Oksana Minenko, a 44-year-old accountant who lives in the Ukrainian city of Kherson, said she was repeatedly detained and tortured by occupying Russian forces.

Her husband, a Ukrainian soldier, died defending Kherson’s Antonivskyi bridge on the first day of full-scale war, she said. During several interrogations in the spring, Russian forces submerged her hands in boiling water, pulled out her fingernails and beat her in the face with rifle butts so badly she needed plastic surgery, according to Minenko.

“One pain grew into another,” said Minenko, speaking while at an improvised humanitarian aid centre in early December with scarring visible around her eyes from what she said was an operation to repair the damage. “I was a living corpse.”

The methods of the alleged physical torture administered by occupying Russian forces have included electric shocks to genitals and other parts of the body, beatings and various forms of suffocation, according to interviews with more than a dozen alleged victims, members of Ukrainian law enforcement and international prosecutors assisting Ukraine.

Prisoners were also held in overcrowded cells without sanitation or sufficient food or water for periods of up to two months, some of the people said.

Reuters wasn’t able to independently corroborate individual accounts shared by Minenko and other Kherson residents but they fit with what Ukrainian authorities and international human rights specialists have said about conditions and treatment during detention, including detainees being blindfolded and bound, subject to beatings and electric shocks and injuries, including severe bruising and broken bones, forced nudity and other forms of sexual violence.

“This was done systematically, exhaustingly” to obtain information about the Ukrainian military and suspected collaborators or to punish those critical of the Russian occupation, according to Andriy Kovalenko, the Kherson region’s chief war crimes prosecutor.

The Kremlin and Russia’s defence ministry didn’t respond to Reuters’ questions, including about alleged torture and unlawful detentions. Moscow, which has said it is conducting a “special military operation” in Ukraine, has denied committing war crimes or targeting civilians.

According to the most comprehensive figures to date on the scale of alleged torture and detentions, shared exclusively with Reuters by Ukraine’s top war crimes prosecutor, the country’s authorities have opened pre-trial investigations involving more than a thousand people in the Kherson region who were allegedly abducted and illegally detained by Russian forces during their months-long occupation.

The scale of alleged crimes in the Kherson region now emerging appears to be much greater than around the capital of Kyiv, say members of Ukrainian law enforcement, which they attribute to the fact that it was occupied for so much longer.

Ukraine’s top war crimes prosecutor, Yuriy Belousov, said authorities have identified ten sites in the Kherson region used by Russian forces for unlawful detentions. Around 200 people who were allegedly tortured or physically assaulted while held at those sites and about another 400 people were illegally held there, he said. Ukrainian authorities say they expect the figures to grow as the investigation continues following Russia’s mid-November withdrawal from Kherson city, the only regional Ukrainian capital it captured during its nearly year-long war against its Western neighbour.

Nationwide, authorities have opened pre-trial investigations into alleged unlawful detentions of more than 13,200 people, Belousov said. They have launched 1,900 probes into allegations of ill-treatment and illegal detention, he said.

Russia has accused Ukraine of carrying out war crimes and the West of ignoring them, including alleging that Ukrainian soldiers had executed Russian prisoners of war. The United Nations in November said it had found evidence that both sides had tortured prisoners of war, with a U.N. official saying Russian abuse was “fairly systematic.” Kyiv has previously said it would investigate any alleged abuses by its armed forces.

Minenko believes her alleged tormentors targeted her because her husband had been a soldier. During his burial a week after his death, Russian forces turned up at the cemetery and made Minenko kneel next to his grave, firing their automatic weapons in mock execution, she said.

According to Minenko, on three occasions in March and April men in Russian military uniforms with their faces covered by balaclavas came to her home at night, interrogated her and took her into detention. On one occasion, the men forced her to undress and then beat her while her hands were tied to the chair and her head was covered.

“When you have a bag on your head and you’re being beaten, there is such a vacuum, you cannot breathe, you cannot do anything, you cannot defend yourself,” Minenko said.

Moscow’s February invasion of Ukraine plunged Europe into its biggest land war since World War Two. Having begun its occupation of Kherson city in March, Russia withdrew its forces in November saying it was futile to waste more Russian blood there.

Of more than 50,000 reports of war crimes that have been registered with Ukrainian authorities, Belousov said more than 7,700 have come from the Kherson region. More than 540 civilians remain missing from the region, he added. Some people have been taken to Russian-held territory in apparent forced deportations, including children, according to Kovalenko, the regional prosecutor.

Belousov said authorities have found more than 80 bodies, the majority of whom were civilians, with more than 50 of those people having died as a result of gunshot wounds or artillery shelling. Belousov added that hundreds of bodies of civilians had been found in other areas that Russian forces had withdrawn from. That includes more than 800 civilians in the Kharkiv region, where investigators have had longer to probe after Ukraine retook a vast tract of territory in September.

Ukrainian authorities have also identified 25 locations in the Kharkiv region they described as “torture camps,” according to a Jan. 2 Facebook post by Kharkiv’s regional police chief, Volodymyr Tymoshko.

Some of the thousands of alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces could be escalated to overseas tribunals if they are deemed sufficiently serious. The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened an investigation into alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

The numbers that are emerging on the scale of alleged detentions and torture, “point to widespread and grave criminality in Russian-occupied territory,” said British lawyer Nigel Povoas, lead prosecutor with a Western-backed team of legal specialists assisting Kyiv’s efforts to prosecute war crimes.

Povoas said there appears to have been a pattern to inflict terror and suffering across Ukraine, which reinforces “the impression of a wider, criminal policy, emanating from the leadership” to target the country’s civilian population.

One 35-year-old man from Kherson city said that during a five-day detention in August, Russian forces beat him, made him undress and administered electric shocks to his genitals and ears. When the current hits “it’s like a ball flying into your head and you pass out,” said the man, who asked to be identified only by his first name Andriy due to fear of reprisals.

He said his captors interrogated him about Ukraine’s military efforts, including the storage of weapons and explosives, because they suspected him of having links to the resistance movement. Andriy told Reuters he knew people who served in the Ukrainian military and territorial defence forces but wasn’t a member himself.

One of the largest detention facilities in the region was an office building in Kherson city, according to Ukrainian authorities. They say more than 30 people are known to have been held in just one of the rooms in the warren-like basement that was used for detention and torture during the Russian occupation. An investigation to establish the total number of people held is ongoing, authorities said.

During a December visit to the building’s basement, the smell of human excrement filled the air, bricked-up windows blocked the light and lying visible were signs of what Ukrainian authorities say were tools of torture by Russian forces such as metal pipes, plastic ties for ligatures and a wire hanging from the ceiling allegedly used to administer electric shocks. Scratched on the wall were notches, which authorities said were made by detainees possibly to count the number of days held, as well as messages. One read: “For Her I Live.”

Another location in the city where people were allegedly interrogated and tortured was a police building that locals have referred to as “the hole,” according to Ukrainian authorities and more than half a dozen Kherson residents Reuters spoke to.

Liudmyla Shumkova, 47, said she and her 53-year old sister were held captive at the site, on No. 3 Energy Workers’ Street, for most of the more than fifty days they spent in detention this summer. She said the Russians asked them about her sister’s son because they believed he was involved in the resistance movement.

Shumkova, who works as a lawyer in the health sector, said about half a dozen people packed into a cell with just a small window for light and as little food as one meal a day. She said she wasn’t physically tortured but fellow detainees were, including a female police officer she shared a cell with. Men received particularly harsh torture, she said. “They screamed, it was constant, every day. It could last for 2 or 3 hours.”

INVESTIGATION CONTINUES

Investigators continue to try to identify those responsible for the alleged war crimes, including the possible role of senior military leadership. When asked whether authorities had initiated criminal proceedings against alleged perpetrators of torture, Belousov, the war crimes chief, said more than 70 people had been identified as suspects and 30 people had been indicted.

Belousov, who didn’t name the individuals, said most of the suspects are lower-ranking military officials but some are “senior officers, in particular colonels and lieutenant colonels” as well as senior figures in pro-Russian Luhansk and Donetsk military-civilian administrations. Representatives of the pro-Russian Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic didn’t respond to questions about whether their forces were involved in unlawful detentions or torture.

The Kremlin and Russian defence ministry didn’t respond to questions about alleged perpetrators.

On a cold December day in the village of Bilozerka in the Kherson region, war crimes investigators pored over a courthouse Ukrainian authorities say was used by Russian forces to detain and torture individuals as well as a nearby school that was turned into a barracks for around 300 Russian soldiers. The now deserted school building, where walls were painted with the “Z” symbol that has become an emblem of support for Russia in the war, was littered with debris including gas masks and medical kits, Russian literature and bullets fired into a brick wall.

At the courthouse, a small team of investigators dusted for fingerprints and collected DNA samples. In an adjacent garage, they had placed numbered yellow markers to identify evidence. A desk chair lay upturned and nearby lay plastic ties littered as well as a gas mask attached to a tube and pouch for liquid, which two prosecutors said resembles improvised torture devices allegedly used by occupying Russians to create a sensation of drowning.

The Kremlin and Russian defence ministry didn’t respond to questions about methods of alleged torture.

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For roughly 30 years Federal Reserve policymakers and other central bankers enjoyed a world where market interest rates were falling, inflation was low, globalization effectively expanded the supply of labor, and, at the margin, markets for goods and services were becoming more open and stable.

Those trends have now been challenged if not upended altogether by the COVID-19 pandemic in a disruption that risks leaving policymakers adrift about what to expect.

The U.S. central bank is already adjusting to one unanticipated set of changes – an outbreak of inflation coupled with stalled growth in the U.S. labor force. But it may be just the beginning of a lengthy reckoning about how economic dynamics have shifted, challenging central bankers to keep pace and delve deeper into areas that have not typically been their province, such as the economics of industrial organization and the supply side.

Economists sometimes describe the sorts of changes that may be underway in terms of a new economic “regime,” but “identification becomes something of an art form,” Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said last Friday on a panel at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA) in New Orleans.

“You have to identify the regime change … Then you have to understand the transition dynamics … and have a clear vision and insight into all of those … Trying to develop a single or unitary view that represents a consensus becomes a very, very difficult challenge.”

Bostic said he already regards the U.S. labor market as likely having changed for good, leaving the economy with a seemingly embedded shortage of workers and a population making different choices about labor, leisure and retirement than it did before.

But the structural rift may be far deeper.

The AEA’s agenda in New Orleans included what may prove tip-of-the-iceberg debates about a global economy not only adjusting to the pandemic, but to new geopolitical risks stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s uncertain position in the post-pandemic world.

Supply chains built around relatively frictionless global trade may be recast along more expensive lines by manufacturers reluctant to count as heavily on China or desiring more resilience overall; financial markets built around anchored low interest rates and a global glut of savings may have to accommodate higher debt levels and interest rates; adaptation to climate change, whether to mitigate damage or move to lower-carbon alternative power sources, may be another force fueling higher prices.

“We may well be at a turning point in the global economy,” Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who teaches at Harvard University, said in a panel session at the AEA meeting on Saturday. “Markets calibrated to … Chinese growth and low interest rates may prove fragile.”

Even just the past year saw unprecedented joint losses in major stock and bond indexes, a correlated downturn that challenged the basics of portfolio management and ought to trigger deep rounds of new research about how to prepare for future crises, Kristin Forbes, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, said on the same panel with Rogoff.

Like recessions, which are typically identified only well after they have started, other economic turning points aren’t always apparent in the moment.

A shift to higher productivity in the 1990s wasn’t broadly captured in data at the time, though then-Fed chief Alan Greenspan insisted it was underway and argued, correctly, that inflation would stay lower than expected and require lower interest rates as a result.

By contrast, former Fed Governor Randall Kroszner said the profession missed how changes in U.S. mortgage markets had allowed broader risks to the financial system to accumulate and eventually break it.

“Policy has to be made in real time,” Kroszner, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told Reuters in an interview. “It is extremely important to have a sense of humility and realize the models you may be using, the data you are relying on, may not be appropriate going forward.”

Even when it becomes clear changes are underway, it can take time for institutions like the Fed to adapt.

It was long suspected, for example, that the so-called neutral rate of interest – the point at which economic activity is neither constrained nor stimulated – was falling, theoretically allowing the Fed’s policy interest rate to be kept lower as well.

But as evidence of that accumulated following the 2007-2009 recession, it was only embodied into Fed policy in 2020 under a new approach that leaned against premature interest rate increases.

That happened just in time for what may prove another shift in another direction as the Fed now confronts a world that, instead of a chronic shortage of demand and weak inflation, may be characterized by constrained supply and prices too hot for comfort.

Fed officials have begun tossing out new research lines and theoretical frames to put around inflation, for example.

In an essay last week, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari compared recent inflation to the “surge pricing” models used by tech firms like Uber Technologies (UBER.N). Fed Governor Lisa Cook, speaking on a panel at the AEA meeting last week, laid out the preliminary makings of an agenda to overhaul how the Fed understands pricing dynamics and the implications for monetary policy.

That would include the use of “real-time and other novel indicators” to improve inflation forecasting, she suggested. “When the economy is disrupted by a once-in-a-century event, there is no such thing as too much data and too much analysis.”

Behind it all: An emerging focus on the supply side of the economy, something monetary policymakers usually consider a “given” since their main tool, interest rates, operate to encourage or discourage aggregate demand, or spending.

The economy’s ability to supply goods and services may be beyond policymakers’ immediate influence, dependent more on things like regulatory policy, immigration or, more fundamentally, the quality of the country’s education system and the skills of the people who emerge from it.

But the pandemic has shown, Bostic said, that policymakers can’t ignore it.

“We learned that supply shocks can endure for quite some time in a way that I don’t think our conceptual frameworks really embraced,” Bostic told reporters in Atlanta on Monday. At the top of the list to deal with the emerging economy, “I think we do need to understand how goods get made and how our systems make it easier or harder.”

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California has been deluged since Dec. 26 by seven atmospheric rivers that have dumped up to 30 inches (76 cm) of rain over some areas, but the drought that has gripped the western United States remains far from over.

Virtually none of the storms has reached the Colorado River basin, which means the river that provides drinking water to 40 million people in seven states will continue to be endangered.

Even with more atmospheric rivers in the immediate forecast, and larger and more frequent ones predicted in the future, California cannot solve its long-term water crisis without major infrastructure investments to capture more storm water, restore flood plains and recycle wastewater.

Meanwhile, California’s $50 billion agricultural industry continues to consume 80% of the state’s supply.

Climate change means climate extremes. As California experiences more severe droughts and heat waves, its occasional wet years are expected to be excessively rainy. But the state’s water infrastructure, mostly built in the 20th Century when the population was barely half of today’s 40 million, is ill-equipped for the new situation.

On Dec. 14, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California declared a drought emergency for all 19 million people in the region. A few weeks later, the state was underwater with major flooding.

Despite a deluge that by one estimate has been expected to dump more than 20 trillion gallons (80 trillion liters), the state’s major reservoirs remain well below their historic average. The largest reservoirs, at Shasta and Oroville, are still at 42% and 47% of capacity, according to state data.

The shortfall underscores the severity of the drought. A report published in the journal Nature last year found 2000 to 2021 to be the driest 22-year period for southwestern North America in at least 1,200 years.

The state’s infrastructure, largely a network of cement canals, lacks the capacity to capture excess stormwater.

Irrigation and flood control projects were largely designed to convey water as quickly as possible in straight lines. That deprives flood plains of water taking a natural meandering path that would better protect adjacent cities from floods while also helping recharge the aquifer below.

With temperatures rising, snowpack in the mountains is melting more rapidly each spring, and the state lacks enough storage capacity to conserve the runoff.

California Governor Gavin Newsom plans to ramp up infrastructure spending, including $8.6 billion budgeted for drought and flood management next year. Billions more are available under a major U.S. infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden in 2021.

But until that money is converted to projects, excess stormwater will continue to drain into the Pacific Ocean.

Arid Southern California relies on two external sources to slake its thirst: aqueous Northern California, through massive state and federal conveyance systems; and the Colorado River, under a century-old compact that assigns its water to seven states, with California receiving the largest allotment.

But the compact was written after an unusually wet period, assigning the states more water than the river can now provide. Even as the Colorado River basin faces its own drought, and the atmospheric rivers provide no relief, the Colorado River suffers more from overuse than from a lack of precipitation.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has warned the seven states in the compact – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming – that they must negotiate a new agreement to reduce consumption 15% to 30% by Jan. 31 or else face mandatory cuts imposed by the federal government.

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Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff will visit Auschwitz for International Holocaust Remembrance Day later the month, the White House announced Thursday morning.

Emhoff, the Jewish husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, will be joined by Ambassador Deborah E. Lipstadt, the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. They will participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in Poland and tour the museum on site.

Liza Acevedo, Emhoff’s communications director, said the purpose of the trip is “to advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to combat antisemitism around the world and support Holocaust remembrance.”

Emhoff headlined last month a roundtable with Jewish leaders to discuss ways to tackle the rise of antisemitism. It was followed with the launch of a White House task force to draft such a strategy. In speeches to Jewish audiences, Emhoff has repeatedly said that representing the U.S. administration as a Jewish person has been extremely “meaningful” to him.

The Second Gentleman will also join Lipstadt on her visit to Germany to meet with a group of antisemitism envoys from other countries, the third such gathering since Lipstadt first hosted the group of envoys at the United Nations in New York last June.

The White House said that in both countries, Emhoff will visit historical and cultural sites and meet with local Jewish leaders and civil society representatives.

The post Second Gentleman Emhoff to tour Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial on Holocaust Remembrance Day appeared first on The Forward.

President Joe Biden is pledging to get tough on the border, but the measures he proposed won’t alleviate the crisis unless he starts enforcing the laws on the books, immigration experts say.

At the center of Biden’s plan to deter migrants from flooding to the border is a mobile phone application that allows migrants in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba to apply for asylum from their home country. But critics say that until the Biden administration enforces federal law that mandates the detention of all migrants, even those with credible asylum claims, until they come before an immigration judge, migrants will continue to flood to the border.

Without enforcing that law, those who cross the southern border and claim a credible fear of returning home will simply be released into the United States. Biden’s proposal, which makes it easier for migrants to get into the country, sidesteps that central problem, experts say.

“This program started with Ukraine, expanded to Venezuela, and now includes three other countries. It will be expanded further and further because the Biden administration looks for any way to staunch the flow at the border that doesn’t include enforcing the laws,” a senior Department of Homeland Security official told the Washington Free Beacon. “They have learned nothing in two years and figure packing airports with immigrants will relieve the pressure amassing at the border. Something for Americans to think about as they experience long lines at customs.”

Given court backlogs, asylum seekers may not see an immigration judge for years. In the meantime, they can live in the United States, get work permits, and apply for social services in some cities and states. Even if their asylum claims are ultimately denied, the Biden administration has ground deportations to a halt, with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement removing the smallest number of illegal aliens since 2015.

Although Biden pointed to studies showing that pilot versions of the program led to a lower number of Venezuelans applying for asylum, the total number that aimed to apply is unknown due to migrants who were never detained by law enforcement. In 2022, Customs and Border Protection recorded more than half a million “known gotaways,” a jump from 2021 when there were fewer than 400,000 such cases.

When announcing the plan earlier this month, Biden said migrants who cross into the United States without using this new framework will be subjected to “new consequences,” including expedited removal. But Biden has thus far been apprehensive about using expedited removal, a power his administration has had since entering office. Law enforcement in November, for example, used expedited removal on less than 5 percent of the over 140,000 migrants apprehended on the southern border. That rate is far below years past, which averaged in the low 20s from 2012 to 2020.

Critics of the Biden administration’s plan also say allowing 30,000 migrants a month from those select countries, which comes out to hundreds of thousands annually, will overwhelm public services. Democratic mayors have bristled at Republican governors sending migrants to their cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and have claimed they cannot support such a rapid influx of outsiders.

“This is mass immigration by another means. These foreigners need to go somewhere, but this administration has no plan,” said Center for Immigration Studies director of investigations and former ICE chief of staff Jon Feere. “From public education to housing to welfare, this administration doesn’t care about the strain this will inflict on social services.”

Biden this week met with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to discuss issues related to border security, including illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The White House gave few details on what the meeting accomplished, and a White House summary of Biden’s meeting said the two presidents “reaffirmed their commitment to implement innovative approaches to address irregular migration.”

The post ‘They’ve Learned Nothing’: Experts Say Biden’s Latest Immigration Proposal Will Do Little To Alleviate Border Crisis appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.