Wali has no Ukrainian ancestry and doesn’t speak the language. But when the former Canadian army sniper heard that Russia had launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine and its civilians, he quickly terminated his contract as an IT programmer in Quebec and packed his bags.

Today, Wali (a nickname he uses to protect his identity) finds himself in eastern Ukraine on the banks of the Dnipro River with a group of foreign fighters who heeded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s call to join an “international brigade.” Over 20,000 foreigners have expressed interest in fighting, according to the government.

“For me it’s simply that a country, a fascist government, invaded another country, and I can’t stand that,” says Wali, who flew to Warsaw and linked up with like-minded Canadians in Poland before crossing the border into Ukraine. “Ukrainians are not perfect, but in this matter, they really are the victim.”

That sense of injustice and moral clarity is shared by a constellation of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans who have found their way to Ukraine, ready to fight, in recent weeks.

The willingness of individuals – with or without combat experience – to join the war effort and potentially sacrifice their lives has evoked romantic memories of past conflicts in which foreign fighters were lauded as being on the right side of history, notably the American and Spanish civil wars. And, indeed, many say they have responded to Ukraine’s call to arms out of a desire to protect Ukrainians or to fight injustice.

Courtesy of Wali

Wali says he considered going to Ukraine during previous flare-ups in the Donbass, but it was the Russian invasion that sealed his decision. “For me it’s simply that a country, a fascist government, invaded another country, and I can’t stand that,” he says.

But they also speak of what they are risking to make the journey to Ukraine, and what consequences they or their loved ones might face. At least among the volunteers with whom the Monitor spoke, the desire to fight seems to be born out of the perception that this conflict is not just “close to home,” but also directly threatens their homes.

“It’s my duty”

That sentiment runs particularly strongly among Europeans.

The war is “practically at France’s door,” says Sabrina, an unemployed security guard from Montpellier, France, who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy. She has never fired a gun and would have to leave a 16-year-old son behind if her application is successful. “It’s possible that it won’t stop there,” she says of the conflict. “If I can do something to help people” in Ukraine, she says, “I can protect my kids here.”

Gael Centro, a divorced father with zero military experience living near La Rochelle, France, feels the same way about protecting his four children, aged 6 to 18. “I’m ready to fight so that they don’t have to experience what people in Ukraine are experiencing,” says Mr. Centro, who is processing a new passport in order to go to Ukraine.

Joe, who didn’t give his last name for security reasons, fought in the French Foreign Legion for 10 years before launching a business in Lyon. The conflict in Ukraine struck a chord in him that others did not. Last week, he waved goodbye to his wife and 8-year-old son.

“It’s my duty to help the innocent people who are being killed in Ukraine every day,” he says before joining a Ukraine-bound convoy. Three fellow passengers shared his willingness to sign the three-month government contract that awaits them in Ukraine.

Others on the convoy are seeking different ways to contribute to the war effort, but all are cleareyed about the risks. “Everyone in this car is scared,” says the convoy’s organizer, Franck Juliard, who left his job as a boxing instructor and five children in Nantes. “It might just be a one-way trip.”

Mr. Juliard partially regrets telling his 5-year-old the truth about where he was going. The mother of his children – from whom he is separated – told him their son has been suffering recurrent headaches and fever, and can’t stop crying since he left.

“But I owed him the truth,” he says. “I didn’t want him to suddenly not hear from me and think his father had abandoned him.”

Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

Fighters from the United Kingdom pose for a picture at the main train station in Lviv, Ukraine, March 5, 2022, as they prepare to depart toward the front line in the east of Ukraine following the Russian invasion.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has strongly discouraged French citizens from visiting Ukraine for any reason, but that hasn’t swayed the thousands who have joined Facebook groups in the last week in hopes of going to Ukraine to fight against Russia. One private Facebook group, French Volunteers in Ukraine, now has over 11,000 members.

The number of people who have left is hard to verify. The Ukrainian Embassy in France has only said, “There is a very large demand from French citizens.” According to those leaving or trying to leave for Ukraine, small groups of five to 15 people are departing in private caravans on a regular basis.

Combat vets and greenhorns

For Colorado native David King, getting to Ukraine was a solo endeavor. Officials at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, he says, verified his combat experience as a helicopter pilot and accepted his application. They offered no logistical or financial help beyond the coordinates of his destination and a contact in Ukraine.

He sold his truck to finance his flight from the United States to Warsaw. “I brought my own gear,” he says, dressed in green camouflage pants and a hoodie with the U.S. flag.

“Everything to get here is out of my own pocket. It has cost me about every dollar I have,” he explains during a train journey to the Polish town of Przemyśl, a gateway to Ukraine. “We’ll see what kind of support we have out there. Hopefully more than one American will come to Ukraine.”

Mr. King says seeing the suffering of Ukrainian women and children on the news jolted him into action – he had nothing better to do and trusts Jesus to keep him safe. Salvos of expletives betray his excitement about fighting the Russians.

“I’m not here to be cannon fodder,” he stresses. “I’m not going to just go out there and be used as a sacrifice so that a country can say, ‘Look, we have an American soldier that died fighting for us.’ No, I’m going to come in here just like special forces do. I’m going to build a guerrilla unit.”

Not everyone has such a clear sense of mission. British citizen William Farquhar is still mulling it over in northeast England, and admits he would likely skip such an adventure if he had a wife. With no combat experience, the idea of fighting Russians gives him less of a thrill.

“I don’t want to go over there to kill Russians necessarily, but I want to go over there and stop the Russians from killing innocent people,” he says. “I’m not a Rambo figure or a glory hunter. I just want to try and do my bit.”

Monika Rebala

David King, a Colorado native with experience flying Apache helicopters, poses on a train from Warsaw to the Polish border. He says he sold his truck to finance his flight to Poland. “Everything to get here is out of my own pocket. It has cost me about every dollar I have,” he says.

Legally, Ukraine’s foreign volunteer fighters are entering murky territory. Foreign fighters can be considered mercenaries, nonstate actors such as terrorists and extremists, or volunteers like those headed to Ukraine, says Maya Mirchandani, a senior fellow and an expert on insurgencies at the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank in New Delhi. “All of them are governed by different codes of conduct on the battlefield and different regulations.”

Complicating matters, Moscow says that it will treat any foreign fighters captured fighting for Ukraine as mercenaries, or unlawful combatants. In other words, Russia will not grant them protections due under the Geneva Conventions, including the immunity from prosecution normally accorded to soldiers because they were doing their job.

“A mercenary is somebody primarily motivated by financial gain,” says Sandra Krähenmann, a legal expert at Geneva Call and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. “So the people who are volunteers in Ukraine would not qualify as mercenaries, but they run the risk that Russia would treat them as such.”

Western governments indulgent

French law is clear on mercenaries: They are illegal. Nonetheless, the French Foreign Legion, created in 1831 to enlist foreigners, has been sympathetic to the 700 Ukrainians in its ranks; it granted them a 15-day special leave to ensure their relatives’ safety, though they are not authorized to fight in Ukraine.

Some may be doing so anyway. Rumors abound of Ukrainian legionaries deserting to go home and fight. Earlier this month the authorities in Paris stopped a bus on its way to Ukraine carrying 14 Ukrainian Foreign Legion soldiers; five of them had gone AWOL.

Canada forbids its citizens from taking part in military activities against a friendly country; it appears unlikely that Canadians will be prosecuted if they do decide to fight in Ukraine.

“We understand that people of Ukrainian descent want to support their fellow Ukrainians and also that there is a desire to defend the motherland, and in that sense it is their own individual decision,” Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly told reporters. “Let me be clear: We are all very supportive of any form of support to Ukrainians right now.”

Across Canada, Ukrainian organizations have mobilized to raise funds to send to the people of Ukraine and to foreign fighters willing to join the cause. Wali, who served in Afghanistan and fought alongside Kurds against the Islamic State in northern Iraq, says his loved ones have been more understanding of his desire to fight against Russia than any other enemy.

“ISIS was far away, right?” he says. “It was terrible, but it was small. They could not threaten the world’s security or the future of the economy of Canada. My perception is people feel that these things that are happening in Ukraine can influence and bring consequences, terrible consequences, to the way we live.”

His wife was not pleased at first. But now she understands.

“I think there was a shift in the mindset in the Western world, that at some point we cannot just wait for Russia and Putin to be good guys, and something has to be done to stop them,” he says over WhatsApp. “This shift happened in my family as well.”

Michael Sohn/AP/File

Wind turbines turn behind a solar farm in Rapshagen, Germany, Oct. 28, 2021. As Europe looks to end its import of Russian fossil fuels it is considering renewable energy sources like wind and solar. But those are not able to offset the difference in the short term, experts say.

When Russian tanks and soldiers moved into Ukraine, it opened eyes across Europe that energy independence and a transition to green sources aren’t just a matter of environmental concern. They’re a matter of national security.

Nowhere is evidence of that wake-up call more apparent than in Germany, whose capital city of Berlin is some 500 miles from the Poland-Ukraine border. Having already halted a long-awaited Russo-German natural gas pipeline in the run-up to the war, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz quickly declared that the country must wean off Russian energy supplies, while the European Commission announced plans to buy two-thirds less Russian natural gas by year’s end.

This energy wake-up call will take Germany and Europe to new and unfamiliar places. To deal with immediate shortages in supply, the continent will likely be forced to fall back on a mix of undesirable but proven fuels such as coal and nuclear. In the longer term, the danger exposed by the war in Ukraine may spur into action governments, industries, and consumers who have been all too comfortable pushing climate change action toward the horizon, say energy experts.

“We’ve got a three-front war – a pandemic, a shooting war in Ukraine, and a climate crisis,” says retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, former commanding general of the U.S. First Army and an environmental protection advocate. “Now is the time for us to think bigger and more strategically than Ukraine because the Earth is warming. How do we lift the gun from our heads from weaponization of fossil fuels – and at the same time how do we cool the Earth?”

Stepping back to step forward

Germany has a long and complex history of relations with Russia, and is suddenly conscious that it cannot rely on Russian fossil fuels. How does it wean itself off a reliably cheap source of energy imports?

Not easily, say the experts.

Germany imports about 60% of its energy, according to the World Bank, with about half its natural gas and coal needs coming from Russia, as well as a third of its oil. Even more reliant on Russian imports are about half a dozen European countries, including Finland, Bulgaria, and Latvia, with Bosnia-Herzegovina and North Macedonia 100% reliant.

Two weeks ago, in an emergency Sunday morning policy speech after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Scholz said “forward-looking energy policy” is crucial for the economy, climate, and security. This week, he also said that alternatives to Russian energy are not quickly forthcoming. “There is currently no other way to secure Europe’s supply of energy for heat generation, for mobility, for power supply, and for industry,” he said. The EU has made a “conscious decision” to continue to buy Russian energy, he said in a separate statement.

Stefan Sauer/dpa/AP/File

A sign reading "Nord Stream 2 Committed. Reliable. Safe." hangs above a painted map of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline at the Lubmin industrial estate in Lubmin, Germany, Nov 16, 2021. Nord Stream 2 is one of the main casualties of the fallout between Germany and Russia over the war in Ukraine, after Berlin ordered a halt to the project and the business running it declared bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Europe has laid out an ambitious goal to decrease its dependency on Russian gas by half within a year. That will mean the near-term might look like a step backward to green energy advocates, since even German Economy Minister Robert Habeck – a Green Party leader – has talked about a return to coal and the reopening of phased-out nuclear power plants.

“These are taboos,” says Tyson Barker, head of technology and global affairs for the German Council on Foreign Relations, “but in these extraordinary circumstances they’re playing a very pragmatic role in saying, ‘OK, we’ve got to do this even if that goes against our core principles temporarily.’”

“We all have to sacrifice”

In the longer term, phasing out Russian fuels will come with economic costs that are “substantial but manageable,” write the authors of an energy report out of three German universities.

High energy prices may compel households and industries to take action to reduce energy use in the home, say the authors. For example, lighting consumes up to 50% of energy consumption, depending on the country.

Or perhaps air conditioners will be moved to higher temperatures in summer, with less clothing worn to compensate. The benefits are clear: Turning down home thermostats in Europe by 1 degree Celsius will save 10 billion cubic meters of gas, estimates the International Energy Agency. That simple move would save 7% of annual Russian gas exports to Europe, and reduce Russian export revenues by roughly a quarter, estimates Chi Kong Chyong, an energy researcher at the University of Cambridge.

“These little things should be packed into a strategy for immediate response,” says General Honoré. “We all have to sacrifice. We’re in a war whether we accept it or not. We can’t continue to operate like this war isn’t going on. The best way to do that is to get spectators to reduce our use of energy.”

Other measures laid out by the International Energy Agency include ramping up liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports, increasing gas storage to prep for the winter, speeding up new wind and solar projects, and maximizing nuclear power generation.

General Honoré says industry must also do its share, by placing more engineering talent into developing alternative sources of energy. “This is not a moonshot,” he says. “We need to get some of our best engineering, and it should be a national competition among industrial nations to come up with those solutions. There are many professors and [researchers] that have solutions. But we have to embrace them.”

Some solutions will be less than desirable. For example, switching en masse to electric cars would reduce demand for oil but boost demand for nickel, a key component of car batteries. The world’s largest nickel producer is a Russian company, and prices per ton have shot through the roof. Also, buying LNG elsewhere doesn’t mitigate the fact that this fuel produces the most methane of the greener energies. An energy transition should not move toward replacing coal with gas, but rather reducing use of both, says Julian Popov, a European Climate Foundation fellow and former environment minister of Bulgaria.

The United States may be Europe’s top supplier of natural gas in liquid form, but “be very very careful with the idea that U.S. LNG can save Europe,” says Mr. Popov. “It’s just not going to work.”

A tipping point

Europe is at a moment where crucial decision-making can ultimately change the trajectory of how we produce and consume energy, say energy experts. And the goal should be not to get fossil fuels from countries other than Russia, but to actually reduce demand for fossil fuels overall, says Dr. Chyong, who points out that in the next three to five years, Russia can simply replace Europe with other buyers. “Reducing fossil fuel usage is our true and effective weapon against Vladimir Putin.”

Mr. Popov says the time is ripe. No one needs to be convinced of the need for an energy transition, and the learning curve around alternative energies has advanced considerably. If there’s an obvious solution, people will go there, he says.

“The war will have a short-term increase in coal generation, but I expect that to be compensated with significant advance of low-carbon solutions,” Mr. Popov says. “The opportunities [for this moment] are huge.”

The hearings this week to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court are both historic and the resumption of what has become an almost annual tradition.

The fourth nominee to the nation’s highest court to come before the Senate Judiciary Committee in five years, Judge Jackson is also the first Black woman to ever be nominated. If confirmed, she would also become the first justice since Thurgood Marshall retired in 1991 to have experience representing criminal defendants. 

She would replace Justice Stephen Breyer, whom she clerked for, and to whom she paid tribute in her opening statement on Monday.

“I could never fill his shoes. But if confirmed, I would hope to carry on his spirit,” she said. If confirmed, she added, “I commit to you that I will work productively to support and defend the Constitution and the grand experiment of American democracy that has endured over these past 246 years.”

But like the three nominees before her – all confirmed after Senate Republicans blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for almost a year – she is expected to have a narrow path to confirmation. Like Justices Neil Gorsuch (54 votes), Brett Kavanaugh (50 votes), and Amy Coney Barrett (52 votes), observers see a close – perhaps even party-line – vote. If so, she could become the first justice ever confirmed by a tiebreaking vote by a vice president.

In decades past, Supreme Court nominees would routinely be confirmed with unanimous or near-unanimous votes. Conservative and liberal icons Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example, received 98 and 96 votes, respectively. The Senate has seen significant procedural changes since then, and a marked increase in polarization, but in opening statements on Monday several senators lamented that the Supreme Court confirmation process had devolved into bitter partisan theatrics in recent years.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson listens during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, March 21, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

The hearings this week will hopefully be different, senators said. “We won’t try to turn this into a spectacle,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee’s ranking Republican. “Good news on that front, we’re off to a very good start.”

“What we will do, however, is ask tough questions,” he added.

The tone on Monday “gives you a sense of what it’s going to look like, and [it’s] better than it has been recently,” says Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law who studies judicial nominations.

But these hearings, and the final vote, will likely also illustrate that the days of broad-consensus Supreme Court confirmations will not return anytime soon.

“There needs to be a truce in the confirmation wars, but I don’t see where that comes from,” says Professor Tobias. “There should be a celebration here of someone so capable as a nominee. But I guess we’re just past that point.”

Based on the hearings so far, the tone is largely polite and respectful, but the questions are decidedly partisan. Republican senators grilled her on hot-button issues like child pornography sentencing – a charge of leniency debunked by multiple legal experts and called “disingenuous” by the conservative National Review – and her advocacy for accused terrorists held at Guantánamo Bay.

That, however, might still mark an improvement over the Barrett or Kavanaugh hearings, the latter of which Republicans point to as a nadir for civility amid past sexual assault allegations against the nominee. Democrats revealed allegations of sexual assault days after his confirmation hearing, and a subsequent hearing on the allegations – featuring Justice Kavanaugh and one of his accusers, Christine Blasey Ford – is considered by many to be one of the most rancorous in Senate history.

For their part, Democrats decry what they call Republican hypocrisy when it comes to election-year nominations. In 2016, the GOP blocked the nomination of Mr. Garland, now the attorney general, for almost a year, under the rationale that whoever won the presidency should fill the vacancy. Then in October 2020, after early voting had begun in the presidential election, the GOP-led Senate confirmed Justice Barrett in less than a month.

High stakes, high tensions

With a lifetime appointment to the country’s highest court at stake, Supreme Court confirmation hearings are understandably contentious.

Thus, it’s perhaps not surprising that Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – one of three Republicans who voted to confirm Judge Jackson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit – seemed to storm out of the hearing today after aggressively questioning her about her Protestant faith and her work with Guantánamo detainees.

In particular, he complimented her work as a federal public defender representing Guantánamo detainees, but criticized her work on the same issues in private practice. He referenced a 2009 amicus brief she co-wrote while in private practice – in a Supreme Court case that later became moot – arguing that it was illegal to indefinitely detain lawful U.S. residents as “enemy combatants.” 

“If that brief had been accepted by the [Supreme Court], it would be impossible for us to fight this war,” said Senator Graham.

“There’s some people that are going to die in jail in [Guantánamo] and never go to trial for a lot of good reasons,” he added. “If you had had your way, the executive branch ... would have to make a decision of trying them or releasing them.”

Judge Jackson maintained that she was making the argument of her clients, which included the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Rutherford Institute. When challenged later by Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Graham retorted angrily, pointing at Judge Jackson and saying that advocates “would destroy our ability to protect this country.”

This line of questioning had been previewed before this week, and refuted by some Guantánamo experts.

In a post on the Lawfare blog, Benjamin Wittes wrote that Judge Jackson’s representation of Guantánamo detainees, and her work advocating for changes to America’s post-9/11 detention policy, “is not a reasonable basis to oppose her nomination.”

“To suggest that the Supreme Court should not have among its justices lawyers who advocated on behalf of detainees maligns the patriotism of people who have taken honorable positions on contested questions,” he added, “and demands a uniformity of background and view in judicial service from which the judiciary would not benefit.”

There have only been a few Supreme Court justices in U.S. history with criminal defense experience, so these questions are fairly novel. And these questions should be on the table – within reason, according to Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

There’s no evidence Judge Jackson is sympathetic to terrorists, so “in this case it’s not fair and reasonable,” he adds. “But I don’t want to make the claim that never asking lawyers [those] questions is reasonable.”

It would be unreasonable to challenge a lawyer for representing a Nazi in a free speech case because of its implications for speech rights, for example, but not for a lawyer representing a Nazi because they are also a Nazi, he continues.

Seeds of contention

In 1987, Robert Bork’s nomination failed in a 42-58 vote due to Democratic concerns over his views on civil rights. To “bork” someone – meaning to obstruct “by systematically defaming or vilifying them” – entered the dictionary. In 1991, allegations that he sexually harassed a former employee led to Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation by 52 votes – a process he described at the time as “a high-tech lynching.”

Such contentious nominations, once the exception, have in recent years become the rule.

The events of recent confirmation hearings are “undoubtedly” affecting Judge Jackson’s hearings, says Steven Schwinn, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago Law School.

“Republicans are visibly angered by how Kavanaugh was treated ... and that is clearly animating their behavior toward Judge Jackson. Democrats, on the other hand, have their own ax to grind with the Republicans,” he adds.

The tone and temperature have been dialed down this week, particularly from the Kavanaugh hearings, Professor Schwinn agrees. But the hearings “will [feature] political showmanship, and senators trying to score political points,” he says, “at the expense of the credibility of the Supreme Court, and at the expense of ‘we the people.’”

“Frankly it disserves we the people who are watching,” he adds. “Because we want to learn about the Constitution and about constitutional interpretation. And this isn’t doing it.”

Clarification: Context around Ilya Somin’s quote has been updated.

Despite Americans’ widespread support for sanctions against Russia, sticker shock at the pump has burdened consumers already shouldering 40-year-high inflation. For those just trying to get by, it’s yet another test of patience.

“It’s tight out here, man,” says Kendall Billips at a Denver gas station a week ago, filling up his red van with $4.70-a-gallon premium gas. His nearby toddler clutches a doll.  

Fuel aside, a month’s worth of food to feed their family of six cost $300 before the pandemic, but now $700 or more, says his wife, Carlissa Barrott. That’s made them cut down on snacks, despite protestations from their kids.

“I got to deal with the pouting and the crying,” she says.

Still, she supports sanctions against Russia, “because what Putin’s doing is unnecessary.”

Politics at the pump

In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden announced March 8 that the United States would ban all Russian oil. Though Russia provided less than a tenth of all crude oil and petroleum products imported to the U.S. last year, it’s a top global exporter, and when demand overtakes supply the price per barrel tends to increase.

Early March polls show roughly half to 79% of Americans are willing to shoulder higher fuel costs caused by sanctions. That’s despite annual inflation reaching 7.9%, the highest in four decades. 

Yet the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine only partly explains why recent trips to the gas station are stressing wallets. Between February 2021 and February 2022 – as states reopened and demand for travel grew – gasoline costs leaped 38%. 

Beyond the price of crude oil, variables like state taxes and transportation costs make for a patchwork of gas prices across the country. Nationally, the average price of regular gas stands at $4.24 per gallon, down from a record $4.33 on March 11, according to AAA. Adjusted for inflation, however, that mid-March peak still hasn’t topped a July 2008 high that would cost around $5.30 a gallon in today’s dollars. 

Even though oil prices have dipped from recent highs, energy experts note there’s typically a lag between falling oil prices and what drivers pay.  

“When the price of crude goes up, those increases are almost immediately reflected in gas prices,” said Ellen Edmonds, AAA public relations manager, in an email. “However, when the price of crude goes down, it takes a little longer for consumers to see those savings.”

Steven Senne/AP

Gas prices appear on a pump at a gas station March 7, 2022, in Needham, Massachusetts. Today, the average price of regular gas stands at $4.24 per gallon, down from a record $4.33 on March 11, according to AAA.

For temporary relief, some states are considering gas tax holidays, which Maryland and Georgia have recently enacted. And while some governors and lawmakers are calling to pause the federal gasoline tax ­– 18 cents a gallon ­ – consumers would save more from the state level as those taxes are generally higher, says Shon Hiatt, associate professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.

“The hope of doing these gas holidays is to get through what they think could be the worst,” says Professor Hiatt, noting that sizable state revenue surpluses make the tax cuts more manageable. “The big question is will prices settle down.”

Gas versus diapers

Fluctuating fuel costs set back consumers in additional ways. This month Uber, Lyft, and Instacart announced the introduction of temporary fuel surcharges. In Los Angeles, food truck owner John Ou is tacking on fuel surcharges to catering gigs.

The owner of The Fix on Wheels, known for its burgers, says he’s increasing a 15% service fee to 20% to offset the expense of driving. Mr. Ou says he didn’t make the decision lightly – he’d already upped the price of menu items in 2021 to keep pace with rising costs of materials and ingredients. A box of latex gloves that cost him $4 pre-pandemic now sets him back $12, for example. 

“We’re getting clobbered on the supply chain, we’re getting clobbered on food costs, on materials costs, and now on gas prices,” says Mr. Ou. 

Mr. Ou says he’s frustrated by high pump prices in California, which at some gas stations this month have surpassed $6. And he resists the either-or assumption that complaining about gas prices suggests he doesn’t care about Ukraine. He says he backs the sanctions to some extent, while also acknowledging that they hurt “otherwise innocent” Russians. But “that doesn’t mean I can’t complain or I’m insensitive to the Ukrainian plight when I’m being clobbered,” he adds. 

Soaring inflation triggered the raising of interest rates by the Federal Reserve this month, the first increase since the pandemic began. The move is a “double-edged sword,” says Carly Urban, associate professor of economics at Montana State University. The attempt to reduce demand and rein in prices also means higher interest rates for lower-income consumers, who purchase more things on credit, she says. These Americans are already considered hardest hit by inflation overall.

In northeast Washington, D.C., LaToya Francis has watched inflation stretch her budget for several months.

“It’s everything from bread to milk to a pack of chicken wings,” says the certified nursing assistant. “I’m literally torn between Pull-Ups and gas on a weekly basis.” 

While raising a preteen and toddler, she says steep prices have made it harder to save, further delaying her dream of a nursing degree. The front-line worker has been outspoken about raising wages for direct care workers like herself, whose grueling work environments are stressed by staffing shortages. 

Ms. Francis says she sometimes augments her full-time job at a nursing home with shifts as a home health aide in Virginia, but that’s a two-hour drive round trip. In an early March interview, she wondered how much longer she could keep either job due to gas.

Three weeks later, Ms. Francis says she still can’t afford to fully fill her tank. Despite this frustration, she explains her support for President Biden’s sanctions against Russia in a text: “I wish there was more we could do without triggering a world war.”

Isabelle de Pommereau

Tõnis Kaasik arrived in Estonia's Ida-Virumaa region as a student in the 1970s. He saw environmental destruction during Soviet times and stayed for the cleanup. Two of his companies employ dozens of people and are spurring additional development.

In bone-chilling wind, Tõnis Kaasik makes his way through a maze of blackened red brick facades, metal pipes, and old chimneys to visit his staff at EcoMetal, the battery recycling company he carved out of an old Soviet uranium refinery that once fueled the USSR’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

In the distance, smoke billows from Soviet-era power and chemical plants, forming deep clouds above the chilly Baltic seashore. Used batteries arrive here at the European Union’s easternmost commercial port, which receives natural gas container ships as a major connecting point between Russia and Europe.  

For years, this now-important industrial town was shrouded in mystery, reeling from its past as a secret uranium enrichment city. By the time the USSR collapsed, a major Soviet industrial capital had become a radioactive depository with a large, unemployed, mostly Russian-speaking population. But Tõnis Kaasik – environmental activist, Estonia’s first minister of the environment, and a green entrepreneur – gave the region, and its people, a new lease on life.

Drawn to the Ida-Virumaa region’s cliffs and waterfalls as a geography student more than 50 years ago, Mr. Kaasik stayed as the Soviet regime made him an environmental inspector in charge of the forest in Estonia’s northeast. He witnessed the lack of environmental care that poisoned his country’s soil and soul, and decided to dedicate his life to helping it heal.

In independent Estonia he spearheaded the effort to rid Sillamäe of its radioactive legacy, guided by a “great sense of ‘the Soviets did this terrible thing to our country, and we would really like to heal those wounds,’” says Cheryl Rofer, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, whom Mr. Kaasik invited to the radioactive site in Sillamäe in 1998. She was instrumental in helping to get NATO to participate in its remediation.

Oil shale and later, uranium

Before war broke out in Ukraine, Estonia had pledged to stop producing electricity from shale oil by 2035. Ida-Virumaa’s rich oil shale deposits make the country nearly the highest per capita carbon emitter in Europe. Moscow once imported its best minds to work on the big shale-powered plants it built here. “The end products and the money went back to the Soviet Union; the environmental legacy stayed here,” Mr. Kaasik says. The industry had polluted the groundwater, decimated forests, and scarred the landscape with myriad “waste hills.”

After discovering that uranium could be extracted from the rock on the Ida-Virumaa coast, the Soviets built a top-secret city dedicated to processing the ore. By the 1990s an estimated 100,000 metric tons of uranium had been produced in Sillamäe, used in the manufacturing of 70,000 nuclear weapons. The place was never to be entered or left without approval. Nobody was allowed to know what happened there, “but I knew,” says Mr. Kaasik.

With the greater freedoms of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, Mr. Kaasik took part in the successful 1987 protest movement to ban the opening of a new phosphorus mine, an event seen as helping to foster the dissolution of the Soviet government in Estonia. Only after Estonia gained independence in 1991 did the world discover Sillamäe’s secret past. Mr. Kaasik, as the first Estonian environment minister, had to deal with the legacy.

“There are problems linked to uranium mining all over the world, but Sillamäe may be one of the biggest,” remembers Ms. Rofer, a former nuclear-disarmament specialist who has led environmental cleanup projects worldwide, from Los Alamos to Kazakhstan. In Sillamäe, “there was a kilometer-long, half-a-kilometer-wide pile of tailings from what must have been 50 years of processing a variety of material, all of them having some radioactive material,” says Ms. Rofer. The waste was only yards from the sea; waves and rain could have washed off radioactive material into the ocean, toward Finland.

“There was all this waste left and my task was to cover this dump, make it secure,” says Mr. Kaasik. “That took 11 years and cost €28 million.” The international community, including the European Union, helped.

Ms. Rofer remembers Mr. Kaasik’s eagerness to gain NATO support. “Estonia wasn’t a member of NATO yet but really wanted to be,” she says. “Tõnis felt strongly about the dangers that the waste pond represented, and he felt strongly about Estonia and wanted it to be a better place.”

The remediation also paved the way for Sillamäe’s economic recovery. By 2003, with the radioactive waste turned into a gigantic green hill, the local harbor, which the Soviet military had bombed in the 1960s, could be rebuilt. Although the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia are widely expected to deal an economic blow to the region, the port had helped Sillamäe regain its position as a commercial bridge between the East and the West. “It was a must to solve this problem,” says Mr. Kaasik. “If it is not clean, nobody comes.”

“Now I had to think about what to do next,” Mr. Kaasik says.

Isabelle de Pommereau

Aleksandr Arhipov (right) is the chief technologist of Tõnis Kaasik’s battery recycling company in northern Estonia. Mr. Kaasik (left) created the company at the former uranium processing plant where Mr. Arhipov was sent to work by the USSR when he was 21 years old.

Some workers were producing rare earth metals at the old plant, but Sillamäe was hurting. Former uranium workers, who spoke only Russian, were highly skilled but unemployed. Mr. Kaasik felt compelled to help. “The work had to be related to previous industrial work,” he says. Mr. Kaasik reconverted old uranium facilities to bring EcoMetal online in 2003, seeing it as his chance to turn waste into something useful. EcoMetal recycled 20,000 tons of batteries last year, producing 12,000 tons of lead and lead alloys.

Aleksandr Arhipov was 21 years old when he was uprooted from his native Tomsk in Siberia to work in Sillamäe. He saw his world collapse two decades later in 1990 when he went from being a Soviet citizen to being the former occupier, part of a group that was often mistrusted and hated by Estonians. “It was bad,” he recalls.

Mr. Kaasik hired Mr. Arhipov and 60 other ex-uranium workers. The job gradually gave him stability, and enabled him to surmount the trauma of Estonian independence. He says he has found his place as a full-fledged, Russian-speaking Estonian.

For many years, Estonia’s industrial northeast was looked down upon as a Russian-speaking enclave suspected of being closer to Moscow than to Tallinn. In the wake of Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, fear of the Kremlin using its Russian minorities to destabilize the West brought attention to Ida-Virumaa. Stability in the Russian-speaking region continues to be important in light of the war Russia is waging in Ukraine.

“Sillamäe is becoming normal,” says Mr. Kaasik. In Estonia, “there are Russian-speaking and Estonian-speaking Europeans.”

From Soviet barracks to mansion hotel 

In 1971, Mr. Kaasik was a student measuring a 23-meter waterfall in Ida-Virumaa when a Soviet border guard arrested him, thinking he was a spy. The military barracks he was taken to was a 17th-century mansion with stunning views of the Baltic Sea. The historic home deserved better, he remembers thinking. One day, he told himself, he would restore it, so people could discover the region’s nature and history.

Just before EcoMetal took off, in 2001 Mr. Kaasik saw an ad in the newspaper: Saka, the manor he’d once been a prisoner in, was being auctioned off by the government. He bought it and has been renovating it one room at a time, yet another way of fulfilling his pledge to help Ida-Virumaa heal. More than 30 locals have jobs at the manor, a working hotel complex that is stimulating other economic development.   

“Tõnis has injected new life into Ida-Virumaa,” says Eva Ambus, one of the first locals hired at Saka Manor. At first, when she couldn’t afford a car, Mr. Kaasik paid for her 27-mile round-trip commute by taxi, making it possible for her and many other employees to work in a struggling region with little public transportation. Ms. Ambus took a different job last year but is considering a return to her old one. “I miss Saka very much,” she says.

Renovating the manor is expensive. But closing it, even in the pandemic when visitors have been sparse, is out of the question.

“I have no choice,” says Mr. Kaasik.“I feel some responsibility.”

Reuters

An unexploded Grad rocket is seen at a kindergarten playground in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Feb, 26.

On Monday at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Secretary of State Antony Blinken seemed to send a subtle and timely message to officials in the Kremlin. He designated the military slaughter of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority in 2016-2017 as genocide. The possible message: Any official in Russia who assists in the intentional mass killing of civilians in Ukraine could someday face a similar prospect of international justice.

“By learning to spot the signs of the worst atrocities, we’re empowered to prevent them,” Mr. Blinken said.

With the announcement, the United States has now concluded that genocide has occurred eight times since the Holocaust, bringing legal weight to prosecuting war crimes in various courts while encouraging other countries to follow suit. Not every designation has resulted in prison time for perpetrators, yet each one may have served as a deterrent. Top officials in a dictator’s inner circle, for example, might rebel or try to thwart a slaughter to later avoid capture and prosecution.

In 1945, a top Nazi official surrendered German troops in Italy in an apparent deal to escape prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. In the case of Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, fear of prosecution could possibly cause an official under President Vladimir Putin to save Ukrainian civilians from harm.

Fear may not be the only incentive. When enough countries cite war crimes, it could prick the conscience of those in the midst of committing atrocities and they could then replace evil with good by, for example, offering up evidence for a later trial.

Ukraine itself has played an important role in the history of legal terms for the worst in wars, according to scholar Philippe Sands in a 2016 book, “East West Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity.’” 

In the western city now known as Lviv, two law scholars who went to the same university in the 1920s, Eli Lauterpacht and Alex Lemkin, introduced the concept of war crimes as World War II developed. Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in 1944 to describe the mass killing of Jews. Lauterpacht introduced the idea of crimes against humanity. Their work was later adopted by the United Nations.

Today, the use of universal principles to curb war violence is now commonplace. Myanmar’s military, for example, could face legal hazards for its crimes if a pro-democracy civilian rebellion succeeds. The International Criminal Court is investigating crimes against humanity related to the military’s forced deportation of more than 740,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh. “The day will come when those responsible for these appalling acts will have to answer for them,” said Secretary Blinken.

The wheels of international justice grind slowly. But as they grind, they could force war criminals to think twice.