Andrei Vitaliovych peers through a handheld periscope over the top of a trench wall at a line of barren trees some 350 yards away. The junior sergeant with the Ukrainian army explains that the trees mark the front-line position of Russian-backed separatist fighters near this mining town of 13,000 residents in southeastern Ukraine.

“When the wind is right, you hear them talking,” he says, stepping down into the trench and sinking ankle-deep into mud as thick as clay. “They probably hear us sometimes.”

On Thursday, the enemy was more audible – and more menacing. Artillery and mortar rounds fired from rebel-occupied territory thudded into the wet earth a half-mile from the trenches patrolled by Sergeant Vitaliovych’s unit with the 24th Mechanized Brigade.

The shelling occurred as tensions spiked between Ukrainian and separatist forces in the southern portions of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions along the Russian border that rebels have held since 2014.

The Ukrainian military has reported more than 50 attacks on its front-line positions over the past 48 hours. In Stanytsia Luhanska, east of Zolote, a rocket struck a kindergarten and wounded three people Thursday. Separatist leaders claimed government forces fired mortars and grenades into occupied areas in multiple incidents during the same period, and earlier Friday announced a large-scale evacuation of residents.

Martin Kuz

A shooting target with the image of Russian President Vladimir Putin sits at a Ukrainian military outpost in the village of Zolote, Ukraine, Feb. 17, 2022.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the kindergarten shelling a “big provocation” as U.S. President Joe Biden warned that the threat of a Russian invasion of its neighbor remained “very high.” Mr. Zelenskyy attended a security conference Friday in Munich to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, and other world leaders. Mr. Biden was scheduled to talk with NATO allies as they seek a diplomatic resolution to the crisis.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported Friday that Russia has deployed up to 190,000 troops along Ukraine’s border. In the shadow of that buildup, and in contrast to rising fears in the West of Russia’s intentions, a sense of calm prevailed this week among soldiers and villagers in Zolote and elsewhere near the front lines.

“We have been in this situation now for eight years, so we are used to it,” says Sergeant Vitaliovych, who enlisted when war erupted in Luhansk and Donetsk, an industrial region of the country known as Donbass. He speaks with casual affability amid the occasional boom of incoming artillery, swinging the pipe periscope at his side as if strolling with an umbrella in his hometown village outside the western city of Lviv.

“The talk of invasion – it doesn’t affect us,” says Sergeant Vitaliovych, the father of a 3-year-old daughter with his wife, a fellow soldier. “We will be ready, the same as always.”

Martin Kuz

Anhelina Polishchuk, a grandmother who lives near the front lines in the village of Zolote, Ukraine, spoke about the ongoing war on Feb. 17, 2022. "You hear some shooting or some rockets, but you can’t let that scare you," she says.

“We have to go on living”

Dozens of homes and businesses in Zolote bear the scars of war – rooftops blown open by artillery, walls pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel – and separatists retain control of one section of the village.

Yet for Anhelina Polishchuk, an area native and a grandmother, neither the sound of rocket fire nor the exchange of accusations between Ukrainian and Russian officials provokes cause for concern.

“I’m not worried,” she says, pausing on her walk home from a nearby market. She wears a stylish zip-up coat to keep out the cold, and the flower design on her tote bag lends a dash of springtime brightness to winter’s gray-white tableau. “You hear some shooting or some rockets, but you can’t let that scare you. We have to go on living.”

In Niu-York, a village in Donetsk some 50 miles south of Zolote, residents and troops offer a similar perspective. Olha Mykolaivna, a mother of two young sons, ascribes the lack of public panic to the steady presence and improved capability of Ukraine’s military.

“I believe that our soldiers can protect us,” she says, speaking in Russian, the predominant language of Donbass. She and her husband stopped by a bakery to pick up pastries and bread on their way home to dinner. Each wears a face mask adorned with a small Ukrainian flag.

“The Russian government wants us to be afraid,” she says. “But we can see what they are doing. It is nothing new.”

SOURCE:

BBC

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The war in Luhansk and Donetsk has displaced an estimated 1.5 million people. The army has converted abandoned houses into outposts in Niu-York and across the front line, and its enormous troop carriers now rumble along the town’s narrow dirt roads with the same regularity as municipal buses.

Most of the soldiers with the 46th Air Assault Brigade deployed to the area live beneath the ground’s surface in trenches that form a subterranean maze in and around the village. They profess to worry more about the cold than an invasion.

“I really don’t think anything big is going to happen,” says Vladimir Oros, kneeling down to pet a stray short-coated collie that the unit has adopted. “If it does happen, then we will do what we are here to do: fight.”

His platoon mate, Sergiy Pryhodko, smiles at the comment. “And if we have to fight,” he says, “it will keep us warm.”

Mike Callicrate doesn’t mince words: “Break ‘em up,” says the Kansas cattleman of the four meatpackers that dominate his industry. “We’ve got to have a different model going forward. It’s going to be a smaller, more local, regional model.”

It’s a notion that is gaining attention, and not just in agriculture. While few would go as far as breaking up companies, the idea that concentrated corporate power needs more government oversight is catching on. From academia to Congress to the White House, people are reconsidering “bigness.”

The industries getting the most scrutiny so far are Big Tech and meat. Complaints about the reach and influence of giant technology companies such as Meta (formerly Facebook) are rising from both sides of the political spectrum. And shutdowns of huge packing plants before and during the pandemic, which sent meat prices soaring, have caused the White House – as well as bipartisan groups of rural-state senators – to propose new steps for reform. The idea is: Reliance on a few players with big, efficient operations may be hurting the economy’s resilience in the face of unexpected challenges.

Even some economists are beginning to reconsider their devotion to efficiency and are asking: “Should we start thinking about sacrificing some cost and efficiency to guard against future pandemics?” says Azzeddine Azzam, an agricultural economist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Big meatpackers have survived public scrutiny before, such as food-safety scandals in the early 1900s and price-fixing concerns in the 1920s. Today’s talk of resilience, however, poses a bigger challenge because it goes to the heart of how the industry is set up. “It represents a larger potential for change than food safety,” says Bill Winders, a sociologist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and co-editor of “Global Meat,” a 2019 book on the industry. 

Four big companies

Four international corporations control 85% of U.S. beef processing capacity, according to the White House: JBS S.A., the world’s biggest meat supplier; Tyson Foods Inc., the biggest U.S. meat company by sales; Cargill Inc., the nation’s largest privately held corporation; and National Beef Packing. The other popular meats – pork and poultry – are also highly concentrated and controlled by some of the same players. But beef is drawing the most attention, in part because it’s the most concentrated and also because it’s an inflation leader, with an 11% jump that’s the fastest 12-month rise in beef prices in four decades. 

The Biden administration blames much of that price rise on the lack of competition within the meat industry. “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation,” President Joe Biden said last month in announcing his plan to help smaller processors, the same phrase he used last July when signing an executive order taking on Big Tech’s anticompetitive practices.

Charlie Riedel/AP/File

A Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Emporia, Kansas, April 27, 2020. Tyson is one of several big meat packers that has faced, and settled, price-fixing lawsuits. Because the processing plants are so big, they have also raised environmental concerns – plus worries about whether food-industry resilience is threatened if several plants face temporary shutdowns, as occurred during the pandemic.

But the reality is more complex. Weather, an historic drought in the West, the constant supply adjustments by ranchers to price signals, plus changes in consumer demand brought on by the pandemic have had a big impact on meat prices. “The Biden Administration continues to ignore the number one challenge to meat and poultry production: labor shortages,” Julie Anna Potts, president and CEO of the North American Meat Institute, said in a statement last month.

With bigness, efficiency

Nor is it clear that bigness is always bad. A 2021 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that while concentration increased in consumer-facing industries over the past quarter-century (think airlines or rental cars), product concentration actually went down. In other words, the more dominant corporations became, the more fiercely they competed with each other, crashing rivals’ markets with new products of their own. And the efficiency of the big packers has kept meat prices low for American consumers over the long term, certainly lower than in Europe, which has adapted a model closer to what reformers are proposing.

And while the big processors have been squeezing ranchers, taking a bigger and bigger share of the consumer dollar spent on beef, their extreme efficiency has allowed them to afford to pay ranchers more than they otherwise would get, says professor Azzam, the University of Nebraska economist. That sounds contradictory, but packers don’t want to build an expensive plant and then wipe out their suppliers, he points out. The packers’ efficiency-powered profits give them more leeway to pay ranchers what they need to stay in business.

But there are also costs to bigness – some apparent and some hidden. (Neither the meat institute, which represents the processors, nor three of the biggest processors themselves responded to emails for comment.) 

One is wages. By moving plants from the Corn Belt to the Great Plains to get plants closer to ranchers, processors were also able to shed unionized workers and replace them with rural, poorly paid, nonunion – and eventually immigrant – labor. Another is manipulating prices. JBS, Tyson, and pork-processing giant Smithfield Foods have all settled lawsuits for price fixing. 

Then there are the environmental and health problems. Because the processing plants are so big, they generate enormous amounts of waste. Last year, for example, Tyson agreed to a $3 million settlement for releasing thousands of gallons of partially treated wastewater into an Alabama river, killing an estimated 175,000 fish. The five largest meat processors also were hit hard by the pandemic, with at least 269 worker deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic, according to a House select subcommittee. 

To counter this market power, the Biden administration has a plan that would extend $1 billion in federal aid to small processors and expand and strengthen regulations to try to level the playing field.  

David Zalubowski/AP

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and his wife, Christie, pay for an order during a visit to Wheat Ridge Poultry and Meats, a locally owned butcher shop, on Jan. 14, 2022, in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. Mr. Vilsack made the stop to talk about Biden administration efforts to widen market opportunities for American farmers, ranchers, and consumers.

A new political climate in Congress

Efforts at reforming the industry are also underway in Congress – and in a bipartisan way. Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Deb Fischer of Nebraska have joined with Democratic Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Ron Wyden of Oregon to require that packers buy a certain amount of their beef on the cash market, rather than rely on private contracts whose terms are not disclosed. The idea is to make price-setting more transparent.

Last fall, a larger bipartisan group of senators also introduced a bill to reinstate the American Beef Labeling Act, so U.S. meatpackers would no longer be allowed to put a U.S. label on beef imported from abroad. Even small processors who might benefit from the Biden program doubt that such measures will come close to leveling the playing field. “We really appreciate what the Biden administration is trying to do,” says Mike Lorentz of Lorentz Meats, a niche meat processor based in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. And “we have grown exponentially in the past 20 years. But we are still not even a blip on the radar.” 

The difference in operating scale is just too great to overcome – and not just in beef, but in pork and poultry as well. Mark Curran and Bill Kuhnert, partners in Vermont Family Farms, which buys cattle and hogs from small farms and aggregates them into lots that can be sold to niche processors, say they can get 120 hogs processed a day. But they point out that Smithfield’s Tar Heel, North Carolina, plant, the world’s largest, processes 32,000 hogs a day. “It’s just so far apart,” Mr. Curran says. “You’d need a whole lot of plants to get close to matching that or have any meaningful impact.”

The political power is also tilted in favor of the bigs. 

When President Biden was vice president, President Obama proposed strengthening federal laws against price fixing in agriculture, “The power of those big processors undermined it, says Philip Howard, a professor in the department of community sustainability at Michigan State University at Lansing. “It’s a different political climate now. [But] it’s going to be difficult to see substantial change.”

Martin Meissner/AP

People wait at a coronavirus testing site in Duisburg, Germany, Jan. 25, 2022. Testing sites have become ubiquitous around Germany, and Germans are using them to make social activities possible again.

Max Diel wanted to go out to dinner, even with a pandemic rampant in Germany.

So the Berlin-based artist sauntered into one of the more than 15,000 free test centers that have popped up all over the country and got in line. Navigating the sign-up app was challenging, he says, and waiting in line can be annoying. But he got his free test result and an hour later, he was meeting with friends.

Though Germany is now considering loosening some pandemic restrictions within a month, for nearly a year, simply attending school, visiting a restaurant, or shopping at a clothing store has at times required showing a negative test result.

“I don’t see anything negative about the testing,” says Mr. Diel. “It just gives you the possibility to live with more freedom.”

Germany has long been a nation with a collective culture and a reverence for scientific achievement. But two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, those tendencies have been kicked into overdrive. Matter-of-fact acceptance of testing has become part of life, and public trust in science is also higher now than before the pandemic.

Sociologists say German society will emerge from the pandemic newly practiced on the importance of shared responsibility. And that could have significant implications for how Germany handles future crises – and other imminent ones, like climate change.

“I would say the majority has realized that solidarity is a human resource,” says Heinz Bude, a professor of macrosociology at the University of Kassel. “People see and realize we need collective action for situations we can’t imagine for the moment, but which might possibly arise in the future.”

Science and responsibility

Rapid testing has long been key to Germany’s COVID-19 strategy, with the government working early to shore up supplies and subsidize costs for the public. In this way, science has always been at the forefront of Germany’s pandemic response.

German virologist Christian Drosten, who co-discovered the SARS coronavirus two decades ago, now consults the government on its COVID-19 response. Two married German scientists who started the company BioNTech developed the vaccine now marketed worldwide by Pfizer. Angela Merkel, chancellor when the pandemic started, holds a doctorate in quantum chemistry and refused to dumb down science while addressing the public.

Across Germany, public trust in science is higher now – by about 10 to 15 percentage points – than before the pandemic, according to the multiyear “Science Barometer” study out of the Wissenschaft im Dialog, the German organization for science communication.

Further, more than two-thirds of respondents now expect politicians to be guided by scientific findings.

Science was boosted by what sociologist Rudolf Stichweh called the “simplification of social life,” where society’s singular imperative was to save as many individual lives as possible.

“It was kind of a hegemony of the health and science system, subordinating other systems of society to look at what science would tell us,” says Gerald Echterhoff, professor of social psychology at the University of Münster.

Overall, this increased gravitation toward science is a positive development, sociologists say. “I think it’s really important that people are open to the struggle of science to provide answers to important questions facing society,” says Dr. Echterhoff. “I welcome the shift.”

There’s also the realization of the impact of individual actions on strangers. “There could be an infection chain to people in a senior home, right? And it could kill people, right?” says Dr. Echterhoff. “And that has become part of common knowledge and understanding.”

Society shoulders the burden

Overall, this societal shift hasn’t occurred without glitches, and it hasn’t always come from a place of selfless motivation. There’s a vocal minority who protests pandemic restrictions. Certain groups of people have also fallen prey to the “infodemic” of false information around COVID-19 and its treatment.

Further, one could chalk up the new feeling of “collective responsibility” simply to forced compliance. Pandemic restrictions like testing and vaccinations were tolerated by the public in the same way that curbs on smoking were gradually accepted, says Dr. Bude, the macrosociologist. “I think it’s a combination of rational acceptance, and of course, of institutional authority,” he says. “It’s both.”

Testing was also used as a tool, which ultimately allowed politicians to feel as if they could sidestep the negative impact of ongoing coronavirus restrictions. Those included depression, unemployment from retail and restaurant shutdowns, and lack of access to government services, says James Moore, a history professor at Humboldt University of Berlin.

“In this way, the testing campaign contributed negatively to living a normal life,” says Dr. Moore. “The conversation seemed only to be [limited to] the domain of testing and vaccines. As far as I can tell, the governments did not consult sociologists, and what kind of sociological training does a virologist or immunologist have?”

Yet, perhaps this shift might yet morph into a lasting post-pandemic consciousness about crisis management, says Dr. Echterhoff. “I mean climate change, where people need to really assume responsibility, and live with restrictions in order to deal with the things that will be important for the benefit of society and social cohesion.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for.”

AP

Women and children return from their farmlands in Benue State in north central Nigeria.

Across Nigeria, tensions between farmers and nomadic herders keep escalating, driven by a competition for land and water made worse by population growth and climate change. These skirmishes receive less attention than the region’s violent Islamist insurgencies. Yet they take a greater toll in killings and village disruptions, according to the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). They may also be one key to bringing peace in this region of Africa.

In at least two Nigerian states, new local peace agencies are quietly working with traditional leaders to stitch communities back together. Instead of security by military force, they are building what a mediator in the state of Kaduna calls “an atmosphere of understanding” through dialogue and reconciliation. Their successes show a way forward at a fragile turning point in efforts to suppress groups like Boko Haram and Islamic State.

For more than a decade, villages across the scrubby lower band of the Sahara desert called the Sahel have been caught in the crossfire between extremist factions and the military forces fighting them. Schools have been prime targets for jihadis looking for wives and conscripts. But civilians have also experienced violence from those who were supposed to protect them, according to human rights groups. And despite the presence of 12,000 United Nations troops and thousands of American and European forces, the problem has continued to spread.

The traumatic disruption of communities has created conditions that make people, particularly young men, more susceptible to radicalization. It is also causing a crisis of faith in democracy. In Mali, for example, the failure of international forces to contain extremism has turned popular opinion in favor of a ruling military junta even though 75% of the people say they favor democracy, according to the polling firm Afrobarometer.

The crisis deepened at a summit of European and African leaders in France this week. French President Emmanuel Macron announced he was withdrawing the 4,600 French troops based in Mali as part of an international counterterrorism operation. Critics called it an admission of failure. France has had troops in Mali to fight Islamist insurgents since 2013. But Mr. Macron said he could no longer side with “de facto authorities” that have lately embraced the arrival of some 800 Russian mercenaries. Denmark, Germany, and Norway are withdrawing their military support as well.

African leaders at the summit sided with Mr. Macron. Their opposition to the military junta in Mali reflects a shared conviction that lawlessness through military rule is not the answer to lawlessness. But it leaves unresolved how best to fix a security problem that has defied the use of international forces.

In Nigeria, communities responding to ethnic and religious strife from within may hold part of the answer. Peace initiatives like the ones bringing herders and farmers together “are an instrument worth adapting elsewhere to strengthen democracies against the erosions of violence and extremism,” USIP notes. They start slowly. State-sponsored mediators bring traditional leaders together to begin defusing suspicions. Gradually others are involved. Storytelling helps participants find common ground.

A decade of fighting Islamist extremism in West Africa has killed thousands and displaced millions from their homes. As Western and African leaders reassess a primarily military-based approach to countering terrorism, people in communities overrun by that violence are showing that divisions based on identity can be overcome. By restoring local currencies of trust and respect, they are learning how to put down their guns.