Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency/AP

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (left) and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson shake hands next to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg prior to their meeting, on the eve of a NATO summit, in Vilnius, Lithuania, July 10, 2023.

On the eve of a closely watched NATO summit this week one question loomed large: how to solve the alliance’s Turkey problem.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for months had been a holdout in efforts to admit Sweden to NATO. He charged that Sweden isn’t doing enough to punish terrorists who include, in his view, those who burn Qurans and openly agitate for Kurdish independence. 

Since NATO’s founding treaty demands unanimity when it comes to new members, a veto was within his power. 

But on Monday the ground shifted. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that Mr. Erdoğan will forward to the Turkish parliament Sweden’s bid to join the military alliance.

“I’m glad to announce ... that President Erdoğan has agreed to forward the accession protocol for Sweden to the Grand National Assembly as soon as possible, and work closely with the assembly to ensure ratification,” Mr. Stoltenberg told a news conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, where the summit is taking place.

For NATO, hoping that the upcoming summit would be a show of unity, the shift appears to be a major victory. In many ways, the bloc was already treating Sweden as a member, including sharing intelligence. 

Yet even with Mr. Erdoğan’s change of heart, the maneuvering points to a continuing challenge. Turkey is both essential to NATO and often out of line with it. Members will hope the breakthrough signals progress in efforts to bridge the gap.

The mounting tensions had reached the point that there were questions over “whether Turkey, in fact, belongs in the alliance,” said Max Bergmann, who directs the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, in a briefing last week.

Mr. Erdoğan, however, is well aware of NATO’s importance to his country. “For all the differences Turkey has with the alliance, it also has an interest in resolving them,” says Ian Lesser, who is based in Brussels as vice president of the German Marshall Fund.

The alliance had been reasonably accommodating to Mr. Erdoğan’s demands, analysts say. Sweden passed tougher anti-terrorism laws, which required amending its constitution. Sweden’s Supreme Court has also cleared the way for the extradition of a legal Turkish migrant suspected of posting manipulated photos of Mr. Erdoğan online, which is punishable under Turkish law.

Sweden was also one of the first nations rushing in assistance after the devastating Turkish earthquakes in February. It even lifted a 2019 arms embargo against Turkey. 

Sweden, Turkey, and Russia: a long history

Sweden’s connection to both Turkey and Russia goes back centuries. 

Despite a roughly 200-year history of neutrality, Sweden has had its share of run-ins with Russia. In 1708, after a victorious march on Moscow in which he routed Russian forces, Swedish King Charles XII was ultimately defeated and fled.

He took refuge in the Ottoman Empire, and Swedish-Turkish political relations date back to this point, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs notes on its website.

It was in 1952 that Turkey joined NATO, which released a promotional film at the time extolling the strategic advantages of its new member state. Among other things, Turkey offers control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, straits linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean – a considerable check on the Soviet navy. 

Lefteris Pitarakis/AP/File

Turkish soldiers pray in front of a Turkish flag-draped coffin for a soldier killed in action with Kurdish fighters in Syria, at a ceremony in Sanliurfa, Turkey, Oct. 20, 2019. As Sweden seeks to join NATO, Turkey's president has said Sweden should take a tougher stance against people who burn Qurans or agitate for Kurdish independence.

Turkey would become, the film promised, the “strong right anchor” of the alliance.  

Today, at some 355,000 troops, Turkey has the largest standing army in NATO after the United States – another source of leverage within the alliance, notes Rajan Menon, director of the Grand Strategy program at the Defense Priorities think tank in Washington. France and Germany have forces of roughly 200,000 each.

Most recently, Ankara has contributed to NATO military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has endeared its troops to their Western counterparts. 

“They’re heavy-duty players because they understand the Middle East, they understand Asia,” says a senior NATO military official, who asked to be anonymous due to the issue’s sensitivity, prior to Monday’s announcement. “They’re passionate, very devoted to the team – and they get things done.” 

Yet Mr. Erdoğan’s embrace of autocracy and deals with Moscow over the years have driven a wedge between Turkey and NATO allies. Many point in particular to Ankara’s 2019 acquisition of a Russian missile system rather than a NATO-made equivalent.

For Ankara, this soured relations with the alliance and got it sanctioned by the U.S., and it was ejected from the F-35 fighter jet program – all excellent developments from Moscow’s geopolitical perspective.

There have been Turkish run-ins with Russia, too, including the 2015 shoot-down of a Russian military aircraft on the Syrian border after it violated Turkish airspace.

And though Turkey refused to take part in sanctions against Moscow in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, it has closed off key waterway access to Russian warships. 

Selcan Hacaoglu/AP/File

Dozens of Turkish F-16s prepare to take off during an exercise in central Turkey, June 15, 2009. Turkey hopes to buy new versions of the F-16 from the United States.

Lessening leverage

As recently as early on Monday, Mr. Erdoğan vaguely suggested that he would only admit Sweden if the European Union were to “clear Turkey’s way” to membership.

But analysts saw an advantage to downplaying the importance of Sweden’s actual accession. The more Sweden’s entry seemed a fait accompli, the less leverage Mr. Erdoğan had for extracting concessions. 

Even prior to the summit, NATO headquarters was already operating as if Sweden was in the alliance, including sharing intelligence. “Put it this way, I’m in briefings where the slide will say ‘classified’ at whatever level, ‘releasable to Sweden,’” says the senior NATO military official. 

Sweden is at the table in the Military Committee, which guides policy and strategy for the alliance, as well as the North Atlantic Council, which is NATO’s main decision-making body, Adm. Rob Bauer, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, noted at a pre-Vilnius briefing for reporters last week. “They know basically everything.”

On a blustery spring evening in Provincetown, Massachusetts, year-round residents of this New England beach town crowded into an auditorium for their yearly town meeting – that democratic exercise where locals vote on everything from school budgets to fire department personnel to playground construction. 

They considered pier repairs and stormwater improvements, fence maintenance and rental restrictions. Then, around 8 p.m., and after many gavels, they began to discuss Article 17, the agenda item that had brought Madhavi Venkatesan, associate professor of economics of sustainability at Boston’s Northeastern University, to this wind-swept tip of Cape Cod. 

Dr. Venkatesan is the founder of Sustainable Practices, a nonprofit environmental action group that is working to reduce plastic waste and use across the region. Over the past four years, she and other grassroots activists had mobilized towns across Cape Cod, including this one, to ban single-use plastic water bottles. But this evening, she hoped to push the town’s anti-plastics stance a step further.

She and other volunteers had helped organize a citizens’ petition that introduced a policy to ban single-use plastic food takeout containers and utensils. It would be a small but important move, Dr. Venkatesan says, in fighting what has become a global deluge of plastic production, consumption, and waste. 

It would also be part of a trend. Nearby Nantucket, Massachusetts, had implemented similar regulations some months earlier. Other municipalities across the country had banned everything from plastic bags to plastic straws to plastic takeout boxes. And governments big and small, from California to Mexico City to China, have passed bans with similar goals – a sign, many say, of a growing public awareness, and concern, about the world’s proliferation of plastic. 

Sara Lang/The Christian Science Monitor

Amy Young, owner of The Beet, holds up a sustainable takeout bowl that her company has adopted in response to an islandwide ban on single-use plastics, in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

For much of that April evening, Dr. Venkatesan felt hopeful. While she and the other volunteers had heard some concern from restaurant owners, most of the people they had met in town seemed happy to rid themselves of inexpensive plastic objects tossed after a few minutes of use. 

“The whole point of the ban and our continuing efforts has been to promote ... education,” Dr. Venkatesan says. “Our economy thrives the way it does because we don’t know the true cost of anything. We overconsume.”

But when the initiative came up for a vote, the tide seemed to change.

There hadn’t been enough time to talk the measure through, some people said. While the idea sounded nice, was it practical? What would it mean if mom and pop businesses had to switch to more expensive takeout materials while supermarkets could still sell plastic from their cooler sections? What were the economic consequences? 

Overall, there simply wasn’t enough time to decide the issue at this rushed town hall meeting, one resident said. Someone motioned to table the discussion. And then Provincetown – a small, progressive New England tourist town, known for its environmentalism and civic action – decided not to eliminate what pretty much everyone agreed was a pollutant and environmental hazard. 

This transformation, residents voted, was just too complicated.

And this, in many ways, is the story of plastics regulation overall.

Alessandro Clemente/The Christian Science Monitor

A ban on single-use plastics was promoted by Madhavi Venkatesan (second from left), founder of Sustainable Practices.

There have been hundreds of new plastics-related policies introduced over the past decade, according to researchers at Duke University, who have been compiling a public database of such legislation from around the world. But even in places seemingly most ripe for change, there have been setbacks, loopholes, and unintended consequences. Meanwhile, plastic consumption – and waste – continues to increase, alongside growing demand in emerging markets and new investment by gas and oil companies, which see plastics as another product line for the fossil fuels they expect to be increasingly regulated because of climate change.

“Solving single-use plastics is hard and it’s not going to be universal,” says Kara Lavender Law, research professor of oceanography at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “A lot of these laws are trying to just do something.”

Indeed, from Mexico to India, China to California, policymakers are trying to do something – anything – to grapple with a nearly overwhelming challenge:

Our world runs, sometimes quite literally, on plastics, the broad term for a category of materials made from synthetic polymers that are bendable, lightweight, strong, and able to be shaped into everything from your carpet to your cellphone to, yes, your running shoes. But as the world’s plastic consumption has skyrocketed, so has the amount of plastic waste, and the ecological damage that goes along with it.

According to the United Nations, the world now discards more than 440 million tons of plastic every year, twice as much as two decades ago. The vast majority of that is burned or dumped in landfills, or it “leaks” into the environment in the form of plastic litter. Take a walk pretty much anywhere in the world, and it’s hard to avoid an errant candy wrapper or plastic bag or some other bit of plastic trash. The amount of plastic in waterways is even worse. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a 620,000-square-mile swath of swirling ocean plastic, has become so large and permanent that scientists say it is developing its own ecosystem. And that’s only the surface. 

Amr Nabil/AP/File

A man carries compressed plastic bottles collected from the Nile ahead of World Cleanup Day in Cairo, in September 2022.

Increasingly, scientists – and laypeople – are learning how plastic breaks up into so-called microplastics: tiny bits of plastics that take up residence in the ocean, plants, our food, and even ourselves. One much-repeated study from the University of Newcastle in Australia found that humans on average consume 5 grams of plastic a week – about the size of a credit card.

“I think there is a greater awareness about the problem of plastic pollution – we see it with our own eyes, we see it on our beach vacations, plastic bags in the trees; they’re everywhere,” says Melissa Valliant, communications director of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics. “But a lot of this we’re not seeing. Plastics typically break up into smaller pieces of plastics, and they’re ending up in food, soil, drinking water, air, rain.”

Much of this waste, Ms. Valliant and other advocates point out, is from what is called “single-use” plastics – the food packaging and straws and plastic grocery bags and water bottles that are made to be used once and then discarded. According to the Minderoo Foundation’s Plastic Waste Makers Index, more single-use plastic was made in 2021 than ever before – 6 million metric tons more than in 2019. Half of all the plastic the world produces every year is intended for single use, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Most plastics become trash within a year,” Dr. Law of Sea Education Association says. “Most plastics are not a computer or a telephone. If you look in your trash, most of it is packaging. It’s plastic film.” 

Alessandro Clemente/The Christian Science Monitor

Provincetown, Massachusetts, residents gather at Town Hall in early April to discuss, in part, a ban on single-use plastics.

This reflects not just a waste problem but also a climate one. Life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from single-use plastics in 2021 was equivalent to the heat-trapping gas emissions of the entire United Kingdom, Minderoo estimated. Greenhouse gases are emitted when plastics are made, when they are shipped, when they break down chemically, and even when they are recycled.

And that latter bit, the recycled plastics, makes up only a tiny percentage of the world’s plastic waste. Despite the near-ubiquitous triangle of arrows on plastic objects (a symbol that, advocates point out, was developed by the plastic industry), only 9% of the world’s plastic has ever been recycled. Less than 4% of plastic is recycled in the United States, the world’s largest generator of plastic waste. (Although Asia is often blamed for plastic waste generation, data analysis by Dr. Law and others shows that the U.S. is the main culprit.)

The good news in this plastic deluge, say Ms. Valliant and others, is that people are increasingly recognizing the problem.

“We’ve seen a big shift in the last five, six years in how people view plastics,” says Kirstie Pecci, executive director of Just Zero, a U.S. nonprofit advocating zero-waste solutions. “I’ll talk to someone on the street and they’ll know about this. And it’s not just people in my echo chamber. People understand now that not only are plastics polluting, but there’s no way to get rid of them.”

Increasingly, there is pressure on governments to do something.

When Rachel Karasik, senior policy associate with the Oceans and Coastal Policy Program and the Ecosystem Services Program at Duke University, started creating an online database of plastics regulations in 2019, she and her team were able to find around 270 policy documents from around the world. Now, they have cataloged close to 900. 

“There is an increasing trend in the number of policies passed,” she says. “And anecdotally, there is an increasing trend in the scope of what policies are trying to cover.”

In 2019, for instance, Mexico City passed a ban on single-use plastics, phasing it into enforcement for the city of 9.2 million people over two years. First came the ban on plastic bags in 2020, and then the broader ban on items like utensils, straws, and to-go trays in 2021. 

Ginnette Riquelme/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Inexpensive plastic products feature prominently in this public market stall helmed by Pilar González (left) and Andrea González, who are aunt and niece, in Mexico City. A national ban on single-use plastics has left many vendors scrambling.

Many agree the implementation initially felt promising. Most grocery stores stopped providing plastic bags at checkouts, delivery from formal restaurants began to arrive in paper bags and biodegradable packaging, and many informal stalls cut back on plastic straws or utensils. 

But, more than two years into implementation, the law has fallen short on the broader hopes for an enforced ban on plastics, says Juan Carlos Carrillo, program coordinator at the Mexican Center for Environmental Law, a nongovernmental organization that works to improve the application of environmental law and to inform the public about environmental risks. 

“There has been change, but it’s insufficient,” he says. 

Hurdles have included the pandemic, which saw many vendors and clients doubling down on single-use plastic use in the belief that it provided an extra measure of sanitation. “The pandemic completely changed the context of the law,” says Mr. Carrillo. “By the start of 2020, it was common that a shop would tell you, ‘I can’t give you a bag,’ and there were certain inspections taking place. But by 2021, we were in the middle of the pandemic, inspections were suspended, and COVID-19 really intensified the consumption of takeout food – and plastics. That was when this law started to die.” 

There were other unintended consequences. When the 2021 phase went into effect, women across the city were shocked to see tampons with plastic applicators disappear from shelves overnight, with few, if any, alternatives. Many accused lawmakers of ignoring the gender implications of their policies.

Ginnette Riquelme/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Cristian Cantú, a coffee and sweet bread seller in Mexico City, says that alternatives to disposable plastics are more expensive.

Now, in the leadup to Mexico’s 2024 presidential election, in which Mexico City’s mayor is seeking the ruling party's nomination, the political will to hold stores and vendors accountable has fallen even further, Mr. Carrillo says. So far, in fact, that many vendors assume the law no longer applies.

“The ban on single-use plastics was canceled because of the pandemic,” says Alfonso, who runs a barbacoa stand outside a large hospital in central Mexico City with his wife and young son every weekend. It’s a misconception repeated by many vendors across the city. Alfonso, like others interviewed for this story, did not want to give his full name out of fear he could be singled out for enforcement.

Emiliano, who sells napkins, cups, plates, and other biodegradable and single-use plastic items at a stall in a public market here, agrees. “It might be the law on paper, but the city stopped paying attention.”

Still, he says, he now stocks more biodegradable products and says that most people try to at least appear to abide by the law. He holds up a roll of plastic bags featuring green triangular “recycle” symbols and explains they are marketed as biodegradable, but he says the price and feel of the bags suggest they’re just regular plastic.

“Really, it’s the companies making these products who the government needs to be monitoring,” he says. “Lots of vendors buy this and think they are helping the planet, but it’s single-use plastic in disguise.”

Many advocates would agree with Emiliano.

Although “biodegradable” plastic is often presented as a “green” alternative to traditional, single-use plastic, critics point out that it can still pose an environmental hazard because it only degrades under certain conditions in a process that can take decades. And some worry that bans on single-use plastics result in overreliance on biodegradables rather than real transformation.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP/File

A discarded plastic bag languishes along a road in Sacramento, California, in 2013. The state has since banned single-use plastic bags.

“This is against the principle of source reduction,” said Wan Jie, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, according to the state-run China Daily last March.

China in 2020 announced a plan to curb plastic pollution with a national ban on single-use plastics. The plan came as China’s plastic waste surged – in part with the explosion of packaging generated by e-commerce – toward a projected 45 million tons in 2025.

Under the three-phase plan, China would gradually restrict plastics with the ultimate goal of banning the production, use, and recycling of disposable plastics nationwide by 2025.

So far, the implementation has been uneven, according to experts and Chinese media reports.

“It’s very ambitious,” says Yanzhong Huang, author of “Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to the Chinese State.” “They are indeed making some progress, especially in the large cities,” says Dr. Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It would be safe to say they haven’t fully achieved what they planned to achieve by the end of 2022, in part because of the pandemic but also in part because of the problems of the policy itself.”

In 2020, the first year of the plan, the goal was to ban single-use plastic bags, straws, and utensils from major cities. For example, some big city supermarkets largely adopted biodegradable plastic bags; smaller grocery stores did not. The same was true for takeout food packaging, with restaurants showing mixed results in making the switch.

In Beijing, major supermarket sales of plastic shopping bags fell 37% in 2021 compared with 2020, according to a report in China Daily. At the same time, the pandemic and China’s strict “zero-COVID” policies contributed to major increases in single-use plastics, from takeout containers to medical supplies, experts say.

All of this points to something Alejandra Warren, co-founder and executive director of the California-based nonprofit Plastic Free Future, says is important when thinking about moving away from plastics. Real transformation, she says, is not just about reducing the use of one material. It is about reshaping entire systems – of food production, consumption, lifestyle, and economics.

“We normalize plastic so much in our lives; we stop seeing it,” she says. “But we need to open our eyes and start seeing the connections between the climate crisis, plastic pollution, and environmental injustice.” 

Plastics tend to be both processed and disposed of in lower-income communities of color, she says. And marginalized communities are least likely to have access to plastic alternatives, she adds.

“Charges for containers and cups, they impact low-income communities,” she says. “If you are taking public transportation to take kids to school and you forget your reusable bag – that impacts you more.”

Policies can land hardest on those with the least, she and others say.

In the bustling markets of New Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park neighborhood, for instance, street vendors and small-shop owners say they are bearing the brunt of India’s ambitious new plastics regulations.

As of July 1 of last year, India banned the manufacture, import, stocking, distribution, sale, and use of 19 specific single-use plastic products with “low utility and high littering potential,” including cutlery, candy sticks, and wrapping films around sweets and cigarette packets. Starting this year, the ban also applies to plastic carry bags with thickness lower than 120 microns.

Diomande Ble Blonde/AP

A trash collector picks up plastic along Port Bouet beach outside Abidjan, Ivory Coast, June 2, 2023.

Sachin Kumar, a vegetable and fruit vendor, says authorities of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi enforced the ban strictly at the start.

“I followed the ban, but customers quickly stopped buying produce from me. They all asked for plastic carry bags,” he says. “Not just at the market, even when I go door to door with my cart, they refuse to take the vegetables in hand or their own bags. They ask for plastic.”

Mr. Kumar says he tried to use the costlier cloth alternative, but he incurred a loss, so he began to hide plastic carry bags in his cart. Meanwhile, the market that he visits every dawn to purchase supplies for the day continues to sell produce in the same plastic bags that authorities prohibit vendors from using.

Mr. Kumar is aware of the irony and thinks the ban is enforced only at the level of charging penalties from those like him. “It’s all about the money,” he says.

Many advocates agree with him and say that the burden of plastics regulation should be shifted to the companies who make the material in the first place. At the end of last year, California attempted to do just that, tasking the plastics industry with reducing the percentage of single-use plastic that needed to be recycled.

While some advocates say there are still loopholes for industry in California’s law, it is widely seen as one of the country’s first broad “extended producer responsibility” regulations, which works to shift environmental burdens from consumers to corporations.

Mexico City’s food infrastructure is in many ways well suited for a ban on plastics. Large public markets, typically with one located in every neighborhood, have vendors cutting meat, weighing vegetables, or measuring out grains for customers on the spot. Many products are sold in bulk from large bins or jars, avoiding the prepackaged presentation of much of U.S. grocery shopping. 

What’s missing, says a butcher at one of the vast markets here, is the education of the public. “I don’t know how I can hand over a packet of meat without involving plastic,” he says.

After hammering down six cuts of pork into thin milanesas tucked between two thin sheets of plastic, he says the real solution to decreasing the use of plastic would be encouraging customers to bring their own containers to schlep things home. 

Slowly, some people are doing just that.

Frank Hernández, who sells hamburgers and hot dogs from a street stand, says he has noticed a shift among his clientele since Jan. 1, 2021, when Mexico City’s environment secretary posted on Twitter that “from today on, Mexico City is without single-use plastics.” 

“I’d say about 10% of the people coming for to-go orders bring their own Tupperware or plates to take their food with them,” he says, while wiping down his cutting boards as he sets up the stall, called McPanchos.

“I think the law is a good idea,” he says. “We need to help the environment where we can; it’s just that sometimes life gets in the way.”

Across the Atlantic, entrepreneurs in the European Union are trying to make plastic-free life easier for consumers, bolstered by new single-use plastics bans. Berlin-based product designer Julian Nachtigall-Lechner, for instance, saw a way to reduce plastic consumption and reusing another kind of waste by creating a reusable coffee cup made of discarded coffee grounds. That gave rise to his company, Kaffeeform. In 2015, the company started with just three vendors, but today more than 2,000 locations sell more than 100,000 Kaffeeform mugs a year across Europe – a boom that coincided with EU-wide legislation banning single-use plastics for which affordable alternatives are available.

“The plastics restrictions helped us get an increased awareness,” Mr. Nachtigall-Lechner says.

EU law now mandates that shops accept customers’ containers. The law also says plastic utensils, drinking straws, stirrers, cotton swabs, and other single-use items can no longer be produced within the EU.

In the U.S., Alison Rogers Cove runs a company called Usefull, which combines technology and reusable metal containers to create a plasticless takeout system for colleges and municipalities around the country. The idea is straightforward: Customers take their to-go food in one of Usefull’s containers, and then return the container later at a drop-off location, using the company’s app. 

If one steps back, Ms. Cove says, it’s not a particularly revolutionary idea; after all, we don’t usually toss out our plates at home after we eat on them. She hopes that for the college students using Usefull on campus, this sort of reuse will become the norm, and the consume-discard model will evolve into what’s strange. With more municipal plastics bans across the country, she hopes to expand her model into more cities and neighborhoods.

“This is a very practical thing,” she says. “It’s expensive to use single-use plastic, it’s a waste of resources, and it’s not a great user experience. ... I think mindsets will change.” 

This global report includes contributions from special correspondent Whitney Eulich in Mexico City; special contributor Sarita Santoshini in New Delhi; staff writer Alessandro Clemente in Provincetown, Massachusetts; staff writer Ann Scott Tyson in Beijing; and special correspondent Lenora Chu in Berlin.

Everyone is here.

Overnight strikes by Russian missiles and attack drones on the Black Sea port city of Odesa have just killed three people, wounded others, destroyed apartments and businesses, and forced the closure of major traffic arteries.

But this very next morning, at the jewel box of an opera house in the city’s historic center, dancers, musicians, choreographers, set designers, stagehands, and youth dance instructors and their diminutive charges – all are present for a full day of rehearsals for the children’s ballet “Thumbelina,” which is set to open in 48 hours.

It’s been this way at the Odesa Opera – officially, the Odesa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre – since shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, the opera house – though in so many places the art form is dismissed as an elitist art form with little relevance to today’s challenges and mindsets – has emerged as an immanent pole of strength, support, and solace for a city living under the clouds of war and aggression.

“We try to be as strong and resilient as we can, not just for ourselves, but as a support for Odesa and all of Ukraine,” says Liudmyla Serhiychuk, public relations assistant to the Odesa Opera’s general director. “You see that despite a night of explosions, everyone is on hand for rehearsals.”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

The exterior of the Odesa Opera, June 14, 2023

The opera house, built in the Vienna baroque style in 1887, has long been known as the “pearl of Odesa.” But over recent years, the opera and ballet companies housed in it have become much more.

“We are more than this beautiful building; we are the heart of our city,” Ms. Serhiychuk says. “And when the people see this heart is beating, this gives them hope.”

That conviction about a cultural institution’s role in feeding a besieged city’s soul is what led a shuttered opera to defiantly reopen on March 12, 2022 – just over two weeks after Russia launched its invasion.

Attendance at the initial wartime performances was limited to the 450 patrons who could be accommodated in the building’s bomb shelter. (Since then, shelter space has been expanded so that now an audience of over 1,100 can be accommodated.)

Perhaps more important, the opera opened its doors to Ukrainians most affected by the war and took its works – and its beating heart – outside its walls.

Dancers performed on the square outside the building, opera and ballet employees marched to protest Russia’s aggression, military families and Ukrainians displaced by the war were offered free admission to events, and singers and dancers performed at military camps.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Public relations assistant Liudmyla Serhiychuk stands on the grand staircases of the Odesa Opera on June 14, 2023. "We try to be as strong and resilient as we can," she says.

To mark Ukraine’s Independence Day last August, singers offered a program of arias and patriotic anthems on the opera’s fountain-splashed plaza that left many in the audience of several hundred in tears.

“We’ve even done flash mobs around the city,” says Harry Sevoyan, the Odesa ballet’s chief choreographer. “We are constantly looking for ways to take what we do outside these walls to the world of everyday living.”

What makes that outreach especially important now is that Odesans’ “everyday living” is marked by war.

“All of the fighting, the bombings and explosions, and the constant uncertainty can be depressing,” adds musical director Volodymyr Vrublevsky. “Cultural events can be such an important antidote,” he says, “so we at the opera have made it a priority to go out and help keep the people’s spirits up.”

The decision to produce a ballet based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “Thumbelina” was motivated by a desire to reach out to Odesa’s children with something beautiful, action-filled, and ultimately happy.

“This is a show about hope and courage, and in the end, good things happening,” says Mr. Vrublevsky.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

The interior of the Odesa Opera, built in 1887

For Mr. Sevoyan, creating a show based on Andersen’s tale of a tiny girl who faces many challenges in a number of threatening worlds before finding a happy home seemed just right for Ukraine’s children at this moment.

“It’s the story of going through dark times as we are in Ukraine but ending up in a safe and beautiful place,” he says. “We wanted to tell the children, ‘Hope is coming back!’”

And it was important to make the show – despite its fantastic worlds with sometimes sweet, sometimes aggressive and frightening animal characters – a reflection of Ukraine.

For that, the producers turned to senior costume and set designer Anna Ipatieva. Under her guidance, the tulip that Thumbelina is traditionally born in became a cotton flower, and costumes included more of the yellow and sky blue of the Ukrainian flag. A large teardrop that reigns over a number of scenes became a drop of morning dew, “so instead of sadness we have a symbol of renewal and hope,” she says.

Most important for Ms. Ipatieva was the use of a large map of Ukraine – unabashedly including the Crimean Peninsula and the areas of southeastern Ukraine that Russia now occupies – as a dominant backdrop in the show’s final scenes.

“When Thumbelina is stolen by the mole creatures, the map turns red. It’s the equivalent of our air raid sirens and the fires of the Russian aggression,” she says.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Anna Ipatieva, senior costume and set designer for the Odesa Opera, stands with the set for "Thumbelina," June 14, 2023.

But by the final scene, when Thumbelina is delivered to her happy home by elves with angel wings – those angels representing the fallen heroes of Ukraine’s fight for freedom, Ms. Ipatieva says – the map has turned yellow and blue.

“My point is not for children to come to the show to see war, but to use a context of war like the one we are experiencing to reassure the children that Ukraine is our home of hope and happiness,” she says.

As the audience for the pre-premiere dress rehearsal for “Thumbelina” pours out into the Odesa sunshine on a recent afternoon, it is unclear how much of an impression the show’s symbolism and messaging made on the children in attendance.

A group of boys from a Thai boxing class attending the show with their coach are all thumbs-up. They liked the jumping and leaping and fighting scenes best.

“I’m not sure how much they grasped of the references to our situation today. I’m not sure I got it all myself,” says coach Sarhis Kratchatrian. “But what did come through from the show is that Ukraine will go on and hope will prevail,” he adds. “And I think in some ways [the boys] felt that.”

With the war becoming the government’s top priority, the Odesa Opera has lost its national subsidies. The institution is more dependent on ticket sales, and to replace lost funding, the widely acclaimed opera and ballet companies have multiplied the number of revenue-generating shows they perform in European cities.

A quest for deep-pocketed patrons and sponsors goes on.

But no lack of funding is going to dim the opera’s enthusiasm for serving its city and buoying spirits, says Ms. Serhiychuk, the public relations assistant.

“There’s the old saying in the performing arts: ‘The show must go on,’” she says. “Now that saying means something very different and very important for us. We see the opera as the front line for our city in this period of war,” she adds. “We must go on to keep the heart beating and give people hope.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.

The dog’s golden coat should be shiny. It should be soft. But it’s matted and slicked with what turns out to be engine oil.

Mehmet Gürkan Tığoğlu arrives on the scene – the perimeter of a “container city” erected after the devastating earthquake Feb. 6 that leveled the ancient city of Antakya in southern Turkey.

He had received a call – one of dozens that make his phone buzz daily – about a dog in distress. So he suited up in his blue uniform for Haytap, the name of the Turkish animal rescue organization he’s been volunteering for in the quake’s aftermath.

Mr. Tığoğlu doesn’t warm up quickly in human interaction – although he eventually does – but with animals it’s immediate. “Hey baby,” he says, calming the male dog down, leashing and muzzling him, and putting him in the back of his pickup truck until he can find him some relief.

The work of animal rescue after a disaster is uniquely taxing. Amid high death tolls – in this case at least 50,000 people across Turkey and Syria – animals are often an afterthought. “People say I’m the crazy one,” he says. But he says he is not indifferent to the needs of humans.

After the earthquake, he helped rescue them, too. It’s just that he is as keenly aware of the deprivation of the stray cats and dogs and injured hawks and donkeys that are stuck in rubble, struck by cars, separated from their mothers, injured, dehydrated, or starving now. “We domesticated them; now we can’t leave them by themselves. This is what we did to them, so this is what we have to do for them,” he says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Mehmet Gürkan Tığoğlu (left) and Hakan Tanriover pet a pit bull they brought in. Both men have worked to save animals in the aftermath of the February earthquake in Turkey that killed more than 50,000 people.

Much of the focus on animals after disaster happens in the immediate days following, when pets are separated from their owners, says Felipe Marquez of the Humane Society International in Mexico. He was deployed to Antakya the week after the earthquake, helping to rescue dogs, cats, bunnies, reptiles, and even a bowl of goldfish that remained intact while the residence around it had been destroyed.

“This work is so important,” he says. “Imagine a person who has lost everything. To find their pet gives them one small hope, so that they can continue surviving.”

But then the “feel-good” stories end, and media attention wanes. Ownerless pets roam the streets, and a fragile society is taxed as needs mount. Sometimes survivors can no longer afford to care for their pets. Animals, well loved in Turkey, become a nuisance, another challenge at an unbelievably challenging time. And international rescue crews leave.

That’s when the steady hand and constant presence of Mr. Tığoğlu, who eschews the term “animal lover” or “animal activist,” becomes key. “We would not know how to continue to work there without Mehmet’s support,” says Tom Terveer, who, along with his wife, Babette, was one of the co-founders of the German animal rescue group Notpfote (or “Paw in Need” in English), which financially supports Haytap’s rescue work. “He is the last frontier between life and death for most of the animals there. He’s doing everything for the animals.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A young street cat climbs in the rubble in the old part of Antakya, Turkey. The historic city suffered massive destruction in the wake of the February earthquake.

“You can only cry about what has happened in Antakya,” says Ms. Terveer, who has been working on animal rescue in Ukraine but has visited Turkey alongside Mr. Terveer 10 times since the earthquake. “Those people are forgotten; the animals are forgotten.”
Mr. Tığoğlu and other rescuers have entered about 400 destroyed buildings since Feb. 6, saving roughly 2,000 animals, often at great danger to themselves, especially as aftershocks continue.

In the early days, Mr. Marquez says pet owners recorded their voices on his phone, and he’d walk around damaged buildings playing the recordings to lure their animals out. Today Mr. Tığoğlu drives through the devastated town with a recording of a kitten calling its mother to draw stray cats out to make sure they’re getting enough food.

The other day he and Hakan Tanriover, a young Turkish man volunteering at Mr. Tığoğlu’s side, helped escort several cows out from rubble in the hills of Hatay province, building a tunnel to guide them – not just a humane gesture, but also central to the economy of families who have no other income. It took 10 hours. Mr. Tığoğlu often takes calls in the middle of the night. “Everyone has his number,” says Mr. Tanriover.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Hakan Tanriover feeds street cats wet and dry food in the old town of Antakya, Turkey.

The dog he has helped rescue today has mange. An unknowing local resident thought that oil would kill the mites, but it only made a hungry and dehydrated animal more agitated. He and Mr. Tanriover take him – Mr. Tığoğlu never names an animal, but the ever-cheerful Mr. Tanriover does, already naming two dogs that week Molly and Pirate – to a desolate patio where a rescued pit bull is also living, until they can find a long-term solution.

“They need a field where they can touch the earth, but this is the best we can do for now,” Mr. Tanriover says. “These animals can’t find water; they can’t even find dirty water.”

Later, they visit the city’s animal shelter, where dogs are separated by gender, size, and need: mothers with pups, young dogs, big male dogs. Mr. Tığoğlu refuses to enter because he knows he can’t help them now, and that’s too hard to bear.

He has done the work of animal rescue after floods, wildfires, and other earthquakes in Turkey. But he says he has never seen destruction on this scale. He has no plans to leave. “I see two roads. The first is giving up and stopping caring,” he says. “The second is to continue on, to not feel sorry for the ones you could not rescue, but to be proud of the ones that you did rescue and that are still alive.”

AP

In this June 30 photo provided by the Philippine Coast Guard, a Chinese Coast Guard ship, right, allegedly obstructs Philippine Coast Guard vessel Malabrigo as it provided support during a re-supply mission near Second Thomas Shoal, South China Sea.

Maritime borders in the South China Sea are, to say the least, a touchy topic. Last week, for example, Vietnam banned distribution of the new “Barbie” movie because it includes an image of a map showing China’s ownership of islands claimed by Hanoi. Violent clashes between China and the various countries in this vital waterway have become increasingly common. That is why, as the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations meets this week, it is worth noting two recent examples of peaceful ways to resolve these watery disputes.

In December, ASEAN’s largest member, Indonesia, signed a historic agreement with Vietnam to demarcate their respective offshore economic zones after 12 years of talks. Then last month, Malaysia and Indonesia inked a deal to delimit their territorial seas in parts of the Strait of Malacca and the Sulawesi Sea after 18 years of negotiations.

Both treaties were accomplished without the parties going to the International Court of Justice, as the Philippines had to do to assert its island claims against Chinese encroachment – though it won a strong ruling in 2016. ASEAN leaders know they must not only clean up their own maritime disputes but also do so through peaceful negotiations. That sets a model of trust that might push China to do the same under the norms and principles of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

“If Southeast Asian ... claimant states could settle their bilateral maritime boundary disputes, collectively as ASEAN, then they might have a stronger position to negotiate a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea ... or some other mechanism with China,” wrote Bich Tran, a fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in Fulcrum.

In recent decades, China’s assertive taking of islands more than 1,000 miles from Chinese shores has resulted in many clashes with ASEAN states. In response, the bloc’s members – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam – plan to hold their first joint navy drills near a disputed area of the South China Sea in September.

The more that Southeast Asian states abide by the Law of the Sea treaty, “the more the region can demonstrate resistance and agency against China’s increasingly bold claims and actions,” stated Ms. Tran. Keeping the high sea peaceful will require sticking to the highest principles of international maritime law.