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Taras Shevchenko (left) and Kateryna Pavlenko from the band Go_A sing exclusively in Ukrainian and represented Ukraine on the main stage in 2021 at Eurovision, the popular European song contest. Claire Harbage/NPR hide caption

Taras Shevchenko (left) and Kateryna Pavlenko from the band Go_A sing exclusively in Ukrainian and represented Ukraine on the main stage in 2021 at Eurovision, the popular European song contest.

KYIV, Ukraine Anton Slepakov, a Ukrainian electronic musician, used to spend a lot of time recording music in Russia. That was back when he used to sing exclusively in Russian with his former band.

It made business sense. Bigger, richer Russia offered Ukrainian musicians more lucrative gigs, and singing in Russian attracted a deeper pool of fans.

"It didn't bother anyone," says Slepakov, now the lead singer of an underground electronic band called Vagonovozhatye, Russian for "tram drivers."

All that changed after 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea and fueled a separatist rebellion in Donetsk and Luhansk, in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. That sparked an eight-year war that escalated this week, as Russia sent in troops and asserted the region's independence from Ukraine in an attempt to tear off that part of the country.

In 2014, "We were in talks to play in this very cool Russian club, Chinese Pilot," says the 49-year-old Kyiv-born musician, who wears a screw for an earring. "But during the negotiations, Russia's aggression in Donbas began, and we as a band decided we cannot tour in Russia."

The band backed out of the Moscow gig and has refused to set foot in Russia ever since.

Slepakov has joined many of his fellow Ukrainian artists in a cultural boycott of Russia, part of a national project to assert their country's identity as separate from its heavyweight neighbor. It's a response to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long claimed Ukraine has no separate national identity of its own and seeks to reassert Russian influence there.

Ukrainian electronic musician Anton Slepakov used to sing exclusively in Russian. That changed after 2014, when Russia fueled a separatist rebellion in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. Claire Harbage/NPR hide caption

Ukrainian electronic musician Anton Slepakov used to sing exclusively in Russian. That changed after 2014, when Russia fueled a separatist rebellion in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

"Modern Ukraine was completely created by Russia," Putin said Monday in an angry speech on Russian state TV.

Slepakov has been vocal in opposing Russia's occupation of Crimea and Donbas. As a result, he recently avoided a flight with a layover in St. Petersburg on his way to play a concert in Finland, fearing possible detention by Russian airport authorities.

He has also given up writing songs in Russian. His lyrics now are exclusively in Ukrainian. The first Ukrainian song he wrote is titled "Where Are You From" a reference to Ukrainians' soul-searching as they reshape their national identity in relation to Russia.

Some Ukrainian artists continue touring in Russia, but many turn down tempting offers from Russian venues on principle.

"You can't measure everything in money," Slepakov says.

Russia falsely claims Ukraine is oppressing native Russian speakers. Ukrainians say they're trying to build a national identity.

Guitarist Vitaly Abramov (left) plays for tips in downtown Kyiv. He sings in both Russian and Ukrainian. Daniel Estrin/NPR hide caption

Guitarist Vitaly Abramov (left) plays for tips in downtown Kyiv. He sings in both Russian and Ukrainian.

For centuries, under the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union, Ukrainian was stereotyped as a language of peasants. Russian was promoted as the language of culture.

"We have this thing we call inferiority complex," says Taras Shevchenko, keyboardist and percussionist with Ukrainian electronica-folk band Go_A. "People [who] even didn't hear Ukrainian music, they already think that it's bad and it's not interesting and it's not worth listening to."

Though Russian and Ukrainian share most of the same letters of the Cyrillic alphabet and a lot of vocabulary, they are distinct languages with only about 60% similarity akin to the similarity between English and Dutch, linguists say.

Unlike English and Dutch, many Ukrainians speak Russian and Ukrainian interchangeably. But legislation prioritizes Ukrainian in public life. In January, by law, all print media switched to publishing in Ukrainian. Russian isn't banned, though publications must also issue equal versions in Ukrainian.

In 2016, legislation dictated that 35% of music on the radio must be in Ukrainian. The law increased popular demand for pop music in Ukrainian.

"I just love this language. This language makes me proud to be Ukrainian," says Go_A musician Shevchenko, who shares his name with Ukraine's 19th century national poet, Taras Shevchenko.

Go_A, which sings exclusively in Ukrainian, represented Ukraine on the main stage last year at Eurovision, the popular European song contest. It was the country's first performance at the competition to be sung entirely in Ukrainian.

The band performed "SHUM," which means "noise" and refers to a traditional springtime folk song of the northern Ukrainian region where Go_A's lead singer grew up. It's also where Chernobyl, the site of a catastrophic 1986 nuclear accident, is located.

"Oh spring song, spring song, where have you spent your winter?" "SHUM" begins.

The nuclear disaster forced residents to abandon their homes, and the band wants to promote the ancient folk music tradition that disappeared in Chernobyl after they left.

"We have our unique culture and our unique traditions, and Chernobyl, it's not only about the catastrophe. It's about people, it's about people's lives," says Go_A's lead singer, Kateryna Pavlenko.

Their Eurovision performance placed fifth and was the runner-up for audience favorite. It has since become a Ukrainian favorite. A street musician played "SHUM" on his flute one recent afternoon in a Kyiv subway station.

Despite the tensions with Russia, Pavlenko says she still receives fan mail from there.

Eurovision has become a litmus test as Ukraine tries to assert its own culture. Ukraine's state broadcaster, which oversees the nation's musical entry, rules that contestants must swear off performing in Russia.

In 2019, Ukraine's Eurovision contestant Anna Korsun, known by her stage name Maruv, defended touring in Russia "Performing concerts is my way of bringing peace," she said but it sparked controversy and she dropped out of the competition. Ukraine sent no one to the contest that year.

Last week, Alina Pash, Ukraine's pick for this year's competition, also withdrew after word got out that she had performed in Russian-occupied Crimea.

Other Ukrainian musicians, though, see no contradiction between their Ukrainian identity and their embrace of Russian language and music.

Close to midnight one recent night on a snowy pedestrian avenue in downtown Kyiv, guitarist Vitaly Abramov played for tips, belting out an old Russian song from the Soviet era about the comfort of a pack of cigarettes.

He was displaced from his hometown in Ukraine's east after it was occupied by Russian-backed separatists in 2014. But he shrugged about singing in Russian on the eve of a potential new Russian attack.

"If you talk Russian, it doesn't mean that you think you are Russian," Abramov said.

His next song, a love ballad, was in Ukrainian.

Jonaki Mehta contributed to this report from Kyiv.

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Ukraine's musicians reject Russia and assert their Ukrainian identity - NPR

Military officials and analysts agree that any large-scale military action against Ukraine is likely to begin in the east, yet Odessa would present a clear target. It is home to the countrys largest ports and is the headquarters of Ukraines Navy. It is flanked by Russian-occupied Crimea to its east and the Russian-backed separatist enclave of Transnistria, in Moldova, to its west, a region along Ukraines Black Sea coast that Mr. Putin has referred to using the czarist-era name, Novorossiya, or New Russia.

Odessa also sits just a few hundred miles from where Russian naval forces have been carrying out massive military exercises in the Black Sea, and some ships are close enough to reach the city in a matter of hours.

Like the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, Odessa was the site of a pro-Russian separatist uprising in 2014 that sought to create an independent state. Unlike the eastern territories, the independence movement was quashed after a series of pitched street battles pitting the separatists against Ukrainian nationalists and soccer hooligans, which culminated in the torching of a trade union building on the outskirts of Odessa. At least 40 pro-Russian activists were killed.

The current conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not entirely straightforward for the Jews. Particularly in Odessa, most Jews, as well as much of the city, speak Russian rather than Ukrainian, while many Jews have family and congregational ties that stretch across borders. But while some expressed annoyance at the Kyiv governments recent efforts to enforce laws requiring that the Ukrainian language be used in official settings, they dismissed the idea, repeated often by Mr. Putin and his subordinates, that Russian speakers, Jews or others, might need rescuing by Russian forces.

Pavel Kozlenko, the director of the Museum of the Holocaust, who lost 50 members of his family at the hands of the Nazis and their allies, accused Mr. Putin of betraying the memory of the common victory of World War II. Then he told a joke, as Odessans often do in dark times, about two Jews standing on the street speaking in Yiddish.

A third comes up and says, Guys, why are you speaking in Yiddish? Mr. Kozlenko said, to which one of the Yiddish-speaking men replied, You know, Im scared to speak in Russian because if I do Putin will show up and try to liberate us.

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For Ukraines Jews, the Threat of War Stirs Memories of Past Horrors - The New York Times

It was only three months ago that world leaders met at the Glasgow climate summit and made ambitious pledges to reduce fossil fuel use. The perils of a warming planet are no less calamitous now, but the debate about the critically important transition to renewable energy has taken a back seat to energy security as Russia Europes largest energy supplier threatens to start a major confrontation with the West over Ukraine while oil prices are climbing toward $100 a barrel.

For more than a decade, policy discussions in Europe and beyond about cutting back on gas, oil and coal emphasized safety and the environment, at the expense of financial and economic considerations, said Lucia van Geuns, a strategic energy adviser at the Hague Center for Strategic Studies. Now, its the reverse.

Gas prices became very high, and all of a sudden security of supply and price became the main subject of public debate, she said.

The renewed emphasis on energy independence and national security may encourage policymakers to backslide on efforts to decrease the use of fossil fuels that pump deadly greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Already, skyrocketing prices have spurred additional production and consumption of fuels that contribute to global warming. Coal imports to the European Union in January rose more than 56 percent from the previous year.

In Britain, the Coal Authority gave a mine in Wales permission last month to increase output by 40 million tons over the next two decades. In Australia, there are plans to open or expand more coking coal mines. And China, which has traditionally made energy security a priority, has further stepped up its coal production and approved three new billion-dollar coal mines this week.

Get your rig count up, Jennifer Granholm, the U.S. energy secretary, said in December, urging American oil producers to raise their output. Shale companies in Oklahoma, Colorado and other states are looking to resurrect drilling that had ceased because there is suddenly money to be made. And this month, Exxon Mobil announced plans to increase spending on new oil wells and other projects.

Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford, warned that high energy prices could lead to more exploration of traditional fossil fuels. Governments will want to deprioritize renewables and sustainables, which would be exactly the wrong response, he said.

Europes transition to sustainable energy has always been an intricate calculus, requiring it to back away from the dirtiest fossil fuel like coal, while still working with gas and oil producers to power homes, cars and factories until better alternatives are available.

For Germany, dependency on Russian gas has been an integral part of its environmental blueprint for many years. Plans for the first direct pipeline between the two countries, Nord Stream 1, started in 1997. A leader in the push to reduce carbon emissions, Berlin has moved to shutter coal mines and nuclear power plants, after the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. The idea was that Russian gas would supply the needed fuel during the yearslong transition to cleaner energy sources. Two-thirds of the gas Germany burned last year came from Russia.

Future plans called for even more gas to be delivered through Nord Stream 2, a new 746-mile pipeline under the Baltic Sea that directly links Russia to northeastern Germany.

On Tuesday, after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia recognized two breakaway republics in Ukraine and mobilized forces, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany halted final regulatory review of the $11 billion pipeline, which was completed last year.

I dont think the threat from Russia is outweighing the threat of climate change, and I dont see coal mines opening up across Europe, said James Nixey, director of the Russia-Eurasia program at Chatham House, a research organization in London.

Certainly, the path of energy transition has never been clear. Five climate summits have taken place over the past 30 years, and progress has always fallen short. This latest setback may just be the latest in a long series of halfway measures and setbacks.

Still, without a more comprehensive strategy to wean itself off gas, Europe wont be able to accomplish its goal of reducing emissions 55 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels, or to reach the Glasgow summits target of cutting net greenhouse gases to zero by 2050.

As Mr. Nixey acknowledged, this debate is changing as leaders are forced to acknowledge the downsides of dependency on Russian energy.

A rising concern. Russias attack on Ukraine could cause dizzying spikes in prices for energyand food and could spook investors. Theeconomic damage from supply disruptions and economic sanctions would be severe in some countries and industries and unnoticed in others.

The cost of energy. Oil prices already are the highest since 2014, and they have risen as the conflict has escalated. Russia is the third-largest producer of oil, providing roughly one of every 10 barrels the global economy consumes.

Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders have accused Russias president, Vladimir V. Putin, of reducing supplies to gain a political edge.

Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the worlds largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.

Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctionsdesigned to restrict Russias access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.

Even in Germany, where the progressive Greens have gained a more influential voice in the government, there has been a shift in tone.

This month, Robert Habeck, Germanys new minister for the economy and climate change and a member of the Greens, said events had underscored the need to diversify supplies. We need to act here and secure ourselves better, he said. If we dont, we will become a pawn in the game.

Energy prices started to climb before Mr. Putin began massing troops on Ukraines eastern border, as countries emerged from pandemic closures and demand shot up.

But as Mr. Putin moved aggressively against Ukraine and energy prices soared further, the political and strategic vulnerabilities presented by Russias control of so much of Europes supply took center stage.

Europe is quite dependent on Russian gas and oil, and this is unsustainable, said Sarah E. Mendelson, the head of Carnegie Mellons Heinz College in Washington. She added that the United States and its European allies had not focused enough on energy independence in recent years.

Overall, Europe gets more than a third of its natural gas and 25 percent of its oil from Russia. Deliveries have slowed significantly in recent months, while reserves in Europe have fallen to just 31 percent of capacity.

For critics of the European Unions climate policies, the sudden focus away from greenhouse gas emissions and on existing fuel reserves is validating.

Arkadiusz Siekaniec, vice president of the Trade Union of Miners in Poland, has long argued that the European Unions push to end coal production on the continent was folly. But now he hopes that others may come around to his point of view.

The climate policy is a suicidal mission that could leave the entire region overly dependent on Russian fuel, Mr. Siekaniec said last week as American troops landed in his country. It threatens the economy as well as the citizens of Europe and Poland.

For Mateusz Garus, a blacksmith at Jankowice, a coal mine in Upper Silesia, the heart of coal country, politics and not climate change are driving policy. We will destroy the power sector, he said, and we will be dependent on others like Russia.

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Russian Conflict in Ukraine is Reshaping the Climate Debate - The New York Times

Central to much of the skepticism regarding Americas involvement in the crisis in Ukraine is the question, Who are we?

Who are we, with our long history of invasions and interventions, to lecture Vladimir Putin about respecting national sovereignty and international law? Who are we, with our domestic record of slavery and discrimination, our foreign record of supporting friendly dictators, and the ongoing injustices of American life, to hold ourselves up as paragons of freedom and human rights? Who are we, after 198 years of the Monroe Doctrine, to try to stop Russia from delineating its own sphere of influence? Who are we, with our habitual ignorance, to meddle in faraway disputes about which we know so little?

Such questions are often put by people on the left, but theres a powerful strain of the same thinking on the right. When Bill OReilly asked Donald Trump in 2017 how he could respect Putin when the Russian president is a killer, the president replied: Weve got a lot of killers. What, you think our countrys so innocent?

Trump aside, theres something intrinsically virtuous about this kind of thinking: Who is it who tells us to first cast out the beam in our own eye before we cast out the mote in the eye of another? Countries, like people, are better off when they proceed with more self-awareness, less moral arrogance, greater intellectual humility and an innate respect for the reality of unintended consequences.

But neither people nor countries are well served by the defects of those virtues: self-awareness that becomes a recipe for personal or policy paralysis, intellectual humility that leads to moral confusion, a fear of unknown risks that becomes an asset to an enemy. These are some of the deeper risks we now face in the contest with the Kremlin.

Why has Putin chosen this moment to make his move on Ukraine? As many have pointed out, Russia is an objectively weak state Upper Volta with nuclear weapons, as someone once quipped with a nominal G.D.P. smaller than that of South Korea. Outside of energy, minerals and second-rate military equipment, it produces almost nothing that outsiders want: no Russian iPhone, Lexus or Fauda. Putins problem with Ukraine, starting with the Maidan uprising of 2014, is that Ukrainians want nothing to do with him. If he were a Disney character, hed be Rapunzels mother.

But Putin has advantages his opponents dont, which go beyond the correlation of military forces in the Donbas.

One advantage is the correlation of appetites: Putin wants Ukraine under his thumb much more than the West wants to keep Ukraine in its orbit, and hes willing to pay a higher price to get it. Another advantage is the correlation of attention spans: Putin has methodically set his sights on returning Ukraine to his fold since at least 2004. For the West, Ukraine is another complex crisis of which it will eventually tire. A third advantage is the correlation of wills: Putin wants to change the geopolitical order of Europe and is prepared to take large risks to do it. The Biden administration wants to preserve a shaky and increasingly lifeless status quo. Fortune tends to favor the bold.

But Putins greatest advantage is self-belief. Serious historians may scoff at his elaborate historical theories about Ukraines nonexistence as a true state. But he believes it, or at least he makes a convincing show of it. What, really, does the West believe about Ukraine, other than that it would be a shame, and scary, if Putin were to swallow large chunks of it? Certainly nothing worth fighting for.

Most of us understand that history has a way of turning into myth, but the reverse can also be true: Myths have a way of making history. Fortune also tends to favor fervent believers.

The United States used to have self-belief. Our civilization, multiple generations of Americans believed, represented human progress. Our political ideals about the rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, democratic governance were ideals for all people, including those beyond our borders. Our literature spoke to the universal human experience; our music to the universal soul. When we fought wars, it was for grand moral purposes, not avaricious aims. Even our worst blunders, as in Vietnam, stemmed from defensible principles. Our sins were real and numerous, but they were correctable flaws, not systemic features.

It goes without saying that this self-belief like all belief was a mixture of truth and conceit, idealism and hubris, vision and blindness. It led us to make all sorts of errors, the acute awareness of which has become the dominant strain of our intellectual life. But it also led us to our great triumphs: Yorktown and Appomattox; the 13th and 19th Amendments; the Berlin Airlift and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Marshall Plan and PEPFAR.

These victories were not the result of asking, Who are we? They came about by asking, Who but us? In the crisis of Ukraine, which is really a crisis of the West, we might start asking the second question a little more often than the first.

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Opinion | This Is a Moment for America to Believe in Itself Again - The New York Times

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said the Emergencies Act that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently invoked to quell the trucker convoy protests is "very, very dangerous" and warned against similar legislation that exists in the United States.

"I think statutes that allow presidents or heads of state to invoke emergencies are very, very dangerous," said Paul during an episode of the BASED Politics podcast that aired Sunday. "We have the same sort of statutes here, and I have long-time been an opponent of these. We actually have in the United States an Emergency Act that allows the president to shut down the internet."

Several Canadian civil liberties groups have also spoken out against Trudeau after he invoked the Emergencies Act to cut off funding for "Freedom Convoy" truckers, freeze their bank accounts and crack down on the lingering demonstrations in Ottawa. The trucker protest has been largely cleared from the Canadian capital, but Trudeau has not yet relaxed the state of emergency.

Paul explained how he failed in his attempt to corral anti-Trump Democrats into an alliance with libertarian-leaning Republicans to strike down such emergency power legislation during the Trump administration.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., arrives for a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing to examine the federal response to examine the federal response to COVID-19 and new emerging variants on Jan. 11, 2022, at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. GREG NASH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

"[Sen.] Mike Lee had some reforms that he put forward on the Emergency Act, and it's something we should look at, because these things go on and on," Paul continued. "There are some emergencies in the U.S. that have been going on for many, many decades. And the president can just renew them every year. There's no real stopping him."

CANADIAN CLERGY REBUKE TRUDEAU FOR INVOKING EMERGENCIES ACT, OTHER TYRANNICAL ACTIONS'

Paul pointed out how he tweeted on Feb. 16 that Canada had become Egypt, where Paul said President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has repeatedly extended emergency powers and arbitrarily detained people.

"And so the emergency edict that Trudeau has done in Canada allows him to do some horrendous things, allows him to stop travel, allows him to detain people without trial. Now we don't know that he's going to do that, but it is very, very worrisome what he might do," Paul added.

Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime minister, speaks during a news conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022. David Kawai/Bloomberg

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said the truckers protests did not meet the standard for Trudeau to have invoked the Emergencies Act, which exists for "the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada" and only for actions that "cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada."

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Rand Paul denounces Trudeau's 'dangerous' Emergencies Act ...