters “drug addicts” and “prostitutes.” Human Rights Watch documented prolonged stress positions, electric shocks and threats of rape. The group counted broken bones, cracked teeth, skin abrasions, inflicted electrical burns, kidney damage and traumatic brain injuries. It was an unprecedented level of brutality by the regime. On the fourth day after the election, hundreds of women carrying flowers formed a chain in the central market in Minsk, twisting Slavic misogyny in their favor. The siloviki didn’t know what to do — could they beat the women or arrest them or what?That night, Stepan messaged the building chat that they should do something, but there was so much fear, no one knew what would be safe. They decided to shout “Long live Belarus! Leave!” from their windows. The next night, Diana joined a small group gathered by the building entrance. Everyone was timid and anxious, but they shouted and waited. Nothing happened. The night after that, they ventured to the children’s playground and shouted slogans from there. The following day, they called to their neighbors to join them.In mid-August, the buildings woke up to the D.J. mural. Stepan messaged the building chat that everyone should come to the playground. Residents arrived with thermoses. They hung red and white ribbons on their fence and began to gather for tea every night. A few mornings later, the building chat pinged with a message:“The mural was painted over.”“The paint is not very good!” someone replied. “Looks like the municipal workers saved money and mixed the paint with water!”“Let’s wash it off!”Diana was already at the salon, but Vasili joined a dozen others with rags and water. The paint rubbed off easily. The D.J.s re-emerged from the gray background.In the chat, meanwhile, others were composing a letter:Dear Citizen of the Republic of Belarus constantly painting over the current mural with persistence worthy of another use,We appreciate your hard work, whether you work under compulsion or out of personal conviction. After all, we ourselves had to work hard to build these beautiful houses, playground and this exit from the parking lot that our authorities dislike so much. We appreciate all work and even though we don’t agree with you, we want you to be happy. It hurts to see the camera recordings where you have such a sad face. Smile. Go to the coffee house at 62 Chervyakova Street. There is paid coffee and cookies for you and your comrade. Every labor should bring joy. (Thank you for putting down a tarp.)— Tenants of the yard.They hung it next to the mural and waited.By the end of August, Lukashenko’s system seemed to be teetering. Hundreds of thousands of citizens had joined weekly Sunday marches demanding a recount. State-run factories held walkouts. Siloviki publicly handed over their badges. State-TV journalists resigned or even dared to air segments devoted to the protests. On a visit to Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant, Lukashenko was greeted with loud boos and shouts of “Leave!” He appeared shaken and vowed that they would have to kill him first.One Sunday march, Lukashenko reportedly took to the skies in a helicopter, buzzing over the crowds. He returned to the presidential palace and stalked the grounds brandishing a Kalashnikov with his 15-year-old son, Nikolai, wearing a bulletproof vest and condemning the “rats.”Neighborhood and building courtyard chats had proliferated around Minsk to coordinate smaller actions. Residents of Diana’s building sewed giant red-and-white flags and hung them off the balconies, spanning four floors. Then Stepan, the arborist, strung up a home-sewn red-and-white flag between two buildings, using children’s socks stuffed with uncooked rice as weights. Almost immediately, a fire truck arrived to take it down, but the firefighters couldn’t figure out how to get on the roof. They sat in their truck all night, waiting. By morning, one line had sagged, and they were able to cut the rope. But they still couldn’t get on the second building’s roof to cut the line on the other side, so they left to find a door cutter. Stepan quickly pulled the cut side back up again. When the siloviki returned with the fire truck, dressed in all black, the whole group stormed the building. “Look, it’s Special Operation Flag!” residents taunted on their neighborhood chat.And so it became a routine. Each time the municipality painted over the mural, the residents came right back down to wipe the paint off. Whenever they cut down the ribbons on the fence, the group put them back up again. One day in September, the residents had to wash the paint off twice in one day. At some point the authorities seemed to tire of cutting the ribbons and a man came with a blowtorch and burned them instead. Someone had made a Square of Change sign in the same style and lettering as all the street signs in Minsk, white letters against a blue background. When the authorities knocked it down, residents nailed it back.People had started making pilgrimages to the Square, taking photos of themselves against the famous backdrop. Visitors left gifts — candies, honey, cookies and notes of support. They came from other parts of Belarus or as far away as Moscow and Vilnius. A Belarusian American from Florida visiting Minsk came to take a photograph. Someone programmed “Square of Change” into Yandex — the Russian Google Maps equivalent, which is widely used in Belarus — and it was official.The Square became its own universe. It had a Telegram channel, an Instagram account and a Facebook page. There were Square of Change sweatshirts and stickers. Dozens of residents would gather there every evening. Unlike the Minsk streets or weekly citywide Sunday marches, where people continued to be detained, the courtyard felt safe, like an island of freedom where residents could create the community they had long been denied.Sept. 11, 2020 Police officers near the D.J.s mural during patrols in the Square.Yauhen AttsetskiOne day in the middle of September, the authorities returned to the mural. This time, Stepan and a few others stood in front of the booth, blocking their access. Stepan asked the officers wearing balaclavas to identify themselves. “If you show your credentials, we will, of course, follow the orders of any policeman,” Stepan repeated loudly and calmly, his hands behind his back. Two siloviki in ski masks grabbed him and carried him away. Residents blocked the police car with their bodies and filmed the whole encounter. “Take off your mask!” they shouted. “Show your face! Introduce yourselves! This is our children’s playground!” An unmarked van pulled up, and a group of men in green, wearing ski masks, ran out. They grabbed Stepan, threw him in the van and sped off.That night, the residents gathered to discuss what happened. Diana thought maybe he would be held overnight, maybe for a few days at most. But the following week, Stepan was still in detention, and state television ran a program saying prosecutors knew he was planning to poison the police. They accused him of being the organizer of the Square of Change and said they found chemicals and murderous plans in his house.Everyone was incredulous. The group decided that they would show the authorities who the real organizers were. They printed masks with Stepan’s face on them and took photos: “We are all Stepan Latypov,” they posted on Instagram.But the initial optimism was fading. Peaceful marches were shrinking as attendance became more dangerous. During the postelection melee, Sviatlana had been detained and forced into exile in Lithuania. From Vilnius, she had started calling herself the “leader of democratic Belarus.” A quasi-state had reconstituted itself around her as other political figures, NGO workers, campaigners and civic activists fled or were driven out of the country to Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania or Poland. Those who had not fled were arrested; there were no protest leaders left in Minsk.Putin had publicly congratulated Lukashenko on his victory soon after the election, but his patron had made no other large-scale moves of support. Pragmatists knew their fate was tied to Moscow. Given the personal animosity between the two leaders and the rumors that the opposition candidates were actually Kremlin-approved plants, people thought perhaps Putin would withdraw his support for Lukashenko. Sviatlana and the opposition had taken pains to paint themselves as Russia and E.U. neutral. This had nothing to do with wanting to join the E.U. or NATO, they said — they just wanted free elections.But in mid-September, Lukashenko and Putin met in Sochi, and the Kremlin extended a $1.5 billion loan, cementing continued support for Lukashenko’s regime. Lukashenko dug in and reshuffled the security services, promoting hard-liners, and quickly began making overtures to Russia. Some of the gestures were performative — floating the removal from the Constitution of the country’s neutrality — but others were more concrete. He released the Wagner mercenaries, and the Russian National Guard reportedly signed a cooperation agreement with Belarus’s police force to combat “terrorism and extremism.”Everyone was sure there were siloviki sitting in the open chats, monitoring them. We should start a new secret chat, everyone whispered to one another when they met in the playground. But no one wanted to be the administrator; it was too dangerous. “I’ll do it,” Diana decided. She was tired of hearing everyone repeating the same thing without taking action. The secret chat quickly ballooned with enthusiasts. Diana thought it was getting too big to be secure; she had to be able to trust everyone in the chat. I am Diana, the chat administrator. I want to hear from each of you, privately or publicly. I need your real name and your photo, for security. Don’t be shy. She uploaded a photo of herself and sent it. She tried to meet everyone in person, either at the playground or on a walk. She wanted to find out who they were, what they wanted to accomplish and what skills they had that could help the Square. When it was done, about 60 people remained.Sept. 15, 2020 Constantly painted over and restored, the D.J.s were forever re-emerging as residents of the Square organized against the authorities. Yauhen AttsetskiEvery Sunday at 7 a.m., Diana wrote out the instructions: “Good morning, guys. Today is a day to be responsible. We are going to a march. Whoever isn’t going, cheer for those who are going. Those who are going: The first thing we do is clear all our history, then wipe our pictures. Good luck to everyone. We’ll meet again tonight.” She would delete the whole chat before she left the house and resurrect it at 5 p.m. with a dummy poll, something like: “How would you rate the weather? 1 to 10?”Diana previously assigned everyone in the chat a number, and whatever question she posed, each person had to reply with his or her assigned number. If someone responded with another number or didn’t reply at all, Diana assumed that person had been compromised in some way and would remove him or her from the group chat. Every night before midnight, Diana would ask everyone to check in with their numbers.In the chat, they operated as a democracy, debating future actions, voting on ideas. Diana was a natural leader, stern when she needed to be, unafraid to speak her mind, even if nearly everyone in the group was older than she was.By October, three months after the election, 16,000 people had been detained. There were 101 political prisoners. Diana instituted safeguards for the chat. If they attended a protest, they should let her know, so she could make sure they made it back. She kept a record of their screen names hidden on a piece of paper in her apartment for that day. At night, she would rip it up into small pieces.Sept. 15, 2020 Stepan Latypov, who after opposing the Belarusian authorities attempted suicide during his trial and was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.Ulf Mauder/picture-alliance/dpa/AP ImagesThe Square of Change continued to flourish. The members gathered there every evening. They held concerts and performances nearly every night. One evening, residents watched a video of the D.J.s thanking the Square. After the D.J.s’ arrests and a 10-day sentence, they had fled the country. Another night, Sviatlana called in. By November, the residents had added Saturday fairs to the weekly repertoire, bringing food, small items like handmade soaps and art for the kids. Diana had delegated many of the roles — managing content for their Telegram channel and Instagram account, creating the nightly performance schedule. There was even someone in charge of keeping track of the thermoses.In her apartment, Diana kept a prepacked bag she called a “panic suitcase” filled with items of first necessity to bring to those who were detained. She found a friend who never seemed to mind being woken up in the middle of the night to drive her to detention facilities. When someone was released, the group always greeted them with a cake made by a sympathetic pastry chef with icing that read: Hero of the Square of Change.On the night of Nov. 11, Diana heard that someone had written “Lukashenko is a sucker” in marker on the parking booth, and she went down with acetone to remove it. She hated when people did vulgar things on the Square. Roman Bondarenko, a 31-year-old store manager whom everyone called Roma for short, came up to Diana beaming. “I quit my job!” He announced happily. An interview for his dream graphic-design job earlier that afternoon had gone well. “Now I will come to the courtyard every day!”Diana first met Roma after someone speculated in a chat that he was a tihar, a plainclothes policeman, because of the way he dressed, always in black, with his hood pulled over his head. Plainclothes police officers had a habit of monitoring protests. At an earlier gathering on the Square, Diana confronted him.“Are you a tihar or not?” she asked.“Me?” He turned toward her, incredulous, his blue eyes wide and earnest. “I’m Roma! I’m not a tihar!” Roma would eventually persuade them of his sincerity when they saw him teaching their children to draw at a Saturday fair.That night by the booth, Vasili trotted over to them. “We need to leave now,” he said sharply. “Unmarked vans have arrived.” Everyone knew that meant trouble, and they decided to split up for safety. As she walked, Diana noticed strangers on the Square. They were wearing hats, hoods and face masks. After getting into a car with a friend, she messaged the chat: Guys, there are buses in the courtyard. Please do not go out. We will redo the ribbons. Let’s not go out. Everybody got it?Everyone agreed.One woman did not see the messages. She came back from the store with her child and confronted the masked men. Another woman walking by joined her. Roma watched from a window.“I’m going out,” he wrote in the chat.Seven minutes later, he wrote again. “Come out.”No one replied. Diana had the feeling something weird was going on. “Guys, what is happening?” she wrote. “Why is it so quiet?”“There was a fight, some people ran away,” they replied.“Was anyone taken?”Residents had access to the buildings’ security cameras, and they started uploading and poring over the footage. In the videos, Diana watched the masked men taunt Roma. It was clear to her he wasn’t there for a fight. Trying to protect the women, he stood with his hands in his pockets. The men started to beat him and carried him away. Diana wasn’t overly worried. It seemed like the usual detention. They would need to locate Roma and bring him the panic suitcase.They called the precinct a few times and were told there was no one by the name of Roman Bondarenko there. When they called again, they were told Roma had been there, but he had started to feel sick and was sent to the hospital. When they called the hospital, no one picked up. Diana thought maybe they broke his arm or leg when they loaded him into the bus. “We should go there and bring him some stuff,” she wrote the chat. “Give me five minutes.”A carful of them arrived at the hospital at 2 a.m. After a few tries and incorrect names, the receptionist told Diana that Roma was in surgery. But when Diana called the surgery department, they told her Roma wasn’t there.“What the hell?” Diana raised her voice. She was tired and angry. “I didn’t get this number off the top of my head! The registrar told me that a Roman came to you. All day today everyone is telling me they didn’t admit Roma.”The receptionist at the desk beckoned to Diana, passing her another number. Diana looked at her with exasperation.“I made a mistake,” the receptionist said uncomfortably. “He’s not … in surgery.”“Then where?”“Neurosurgery.”Diana started shaking. She didn’t want to think about what that meant. She took a minute to collect herself. When she called neurosurgery, she learned that Roma had been in the operating room for several hours.“He was admitted in what state?” Diana asked.“Unconscious.”“Thank you.” Diana hung up. They sat down in silence.Nov. 14, 2020 A memorial in the Square for Roman Bondarenko, who died after he was detained by the police.Yauhen AttsetskiRoma died at 7:10 p.m. the next day. All day the large Telegram channels and media carried his story. The group had left the hospital vowing that what happened to Roman Bondarenko in his own backyard would be everywhere. They spent the twilight hours finding Roma’s family to inform them. They also contacted every journalist and channel they could. By evening, the Square was crammed with people holding a vigil more crowded than any previous event.The following day, there was a minute of silence. It felt as if Minsk froze all at once. As soon as it was over, cars started beeping, and the city wailed in unison. Even more people thronged the Square with candles and flowers. “We won’t forget, we won’t forgive,” they chanted through tears.The authorities denied responsibility for Roma’s death, saying he had been killed in a fight, while Lukashenko told reporters Roma had been “drunk.” In response, someone leaked a copy of Roma’s medical records, which stated that he had no alcohol in his system. He had died of a hematoma.Telegram channels began calling for a Sunday march through the city that would end at the Square. Others called for an occupation like the one the Ukrainians had in 2014. The residents of the Square thought this was a terrible idea. “The Square is surrounded on two sides by a metal fence,” they wrote to everyone. “It will be easy for the police to trap everyone and arrest them all.” No one listened. Chat members started patrolling their own courtyard asking people to remove tents and take supplies somewhere else.That Sunday, the march was enormous. Diana watched from a balcony as people flooded the route. In the afternoon, lines of siloviki moved toward the marchers, cutting them off at different intervals. They were kettling the crowds. Diana rushed downstairs to the entryway just as people started running into the courtyard. Residents had opened the three buildings’ doors and started letting people inside, ushering them up the elevators and the stairs. “Guys, run!” Diana shouted as she watched the black wave of riot police rolling in from one side, then another. Streaks of color raced by her, hurrying through the door. She slammed it shut at the last second.But the security services soon managed to get in and started going from apartment to apartment. “They’re here,” someone would message. “They’re here too,” another would add.Since Diana had been the last one upstairs, she hadn’t taken anyone in. She, her mother and Tima sat with the lights off in silence. Her mother was terrified, but Diana wasn’t scared. Since Roma’s death, she had felt nothing but fury. “Why should we be afraid? We are in our own apartment.” Diana turned on the lights and started making noise.The chat pinged with stories. People had taken up to 20 people per flat. Some refused to open their doors. Others opened them with great theatrics.“Are there people here?” the siloviki asked.“Yes, one behind the couch, and two in the closet.”The siloviki thought they were kidding and left.Another called her priest. She explained to the seven people she was sheltering that they were congregants of such and such church on such and such street. She taught them some prayers and streamed an online sermon. When the police knocked, she opened the door.“What is this!” The officer asked, looking at the people seated in the living room.“We’re listening to the word of God,” she explained. She pushed her screen toward the officer. “Hello!” the priest bellowed.A portrait of Roman Bondarenko at his mother’s apartment. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesTwo journalists from Belsat TV, an opposition station based out of Warsaw, were livestreaming from the 14th floor. The police flew a drone above the building to find them. They cut the door off the apartment and detained them. They would be sentenced to two years in prison, the first time criminal charges would be applied to journalists covering protests. Around 100 people took shelter in the basement. They spent 16 hours hiding without heat, light and food.Some officers simply carried people to police vans, while others took the opportunity to punch and kick those they detained. Diana thought about the system that killed Roma. For so many years, they had all been part of it, paying their taxes or working directly for the state. Diana knew each person had just been trying to survive. Then they woke up and constructed the most beautiful version of their country, not just the people of the three buildings but all those people who felt this New Belarus in their hearts. When would they be able to live in that country?The morning after the march, residents woke to a police patrol that would stay on the Square 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly five months. A pair of officers stood at each building, and three pairs walked the children’s playground. The mural had been painted and repainted so often no one could say exactly how many times, but they thought it was at least 18. Now it was gone again.The police patrolled the courtyard through the winter snow and spring rain, checking people’s identification papers to make sure they were building residents. All the while, the secret chat continued to agitate. Neighborhood marches were instituted. Members of chats met with other neighborhood chats and went on short, clandestine walks. The residents of the Square staged covert actions in their stairwells, filming five floors of people, their backs to the camera, lined up with a view of the courtyard police patrol in the distance. They took photos behind the parking booth with the white-red-white flag, just under the siloviki’s noses, and posted them online. On the 12th of every month, they released a video to commemorate Roma’s death on their channels. They fantasized endlessly about resurrecting the mural.The cost of even small protests was rising. By April, there were more than 350 political prisoners. What was previously a five-to-15-day administrative detention was now indefinite pretrial detention with possible criminal charges that carried years of prison time. But if they had put their hands down, mourned and kept silent, what would have been the point of Roma’s death? Diana asked herself. No, they had to keep fighting, putting up stickers and posting photos. Small symbols had grown larger. These ciphers mattered.On April 8, 2021, the residents woke up to an empty Square — the patrols had vanished. So they started to plan. If the first few times they put up the D.J.s they had done it mostly in the open, they knew better now. They met in the parking garage at midnight on May 8, the eve of the Great Patriotic War’s Victory Day. They all had taken their own routes there to avoid the security cameras. Each one had a task — some were on lookout, others would put up ribbons, some would work on the flag and others would draw the mural. They changed into matching white hazmat suits in the parking lot, wore gloves to hide their fingerprints and grabbed the supplies. They wore headphones, tuned to the same channel and waited.When they received the signal, Diana and Vasili walked straight to the booth’s wall. Even if someone had screamed at her, Diana was sure she wouldn’t have noticed; her ears were thudding with the sound of her pulse. The D.J. stencil was big. Diana held it for Vasili, and he held it for her. He had climbed the wall and hung off a metal pipe above her. It was as if they were one unit, a mechanism working in tandem. Diana did the bottom and threw the canister up to Vasili, who grabbed it midair and began to paint. He dropped the canister down to her, and she caught it with one hand. The adrenaline hit hard, the kaleidoscopic sensation of being outside her body. They were done in four minutes.The ribbons were up, the flag was raised, the mural was repainted. They went back to the parking lot, changed and exited the way they planned. They would all walk around the neighborhood for a while, taking different routes, arriving home at different times through different entrances. They were giddy; no one had seen anything. A few hours later, photos of the mural were everywhere — on the news, on Telegram, on Tut.by. The Square of Change had returned.They were caught the following week. One participant, who went by Tanya, had violated protocol and gone home straight from the parking lot. Her face was everywhere on the security-camera footage. On Friday at 7 a.m., plainclothes police officers arrived at her door. She held them off for an hour, stalling by calling the police on the police.As word spread through the chat, people panicked. If there was one thing they were sure of, it was the ability of Belarusian security services to break the weakest link — they knew Tanya had a child with a disability, so it wouldn’t take much. They were all worried they would be next. Some started clearing their apartments of anything incriminating. Diana disconnected her buzzer to give herself time to think. She needed to be normal; she needed to take Tima to kindergarten. She went to the bathroom to take a shower. As she turned on the water, she started wiping her phone. There was pounding on the door.Diana opened it in her towel, half naked. “Hello, I’m in the shower,” she said. “Come in or stay out there, but I have to get dressed.” She went back into the bathroom and cursed to herself. She erased the chat and her contacts. She unsubscribed from opposition Telegram channels. She came out of the bathroom with a clean phone.The two men said they were from the criminal investigations department. “You know why we are here,” they said. They told her to call Vasili. She told them she didn’t have his contacts. She was showing them her clean phone when an alert flashed. It was a message from Vasili: “Someone is knocking on my door.”One of the men took Diana’s phone. “Open it, everything is fine,” he typed, and he hit send. Diana was furious but had little recourse. One of the investigators was talkative, bantering about this or that, while the other stood masked and silent in the entryway. They told her she would be coming to the station.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3The state of peace talks. More

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    Stream These Three Great Documentaries

    This month’s nonfiction picks include a surprising look at a World War II veteran and a fresh dive into footage shot during the first year of Putin’s presidency.The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.‘The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On’ (1987)Stream it on the Criterion Channel.Whatever convinced the director Kazuo Hara that it would be wise to trail Kenzo Okuzaki, the subject of “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” it’s a rationale that probably shouldn’t be repeated, if it ever could be. Yet it resulted in one of the most jaw-dropping documentaries ever filmed. Screening as part of a collection of movies by Hara (whose wildly voyeuristic “Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974,” another excellent streaming choice, shows his ex-wife giving birth on camera), “Emperor’s Naked Army” has won praise from some of nonfiction filmmaking’s biggest names. Errol Morris put it on a list of his 10 favorite documentaries, saying: “I think it’s every interviewer’s dream that in the middle of an interview, when your subject is not forthcoming, you get up out of your chair and just beat them to a pulp. Of course, that never happens — except in ‘The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On.’”The pugnacious interviewer — the man who physically pins men down during interrogations — is not Hara but Okuzaki. A World War II veteran, Okuzaki, at the time of filming, had spent more than a decade in prison for crimes that included murder and firing a slingshot at Emperor Hirohito. Now released, he is on a monomaniacal mission to learn more about the fates of some of his fellow Japanese soldiers who were killed in New Guinea after the war. The circumstances sound increasingly outlandish the more we hear, even as Okuzaki’s quest appears more unhinged (and at times darkly comic) in its single-mindedness. He even recruits people to role-play as relatives of the victims.With Hara tagging along as an observer and, by extension, perhaps an unwitting abettor, the reedy, loquacious Okuzaki, typically dressed in a suit, confronts potential witnesses and perpetrators and matter-of-factly demands that they talk, politely informing one that he came there prepared to beat him up if he does not. “When I committed a murder or when I shot at the emperor, I didn’t try to escape,” Okuzaki barks at another. “I took responsibility. But you didn’t. I hate irresponsible people.”“The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” is a journey alongside madness, an ethical quagmire and a uniquely volatile movie, one that has been difficult to stream stateside until now.‘Enemies of the State’ (2020)Stream it on Hulu.It’s difficult to describe this paranoia-suffused documentary directed by Sonia Kennebeck (and executive-produced by Errol Morris) without giving too much away. A second viewing is completely different from a first. “Enemies of the State” tries to untangle the case of Matt DeHart, an American who fled to Canada in 2013 and claimed that the F.B.I. had him physically tortured, ostensibly because he had stumbled on a bombshell revelation after spending time in hacktivist circles. His supporters were inclined to group him with Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, even though he never made his purported findings public. In the movie, only his mother, Leann, claims to have seen the files he found.But at the time DeHart fled to Canada, he had been indicted on charges of producing and transporting child pornography in the United States, in a case that he suggested had been concocted. And while some coverage of DeHart has noted the difficulties of verifying certain details — the story involves minors (on the one hand) and national security (on the other) — by the end of the film, Kennebeck has not only indicated what she thinks is true, but has also raised potent questions about confirmation bias. The movie suggests that the various agendas of DeHart’s supporters inclined them to view him in certain ways. Kennebeck prods viewers to question their own trustingness, pushing them to doubt certain interviewees, then to believe them and vice versa, and even to be skeptical of what they see. (Re-enactments synchronize original audio recordings with the lips of actors.)To say more would reveal too much, but “Enemies of the State” explains the saga with a clarity other accounts have lacked.‘Putin’s Witnesses’ (2018)Stream it on Ovid.Credit goes to the Museum of the Moving Image for introducing me to “Putin’s Witnesses,” which it screened earlier in the month. In this eerie documentary, the director, Vitaly Mansky, who was born in Lviv, Ukraine; studied film in Russia; and now lives in Latvia revisits footage he shot during the first year of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, beginning with Boris Yeltsin’s resignation on Dec. 31, 1999, a decision that elevated Putin to the position of acting president. In narration, Mansky says he started shooting the movie as P.R. for Putin’s campaign in the March 2000 election — although Putin portrays himself as being all-business, above doing the unsubstantive work of advertising or participating in a televised debate. At the same time, Mansky points out, he was always on TV. And part of what can be seen in “Putin’s Witnesses” is how people around him manufactured and softened his image. The director says he himself proposed that Putin pay a cuddly on-camera visit to an old schoolteacher in St. Petersburg.Yet Mansky sees things in the material that didn’t jump out at the time. He reflects on watching Putin with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain in the czar’s box at the Mariinsky Opera House: “It’s hard to picture the feelings of the guy raised in a St. Petersburg communal apartment, having joined the elite of the world at breakneck speed.” Mansky also spends time with Yeltsin and his family on election night and on the subsequent New Year’s Eve. Yeltsin looks increasingly perturbed at how much distance his chosen successor has put between them. Elsewhere, Mansky introduces various movers and shakers at Putin’s campaign headquarters on election night, then notes that the majority eventually either joined Putin’s opposition or were dismissed. (One of them, Anatoly Chubais, left his post as Putin’s climate envoy last week, reportedly over the war in Ukraine.)During his first year as president, Putin continues to act vaguely chummy with Mansky even as the faint rumblings of autocracy begin to be felt. Late in the movie, Putin praises the concept of being an elected leader instead of a monarch because it means a person like him can serve as president, then retreat into civilian life. “Everything you do with the state and the society today you will have to face in a few years as an ordinary citizen,” he tells Mansky. “It is a good thing to remember before taking a decision.” Those are chilling words now. More