By most measures, Obdulia Montealegre Guzmán shouldn’t be OK.

For the past 20 years, the taco vendor has joined the din of informal work in Mexico’s bustling capital – organ grinders reaching out their hats for tips, vendors weaving through busy intersections hawking bubblegum, and cooks crowding sidewalks with their mobile food stalls.

When the pandemic arrived, the streets went silent. And as clients holed up at home, informal workers like Ms. Montealegre had no source of income and little or no safety net. More than 40% of the Mexican population already lived in poverty pre-pandemic. COVID-19 landed informal workers in a “double situation of vulnerability,” according to the United Nations.

But inside a narrow market that spans three city blocks in a working-class neighborhood, where the snip-snip-snip of poultry shears competes with slow-tempo ranchero ballads from a distant boombox, Ms. Montealegre has re-imagined her makeshift stall selling prepared food and drinks at open-air markets with a slick, new business model.

Today, her team of six dresses in matching face masks, aprons, and baseball caps. Each item is emblazoned with their new brand: a mustachioed man in a sombrero, holding a taco and giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. And while she serves up steak huaraches smothered in cheese and crispy flautas to hungry shoppers, she’s keeping track of orders coming in over a new WhatsApp ordering system, and advertising on Facebook.

Ginnette Riquelme/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

On the menu at Obdulia Montealegre's street food stall in Mexico City: pambazo. Ms. Montealegre has used the second year of the pandemic to give her stall a facelift and a high-tech ordering system.

It’s a situation she hardly imagined at the outset of the pandemic, when she worried everything she and her husband had worked for might be undone. “I’m now able to say I feel capable. I feel prepared to confront problems and overcome them within my family and my business,” she says. “And above all, I feel empowered because I know I’m part of a team.”

Relearning the world, relearning yourself

A year ago, Monitor reporters across five countries met five individuals – average people like you or me – and asked them a simple question just before the first anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the coronavirus pandemic: How are you doing?

During that first year, a surprising resilience emerged amid a global crisis with no end in sight. We decided to check in with the same five people at the two-year mark as the pandemic grinds on. And while reflecting on the loss of loved ones, regretting polarization within families and society, and suffering a dulling weariness, many also speak of a new sense of agency, whether through opportunities or through changing perspectives.

The transition out of the pandemic, when the “assumptive world” has been turned upside down, is full of challenges and positive change, says Robert Neimeyer, director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition in Oregon. “We need to relearn the world, relearn ourselves in that world,” he says. “And that process is continuing for people. We are revising our personal and collective realities. And that’s a big job that’s not accomplished in two years. It’s one that is ongoing.”

Few understand adaptation like Hanen Nanaa. She and her family of nine arrived in Canada as Syrian refugees in 2016, an experience she leaned on to get her through the first year of COVID-19. But driven and dynamic, she took every opportunity the pandemic provided, going online with her nonprofit that helps other newcomers to Canada, continuing her university courses behind a computer, and networking in a suddenly limitless virtual world.

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Hanen Nanaa, a Syrian refugee in Canada, says her life was starting to return to normal, with the end of the pandemic in sight, when Russia invaded Ukraine. "It's been stressful," says Ms. Nanaa, at her campus at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto.

Still a year away from graduation, Ms. Nanaa recently landed a job in Canada’s Parliament with the ruling Liberal Party’s research bureau. A few years ago, she was learning English.

“The pandemic was really good for creating opportunities virtually for people; I met so many people across the country, and I love this. I truly believe we should keep such opportunities virtual,” says Ms. Nanaa from Toronto.

That’s not to gloss over a draining year, one in which her entire family got COVID-19. And if her experience as a war refugee gave her the perspective to handle year one of the pandemic, as year two closes, a new source of anxiety has emerged that recalls her own experience being displaced: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“One of the enemies of the Syrian people was Russia, so I feel the tragedy the Ukrainians are feeling,” she says. “Finally, we were getting back a little bit to normal life, and then a war comes. I am feeling stress and asking myself, ‘What’s next?’”

Working online has also taught her that it can be hard to slow down virtually. “I tried to make the last year busy so I could mentally be well. But of course, being busy creates other problems. ... You are not socializing with your family and loved ones, and you’re burned out.”

She also recognizes how fortunate she has been to shift to a world online when the pandemic took away livelihoods for so many – like the vast majority of Ms. Montealegre’s colleagues in the informal economy.

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

Leonard Makuya (right) and Silva Kossa, caretakers at St. James Presbyterian Church in Johannesburg, tie ribbons to the church's fence representing people in South Africa who have died of COVID-19, Jan. 21, 2022. The men have been tying these ribbons nearly every day since the pandemic began in March 2020.

A small awakening

When the pandemic struck, 56.2% of Mexicans were working in the informal sector, according to Mexico’s National Occupation and Employment Survey. The Mexican government offered some initial, very limited support like small loans for specific categories of informal workers. But to get by, most of them relied on friends and family, informal workers unions, or the generosity of strangers.

Tania Espinosa Sánchez, Mexico coordinator for WIEGO, a nonprofit advocating for informal workers’ rights, says she has watched them overcome two years of hardship. “I don’t know how they do it,” she says.

Despite the extreme challenges in one of the most unequal regions of the world, Ms. Espinosa says she’s encouraged by small signs of sympathy for workers in the informal sector.

In early February, the police in a tony Mexico City neighborhood tried to ban vendors from selling their wares on tricycles. Clearing them out as a nuisance is not uncommon, Ms. Espinosa says, but she was surprised to see this time that the workers stood their ground, standing up for their right to work by blocking streets.

When she posted her support for that protest on Twitter, she was again surprised by the support she garnered. “Before we rarely heard those voices” defending informal workers, she says. She calls it a small “awakening.”

It’s an example of a larger shift that the pandemic has brought. “We may live with less innocence and naiveté, which I think can be understood as positive,” says Dr. Neimeyer. “It moves us toward greater maturity and wisdom and compassion.”

Finding their feet again

Yet compassion has felt in short supply for many people this past year. The hope sparked in many by the discovery and availability of vaccines gave way to divisive protests like Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” over vaccine mandates and continued public health restrictions.

For Hugo Tiedje, a German actor, work has gone surprisingly well. He recalls the fear he felt the first year when his entire industry shut down around him. But by the time he graduated from theater studies in Berlin in 2021, he had found stability in a two-year position at the Luzerner Theater in Switzerland.

But his relief was tempered by family troubles over the issue of whether to vaccinate, which ramped up after his grandfather became ill with COVID-19. “The biggest change from year two over year one was the split in my family,” he says.

Courtesy of Yi-Ling Huang

Ms. Yi-Ling Huang shops in a seafood market before the Feb. 1, 2022, Lunar New Year in Taipei, Taiwan. Despite a public health setback in 2021 during which Taiwan experienced its first major COVID-19 outbreak, Ms. Huang gained a new sense of agency in the second year of the pandemic.

And many families continue to be split by physical separation. Christmas 2021 was Yi-Ling Huang’s saddest ever, she says. Her son and daughter – both students in the United States – could not return to Taiwan because of pandemic travel restrictions. It was the family’s first Christmas apart.

Without the laughter-filled family Christmas party and the aroma of grilling pork, Ms. Huang’s Taipei home felt lonely. “My husband didn’t even set up a Christmas tree,” she says.

And yet the year also brought her new confidence, she says. Her job as a real estate agent has kept her busier than ever, as the industry moved to more virtual showings. Less positive surprises intruded – after being a global standout for successful pandemic prevention, Taiwan had a brief but significant setback last summer. In some ways, though, navigating through the stress has brought her a sense of calm. “I feel much more in control than before,” she says.

Steven Taylor, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who wrote a book on the psychology of pandemics, conducted research about how Americans and Canadians perceive they are doing now. His team found that about 77% of participants reported moderate to high improvement in at least one respect, like valuing friends and family, gratitude for each day, or a greater feeling of self-reliance.

Moving forward

On a slate-gray January morning, Leonard Makuya counts out 25 pieces of blue ribbon and carries them to the barrier fence at St. James Presbyterian Church in Johannesburg, where he is the caretaker. And then, just as he has nearly every day for the last 700 days, he begins to tie the ribbons to the palisade bars, knotting one ribbon for every 10 people who have died of COVID-19 in South Africa in the preceding days.

Over time, this fence has become a kind of archaeological record of the pandemic. By now, the earliest ribbons are frayed and fading.  As the pandemic crests into its third year, the memorial has achieved a longevity its creators never planned for. But its centrality in their lives is also slowly receding.

After spending the first year of the pandemic mostly behind the church’s ribbon-covered fence, tending to its gardens and wiping dust from its unused pews, Mr. Makuya, in the second year, began to resume a more expansive version of his life.

In January 2021, he began taking driving lessons, after making a resolution to himself that this was the year he would finally learn. For weeks, he lurched up and down the road outside the church with a driving instructor, until that kind of movement began, slowly, to feel natural. 

By last spring he had a license and a zippy, yellow, two-door Opel Corsa, which he uses to drive the 350 miles home to visit his family in a rural northern area of South Africa called Venda. “It’s given me much more freedom,” he says.

If year one had been a year of stillness, then year two was one of movement.

Yet the act of moving forward, which everyone has waited for for so long, could actually be the hardest part, especially for younger adults just starting their careers and staking out their independence.

Ms. Hanaa in Toronto has always been an extrovert, so the fact that she has come to love working and studying in her room, what she calls her “zone,” concerns her. She’s been anxious about returning to life on campus, and for a woman who easily leads virtual events (last year she introduced Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at an online conference about refugees), she says the prospect of doing so in person is daunting.

“Virtually I feel so confident speaking, but when I go back to in-person, I feel shy about people looking at all of my body,” she says.

In Mexico, Ms. Montealegre’s daughter Claudia says the stress of the early days of the pandemic has in some ways marked her.

She was in the middle of college when the pandemic began, but asked to join her parents at their food stall because she didn’t want to be alone all day in the house. She has since finished school and gotten her first job. And she was the inspiration behind the branding and online ordering her parents now implement. But doing half her university degree online, seeing less of her friends than she used to, and new stresses – she mentions the war in Ukraine – weigh on her mind.

“I got to know that stress from the early days of the pandemic, and it stayed with me,” she says. “All of my peers who went through this – finishing university in a way that it’s not meant to be finished, all alone – we have this sad vibe. Not finding work, not going out with friends, it affects us all.”

She tries to focus on all that she has gained, and most of the time she’s good at that. She has perspective and knows her family has been fortunate.

An “absolute gift”

So does her mother. 

On a recent day at the market, a pair of older women in exercise clothes and baseball caps sit down at Ms. Montealegre’s stand next to two young girls playing hand-clap games. “Would you like red or green salsa?” Ms. Montealegre asks them, taking their order for three chicken flautas and a gordita stuffed with chicharron.

Her stall is one of the few that are fully set up at 9 a.m. – she and her team arrived three hours earlier to build the frame and hang the hot-pink awning, then fry meat and chop tomatoes.

Ms. Montealegre says things at work are looking more “normal” two years into the pandemic. Last year, customers would order their food to go. Now they often stay to eat, and Ms. Montealegre can once again enjoy what she likes best about running a business – small talk with diners, the thrill of juggling multiple orders and managing a team, and being part of Mexico City’s cacophony.

Looking back, she calls the pandemic “an absolute gift.” Her family grew closer, as members got to know one another on a new level, she says.

“The pandemic brought really tough moments,” she recalls, “but then it brought beautiful ones, too.”

Lenora Chu in Berlin, Ann Scott Tyson in Seattle, and Ryan Lenora Brown in Johannesburg contributed reporting to this article.

Editor's note: A detail about a personal relation mentioned in the story has been removed to respect the privacy of the parties involved.

Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (center) poses signing an official request for Ukraine to join the European Union, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 28, 2022. Though the request was warmly received in Europe amid the Russian invasion, Ukraine faces many obstacles before it is realized.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has left no doubt about where he sees his country’s future – in Europe. In an impassioned plea on March 1, Mr. Zelenskyy said that Ukraine was fighting not only for its rights, but also “to be equal members of Europe.” Just the day before, he submitted an official application to join the bloc.

European leaders have expressed their solidarity, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saying that Ukraine “is one of us and we want them in the European Union.”

But despite best intentions, there are many political and bureaucratic roadblocks to admitting Ukraine. Can its application for EU membership go beyond the symbolic?

When will Ukraine join the EU?

Probably not for several years, if ever.

While there is a minute chance that Ukraine is fast-tracked to candidate status as a gesture of goodwill, it remains highly unlikely. The EU accession process is long and arduous, requiring candidate countries to meet economic and political standards under the Copenhagen criteria.

The entire process can stretch 10 years or more, and the final decision rests with the bloc’s 27 member states, which must unanimously give the green light.

The acceptance process for Sweden, Finland, and Austria, which were seen as strong candidates when they applied, took at least three years before completion. Serbia, Montenegro, and Turkey applied for membership over a decade ago and still remain deadlocked in negotiations.

What hurdles stand in the way of Ukraine’s membership?

If Ukraine were to join the EU, it would be the poorest nation within the bloc, with a gross domestic product per capita around a third of that of formerly communist Bulgaria, the EU’s current poorest member. Ukraine would also be one of the largest in both geography and population.

The government would have to commit to major economic reforms to prove its ability to be a benefit, not a burden, to the bloc. That would be further hindered by the economic toll brought on by the current invasion.

And while European politicians could push through its application more quickly to candidate status due to the war, the conflict is likely to be the primary reason Ukraine isn’t admitted to the EU anytime soon. Territorial integrity is a major pillar of EU membership, and Ukraine’s involvement in a recent or ongoing conflict would make it an undesirable candidate.

Above all, fast-tracking Ukraine’s application would set a new precedent about how countries are granted membership, which risks undermining the process. It could be seen as an affront to those countries whose applications have stalled for decades. And long-standing expansion fatigue, worsened by Brexit and economic crises, could make member states bristle at allowing Ukraine in – quickly, or at all.

“I think the EU would grant Ukraine candidate status faster than it would under normal circumstances – as a gesture of moral, diplomatic, and political support,” says Douglas Webber, professor emeritus of political science and a Europe specialist at the Paris campus of Insead, a business school. “However, actual accession to the EU, in the best of circumstances, would take a very long time.”

Then what was the point of Ukraine’s application?

Ukraine’s application is primarily symbolic. It sends a clear message to Russia that Ukraine has no intentions of surrendering its independence and sees itself as part of Europe going forward.

“This really shows that Ukraine has set itself on the Western path, that it wants to become a democracy, and has cut off past dependence on Russia,” says Jana Juzová, a research fellow at Europeum Institute for European Policy, a think tank in Brussels. “It has explosive potential.”

Ukraine will also benefit from the political support and solidarity of EU member states, which can only help boost morale during the invasion and remind Ukrainians what they are fighting for.

“We absolutely need the Ukrainians to continue the struggle,” said Marie Mendras, a Russian specialist from Sciences Po Paris, during a meeting with the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris at the end of February. “And for that, they need to see [the light at] the end of the tunnel, which can only be Europe.”

David Zalubowski/AP

Vadim Kayrevich, a native of the Odessa region of Ukraine, holds a placard during a Feb. 26, 2022, protest against the invasion of Ukraine held outside the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. People from Russia and Belarus, which supports the invasion, have also shown support for Ukraine by protesting or displaying the Ukrainian flag.

As the smell of beef stroganoff swells before a lunch-hour rush, Halina Yatskevich reads recent reviews off a smartphone. Behind the counter of her cozy Masha and the Bear Russian Cafe, she revisits a few one-star posts that say “the whole world is against Russia” along with a call to “go home.”

The posts don’t even mention Belarus, her actual home country, which has sided with Russia in its war against Ukraine. 

Though customers are largely supportive, the posts leave her “disappointed, upset,” she says softly, finding the right words in English with the aid of a Ukrainian worker. A small blue-and-yellow flag stands nearby. “I support Ukraina,” says Ms. Yatskevich. 

Alona Kolesnyk, a Ukrainian who helps out in this Aurora cafe, says this solidarity is meaningful. Her family recently escaped Russian attacks in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. The two women share not only pale-pink shirts but the Russian language – the lingua franca of the cafe. 

There shouldn’t be hate, says Ms. Kolesnyk. “It doesn’t matter what nation you’re from.”

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Alona Kolesnyk, from Ukraine, and Halina Yatskevich, from Belarus, stand together in Ms. Yatskevich's Masha and the Bear Russian Cafe, in Aurora, Colorado, March 4, 2022. There shouldn’t be hate, says Ms. Kolesnyk. “It doesn’t matter what nation you’re from.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russophobia has seeped into everyday interactions. Emerging reports of threats, vandalism, and online trolling amount to hate-laced – and often mistaken – assumptions about complex identities. Some Russian speakers in the United States, including those with few or no ties to Russia, say they’re accused of supporting a war they actually oppose. 

Yuri Groza, a Russian American IT specialist in North Carolina who reports receiving threats via calls and texts, wants people to remember that wars eventually end. 

“You need to stay human to another human being next to you,” he says. “Because you’re still going to have to be neighbors.”

“Do Russians want war?”

In the two weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, hundreds of Ukrainian civilians have died, while more than 2 million have fled as refugees. Many Russians in Russia oppose President Vladimir Putin’s acts, even as dissent seems to grow more dangerous by the day.

From the start, the Ukrainian government, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has attempted to distinguish the Kremlin leader from the Russian people, even appealing directly to Russian soldiers.

“Do Russians want war?” Mr. Zelenskyy asked in Russian in an online video posted just before the invasion. “The answer depends only on you – the citizens of the Russian Federation.”

U.S. President Joe Biden, likewise, stated in mid-February, “To the citizens of Russia: You are not our enemy.” 

Yet not everyone appears to embrace this distinction. Russian-themed eateries in New York are reporting harassment, while vandalism of a Russian restaurant in Washington, D.C., is being investigated as a possible hate crime. Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California has raised the idea of booting all Russian students from American soil, while some National Hockey League players have reportedly faced death threats. A similar rising tide of rancor is happening in Europe.

Anti-Russian sentiment isn’t surprising, says Keith Darden, associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington. 

When the U.S. engages in an international conflict, for segments of its diverse population with ties to that conflict, “their loyalties get questioned,” says Professor Darden. Discrimination against Germans during World War I, internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, and post-9/11 scrutiny of and attacks on Muslim and Arab Americans offer extreme examples. Cold War suspicion of communists also permeated a broad swath of American life and politics.

“One person’s war”

Amid majority, bipartisan support from Americans to ban Russian oil and increase sanctions, targets of Russophobia say they’re trapped in a grim game of identity politics. 

Like Ms. Yatskevich in Aurora, Maxim Ionikh says his Red Square Euro Bistro in downtown Denver has also attracted some virtual vitriol in the form of Google reviews. That’s included a one-star review claiming the bistro “served Ukrainian children and cluster bombs,” according to a screenshot of a post that has since been removed.

Trolling aside, Mr. Ionikh says most clients of the nearly 20-year-old establishment are “extremely supportive” and ask after his family’s well-being.

“They understand that it’s not the war that the Russians are waging on Ukraine. It’s one person’s war,” says the Russian business owner. However, he says incessant questions about the conflict and where he stands have drained him emotionally.

“It’s a sore subject, really,” says Mr. Ionikh, noting that his grandfather was Ukrainian and he still has family in Russia. 

Mr. Groza, the Russian American IT specialist, also describes a complex background, with Belarusian, Kyrgyz, and Ukrainian ancestry.

“I don’t even think that my identity or heritage have to do anything with me saying that war is bad,” says the U.S. citizen. “Any sane person would say war is bad.”

As a Facebook administrator for groups catering to local Russian speakers, he says he’s used to blowback for attempts to moderate content. But nothing has compared to the past two weeks. Since the invasion, Mr. Groza says he’s received multiple threatening calls and texts. Concerned for his safety, he’s pursuing recourse through local law enforcement and the court system. 

For Soviet-born Maria Petrenko, hostility has taken on subtler hues. The owner of Hadrout Advertising and Technology, a web design and digital media agency in metro Detroit, says she employs some designers and developers in Russia. 

“There’s definitely a worry and mistrust and confusion” from most clients, says Ms. Petrenko, adding that she left Russia in the late ’90s on a university scholarship to study in the U.S. Lately, she says she must constantly clarify her anti-war position at the start of business meetings, which she sees as irrelevant to her work.

But the scrutiny extends beyond her business day. On a recent morning as she dropped off her child at day care, she says a man approached and asked her something about what “you guys” were doing in Ukraine.

“I said, Who are ‘you guys’? I’m dropping off my kid in Farmington Hills, Michigan,” she recalls. “Like, what ‘guys’ are you talking about?”

“Crying slow tears”

To be sure, some of the U.S. populace does support the Putin regime. And part of the mistrust and hatred directed against Russians comes from Ukrainians incensed by the war, say a few sources interviewed. It’s also true that not all Russian Americans say they’re taking direct heat. 

There’s Nina, for instance, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and arrived in Colorado with her mother in 1998. She says she’s only received support – even from people unaware of her Ukrainian heritage on her mother’s side. 

Outside the Colorado State Capitol one recent blustery afternoon, she stands in a crowd calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Her gloved hand holds a fistful of sunflowers – a symbol of solidarity.

​​“I guess I’m tired of sitting at home, crying slow tears,” she says as passing cars honk. Still, deciding to join the Denver rally wasn’t easy. 

“I’ve never protested before,” she admits. “I was afraid that people would start asking me questions like, Do I belong here?” 

Editor's note: This story has been updated to remove Nina's last name and photograph due to security concerns.

As the Velvet Revolution raged in Czechoslovakia against communist one-party rule in 1989, famed hockey goalie Dominik Hasek and teammates squeezed into a Skoda to join pro-independence protests in Prague.

When Washington Capitals left-winger Alex Ovechkin, a Russian, took a far more nuanced stance about his country’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Hasek squared up on Twitter.

He labeled the star puck-handler an “alibist” for refusing to denounce President Vladimir Putin’s claims of a defensive attack, and called for the National Hockey League to expand a growing umbrella of sports sanctions by suspending Russian player contracts. 

Mr. Ovechkin, in particular, is in a vise, not least of which is that he plays at a rink just a stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol. For one, his decision to call for peace may have put him at odds with new crackdowns on speech back home. Yet he also counts Mr. Putin as a friend – and his Instagram page still boasts a picture of the two men.

Growing sports sanctions underscore the tension between fairness to an individual and a need for collective action in the face of atrocities like the kind occurring in Ukraine, where a children’s and maternity hospital was bombed Wednesday.

“Here we have athletes – including Russian Paralympians – paying the consequences, and that feels atrocious on some level, even immoral,” says Sergey Radchenko, author of “Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy.” “But on the other hand, Russia has pursued a brutal, immoral war, and so then do you host Russian athletes like nothing is happening? It’s a clash of moralities that’s very hard to reconcile.”

Pressure is growing for leagues to sanction not just Russia, but individual players. Russian athletes have been barred this year from both the Paralympics and the World Cup. The Russian owner of an English Premier League team has seen the club’s sale frozen – and no new tickets can be sold. An international cat association even banned Russian cats.

“I think international hockey should say, ‘We’re not gonna let [Russians] play in the world junior hockey tournament’” this summer, Canadian hockey great Wayne Gretzky said last week in a TNT interview.

George Orwell once called sports “war minus the shooting.” Hockey offers a particularly mythic backdrop. The underdog victory of the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team against the Soviets at Lake Placid in 1980, after all, is known as the Miracle on Ice.

Nick Wass/AP

A sign is held up showing Vladimir Putin and Washington Capitals' Alex Ovechkin during warmups before an NHL hockey game between the Capitals and the Seattle Kraken, Saturday, March 5, 2022, in Washington.

The NHL features players from the Arctic hockey halo, from Toronto to Kyiv. It has cut business ties to Russian firms. But it has defended its Russian players, adding extra protection because of what the league calls verbal threats and attacks on them.

As the war grinds on in Ukraine, tensions on the ice are mounting. After someone displayed a Ukrainian flag at last Thursday’s Capitals home game, the team banned fans from carrying Ukrainian or Russian flags in the stands. On Wednesday, it issued a statement condemning the Russian invasion and “loss of innocent life.” It also offered its “full support of our Russian players and their families overseas.”

So far, the 41 Russian players in the NHL have remained muted about Russia invading its neighbor. One posted a “No War” poster, with the caption “Stop it!” Carolina Hurricanes forward Andrei Svechnikov toyed with making a public statement, but decided to take more time to think about it. That was last week.

And while Mr. Hasek found Mr. Ovechkin’s comments mealy-mouthed, the younger hockey star did publicly call for peace. 

“Nobody likes the war,” says Daniel Milstein, a Ukrainian-born sports agent who has become a key conduit of Russian and Ukrainian talent into the NHL. It’s not right, he says, to discriminate against an individual player because of their nationality. “Their lives,” he says, “are being threatened.” 

But the case of Mr. Ovechkin is particularly fraught.

While he has argued he is just an athlete with pride of country, Mr. Ovechkin has publicly stumped for Mr. Putin.

In 2017, he started the “Putin Team” ahead of the Russian elections. When he got married, Mr. Putin sent congratulations that were read on Mr. Ovechkin’s wedding day.

That puts Mr. Ovechkin under more pressure to speak out, especially given concerns about players’ families back home in Russia.

“In some ways Ovechkin, precisely because of his ... being such a Putin buddy, has a greater form of freedom here, a greater space of activity, of action,” says Andrei Markovits, co-author of “Gaming the World.”

Sports and stature

Analysts say Mr. Putin sees athletic endeavor as symbolic of Russia’s stature and ambition.

The fall of the Soviet Union hit its sports community hard. In the mid-1990s, an American sports promoter found the remnants of the Red Army team playing in a dingy night club. 

Mr. Putin has worked to resurrect the glory days, using Russian hockey players as backdrops. 

In 2019, he suited up for an “all-star” game featuring former NHL stars Pavel Bure and Slava Fetisov. Mr. Putin reportedly scored eight goals. The Kremlin issued a correction the next day. It claimed Mr. Putin had actually scored 10 goals.

He joins other authoritarian leaders who have come to understand that “the Olympics [and other global sports events] become a form of nationalistic orgy, because it’s such an aphrodisiac, such an unbelievable drug,” says Mr. Markovits, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.

But that is also what sports organizations are aiming for as they join a global sanctions movement aimed at undermining support for the Ukraine conflict on Russian streets from Novosibirsk to Nizhny Novgorod.

Sports sanctions can work. When South Africans were polled ahead of a 1992 referendum to end apartheid, several questions focused on the country’s athletes being barred from world sports bodies because of their government’s support of a racist system. 

The sanctions created an environment where, as Nelson Mandela once said, South Africa became “the skunk of the world.” 

But this is a different dynamic, says Stuart Kaufman, a political scientist at the University of Delaware in Newark.

“The problem with these kinds of measures is that it wouldn’t affect the awareness of the Russian people very much,” says Mr. Kaufman, author of “Modern Hatreds.” They could also backfire, he says.

Sanctions, he adds, “are potentially relevant as far as building a broader movement, but the only thing that is going to hit Russian public opinion would be if the 2026 Olympics don’t have a Russian hockey team at all. That’s the kind of blunt force symbolic measure that would be needed.”

At least one Russian, however, says that sanctions against Russian athletes “may change the calculus” of how Russians perceive the war – and their support for it.

“I am in deep opposition to Putin, but at the same time, as a Russian, I realize that sanctions are applied to all of Russia, so I then reap the consequences of the government’s actions,” says Mr. Radchenko, in a phone interview from London. “Whether it’s fair or not, it’s hard to avoid.” 

Reuters

A banner welcomes Chile's incoming president, Gabriel Boric, to his new residence in Santiago, March 8.

 In manner and style, Gabriel Boric has not changed since becoming president-elect of Chile three months ago. He still walks through his scruffy Santiago neighborhood in shorts and hiking boots. Patrons at a local lunch shop now call his favorite sandwich – avocado and tomato with extra mayonnaise – “el presidente.” When he takes the oath of office March 11, he won’t be wearing a tie. “We represent fresh air, youth, novelty,” he told BBC.

At a time when faltering governance in Latin America is tilting public support toward authoritarian rule, Mr. Boric represents something else, too: the possibility that societies, like individuals, are more open to reinvention through a commitment to widely shared values.

Mr. Boric has become the new face of a country striving for change not by abandoning democracy because of its shortcomings, but through a determination to realize its potential. Just 10 years ago, he was a prominent student protester. His presidential campaign arose in part from demands for a new constitution drafted and approved by the people.

Chile has the most stable economy in Latin America. But it is also one of the world’s most imbalanced. The richest 1% own a quarter of the country’s wealth. To fix that, Mr. Boric has promised to raise taxes to pay for, among other things, universal health care. Yet such liberal goals face hard economic realities. The pandemic has resulted in higher inflation rates and slower growth.

He also faces political obstacles. His party holds small minorities in both chambers of the Congress. He has already backed off his proposals to ease immigration requirements.

But Mr. Boric enters office with strong tail winds as well. The youngest person ever elected president, he also garnered the most votes in history. His agenda is deeply rooted in the feminist wave that has gathered strength across the region in recent decades. He enters office with Chile’s first predominantly female Cabinet.

He acknowledges that revolutionaries are not historically well known for patience and consensus-building. “I always start with trust in people and in the idea that we all want to build a better country,” he told a conference of business executives in January. “Radicalism is not in who shouts the loudest. The changes we are aiming at must be carried out with a broad dialogue and without exclusions – with gradualness and fiscal responsibility.”

It is not just neckties that the new president eschews. He has said he will continue to live in his modest home in one of Santiago’s grittier barrios rather than in the presidential mansion. In Chile, a radical agenda of humility in governance may be starting.