After Going to Space, You Need to Spend At Least Three Years on Earth Recovering From Brain Damage

Space travel is one of the worst things your body can experience. Spending time in zero-g can cause bones to decalcify, muscles to atrophy, the immune system to weaken, the eye to flatten slightly and the optic nerve to swell. Time in space also exposes the human body to unhealthy doses of cosmic radiation, which can increase the lifetime risk of cancer.

Now, astronauts have another part of their body to worry about: the brain. According to a new paper published in Scientific Reports, too much time aloft can cause the brain’s ventricles—cavities filled with cerebrospinal fluid that cushion the brain, nourish tissue, and remove waste—to swell significantly. After astronauts return to Earth, the condition resolves itself only slowly—so slowly in fact that the authors of the paper recommend that all astronauts remain earthbound for extended periods before they are cleared for flight again.
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“We found that the more time people spent in space the larger their ventricles became,” said Rachel Seidler, professor of applied physiology and kinesiology at the University of Florida and one of the authors of the study, in a statement. “Many astronauts travel to space more than one time, and our study shows it takes about three years between flights for the ventricles to fully recover.”

Seidler and her 10 co-authors conducted their work using a sample group of 30 astronauts; eight of them had most recently flown short-duration missions no longer than two weeks; 18 had flown six-month missions; and four had been aloft for a year. There were 12 first-time astronauts in the group and 18 who had flown at least twice. They underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of their brains both before they flew and, on average, six days after their return.

The researchers suspected they might see some brain changes among all 30 of the fliers. In space, fluids in the body tend to migrate upwards, which is why astronauts frequently complain of sinus congestion when they’re aloft and often look slightly puffy-faced when they make TV appearances. Inside the skull, weightlessness has its effect too—and that ought to have a significant impact on the ventricles.

The brain has four ventricles: two lateral ventricles—one each in the brain’s two hemispheres; the third ventricle near the center of the brain; and the fourth ventricle, in the brainstem. All four are connected to the spine and are continuously fed cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which flows in and out in a regular cycle. In zero-g, that fluid drifts upward, overfilling the ventricles and causing them to increase in size. It also flows back out when the astronauts return to a gravity environment. But the ventricles themselves don’t recover so quickly.

When the researchers conducted their scans, they discovered that the astronauts who had flown two-week missions showed no ventricular enlargement. But for those who had flown six-month and one-year missions, even without excess CSF filling the cavities, the right lateral and third ventricle remained enlarged, anywhere from an additional 11% to 25% of their normal size—and there was no substantial difference between the two groups. “This pattern,” the researchers wrote, “suggests that the majority of ventricular changes in flight occur during one’s first six months in space.”

Added Seidler, in a statement: “We were happy to see that the changes don’t increase exponentially, considering we will eventually have people in space for longer periods.”

The ventricular damage done by zero-g appears to be cumulative. The right lateral ventricle of veteran astronauts, who had flown multiple missions, did not increase in size over the course of their most recent mission as much as the ventricles of the rookies—but that’s not because the veterans were less affected by zero-g. Rather, it’s because the right lateral was still enlarged from their previous flight.

Recovery from ventricular expansion takes time once crews return home. Follow-up MRIs showed that ventricles had reduced in size by 55% to 64% at the seven-month mark post-return, but full recovery took much longer. One subject who had spent a year aloft still showed ventricular enlargement after three years back on Earth—which is what led the researchers to set their minimum three-year benchmark before veteran astronauts should be assigned another mission.

Still unclear is what effect ventricular enlargement has on astronauts’ overall brain health. It does appear to reduce ventricular elasticity and leads to the ventricles doing a poorer job of flexing to accommodate CSF as it flows in and out. That, in turn, can lead to ventricles becoming clogged with CSF if they can’t drain properly or, alternatively, failing to fill with CSF as needed to relieve pressure on the cerebrospinal system.

Generally, ventricles tend to enlarge with age, according to the study—though what was observed in the astronauts’ MRIs exceeded what occurs naturally. But, the authors of the study write, it’s not clear how that might affect them cognitively. That very uncertainty, the authors of the study warn, is one reason to proceed cautiously.

“We don’t yet know for sure what the long-term consequences of this is on the health and behavioral health of space travelers,” said Seidler. “So allowing the brain time to recover seems like a good idea.”

source https://time.com/6285631/space-travel-brain-damage/

Good Jobs Are Good Business

There’s a lot more to a good job than making money. But for more than 50 million Americans who work in low-wage jobs, pay matters a lot—more than those of us who make higher wages may think.

Low and inconsistent pay wreak havoc on workers’ lives, leaving no margin for emergencies or unexpected expenses. Juggling multiple jobs and not being able to meet obligations increases stress, undermining mental and physical health and cognitive functioning, which leads to more errors and less reliable attendance. As a result, they find themselves stuck in a vicious cycle: low pay hurts their performance, which keeps them stuck in low paying jobs.
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In my research and work with more than two dozen companies at the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute, I’ve seen that companies, too, pay a steep price for low pay. Low pay drives high employee turnover, including for K-12 teachers. In low-wage settings including senior living, call centers, warehouses, retail stores, and restaurants, we have seen some companies replacing their entire frontline workforce annually, with more than 100% employee turnover. Many executives I’ve met didn’t think costs of turnover were high enough to justify higher pay—but they had never even quantified the full costs of turnover to begin with.

At most companies with which Good Jobs Institute has worked, employers are pouring the equivalent of 10 to 25% of their labor budget on replacement costs—the costs to recruit, train, and reach baseline productivity, only to start all over again when employees leave. We worked with one company whose replacement costs were 45% of payroll because employees had to be licensed. But those costs pale in comparison to costs from the inevitable poor operational execution that takes place when there is high turnover: lower sales from mistakes, slow service, and customer dissatisfaction; high product costs from more errors, overtime costs, and reduced labor productivity. Not to mention the lost sales from shutting down stores—recall the signs that went viral during the pandemic asserting, “we’re closed because we all quit.”

Read More: Return-to-Office Full Time Is Losing. Hybrid Work Is On the Rise

When pay is low, companies end up in their own vicious cycle: High turnover hurts company performance, ensuring that pay stays low and turnover stays high. Furthermore, when companies are in this cycle, they end up making many interrelated decisions that weaken their system. Managers are always fighting fires, never having enough time to hire and train well. Inevitably, these companies don’t trust their frontliners to do a good job and design the jobs for interchangeable pairs of hands rather than humans with brains, wasting so much talent and potential along the way. Understaffing is common, which causes even more problems and creates anxiety for employees and their managers. Overworked managers then leave or ask to be demoted. Expectations become dismally low.

For instance, high turnover at a convenience store chain we worked with forced managers to make what they called, “desperation hires”: when someone walked in to apply for a job, they were hired immediately, with no interview or background check, and put on the floor without training. That already told employees that this was not a high expectations environment, and in turn, the stores struggled with absenteeism and poor service. Because store managers couldn’t trust this revolving door of new employees, they spent most of their time re-checking counts of the cash drawer and lottery tickets—not on driving better service. So, to get customers in, executives spent resources on rewards programs and marketing, only to lose them quickly due to long lines and dirty bathrooms. The chain had to halt plans to start offering high-margin fresh food, because errors were leading to spoilage and food safety issues.

High turnover is not just expensive. It’s ruinous. It’s uncompetitive. It’s inhumane. And a system based on low pay and high turnover is a weak match for what’s coming. With more retirements, people having fewer kids, it’s not going to get any easier to hire and retain frontline workers. A leaked Amazon memo from 2022 revealed that they had to change their expansion plans because, given its high turnover rate, it would simply run out of people within a few years. With frontline employees in high demand, and new minimum wage regulations, continuously rising wages are inevitable. If companies don’t change their system that treats employees like a pair of hands, they will face increasing costs for the same output—after all the job is the same.

But there’s a better way. Rather than seeing employees as a cost to be minimized, companies like Costco and H-E-B view them as human beings who can drive profitability and growth, paying them significantly more than market. In 2022, average hourly wage for a Costco worker in the US was $26, almost $10 more per hour than a typical retail worker. H-E-B’s pay strategy is to pay as high as they can, not as low as they can. But these companies don’t just pay more—they design a system that increases productivity and sets up employees to succeed. They eliminate wasteful activities (such as constant changes to displays), stagger new product introductions to smooth workload, cross-train employees, empower them to make decisions, and give them enough time to serve the customer well and engage in improvement. Unlike the vulnerable high turnover system, both companies have a system of excellence where workers are treated with dignity and respect, customers enjoy lower prices and better service, and shareholders are rewarded with strong returns.

Consider the example of QuikTrip, a convenience store chain with gas stations. Far from “desperation hires,” getting a job at QuikTrip is quite competitive. Training is evaluative—if you can’t deliver the fast and friendly QuikTrip experience then you don’t start working. Employees are accountable to high standards to keep shelves stocked, bathrooms clean, and customers in and out quickly. Store managers constantly give employees feedback to improve performance. With just quarter of the turnover of the industry average, QuikTrip can spend more on each employee and trust them to use good judgment, which gives employees more agency to drive higher sales and customer satisfaction.

The good news: companies can change. Walmart’s Sam’s Club, call centers at Quest Diagnostics, and pet store chain Mud Bay improved pay, schedules, and redesigned their system to improve productivity and service. In 2019, Sam’s Club increased pay $5-$7 an hour for several key roles and, from 2020-2022, further increased hourly pay for all employees by 18%. In 2016, Quest Diagnostics raised starting pay for its call center workers from $13 to $14 and implemented tenure-based increases. Mud Bay, a chain with 2% profit margins, increased hourly pay 24% over 3 years. By 2022, it was able to pay all its employees a living wage, based on the MIT living wage calculator for different locations. These companies didn’t just raise pay, they made employees’ work more valuable, making the pay investment worthy.

What were the results? Within two years, Sam’s Club reduced hourly workers’ turnover by 25%. Manager turnover dropped even more. Within eighteen months, Quest Diagnostics reduced hourly turnover by more than 50%, and absenteeism dropped. Within three years, Mud Bay reduced turnover by 35%.

In addition to lower turnover costs, all these companies saw higher sales, lower costs, and improved productivity. At Sam’s Club, productivity increased 16%, customer loyalty increased 7%, and sales grew nearly 15% without opening any new stores. At Quest, overall costs decreased $2 million, $1.3 million of which came from ideas from the reps. Customers received better service, with fewer transfers and faster answer rates. At Mud Bay, employees were able to generate 12% higher sales per labor hour and 25% higher sales per square (compared to 9% industry average at the time). We’ve seen similar results in small restaurants and bakeries.

Leaders at these companies realized that to win with their customers and grow, they couldn’t afford high employee turnover. Instead of asking, “how much will it cost to increase pay?” they asked the enlightened question of, “what will be the cost to my competitors if we get this right, and they don’t?”

Throughout the pandemic, we called these frontline workers essential because they are essential to the functioning of our economy. They deserve living wages and companies can profitably offer those wages, if they choose to adopt a different system. If more companies chose good jobs, we could rebuild a strong middle class and better businesses.

source https://time.com/6285516/good-jobs-good-business/

Even As Smoke Engulfs Us, We Can’t Wrap Our Heads Around Climate Change

A friend in Brooklyn DMed me on Sunday: “Skies here in Brooklyn have been milky and the air a pale haze for days from Canadian smoke plumes.”

“I hope it doesn’t go to orange,’ I wrote back. “That’s when things really start feeling weird—otherworldly.”

“So far no orange,” he wrote. “I’ve only seen photos of that.”

Yesterday, he wrote again: “Orange skies today.”

Welcome to our weird new world. Out west, orange skies have become a feature of fire season from L.A. to Anchorage. Over the past few years, most west coast cities have earned the title: worst urban air quality in the world, beating out the usual suspects in Asia. Now it’s New York’s turn, and Boston’s, and New Haven’s. We feel your pain, and we dread that smell. This particulate-laden smoke is truly unhealthy; it gets in your eyes and nose, but what is most damaging is what it does to your head: your home, the world you thought you knew, is no longer quite the same. You feel a new precarity, and a creeping fear: what if it doesn’t go away?
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There is a theme running through the weather-related disasters now traumatizing communities around the globe in all seasons, and it is the theme of dissonance. It’s not just our infrastructure that’s built for a different time, it’s our mindset. Whether it’s the depth of the snow, the volume of the rainfall, or the speed of the flames, when it comes to extreme weather, our heads are still in the 20th century.

There is actually a name for this phenomenon: the Lucretius Problem. Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) was a Roman poet and philosopher who identified this cognitive disconnect more than 2000 years ago. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, paraphrases Lucretius this way: “The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest he has observed.” In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.

In January, residents of Buffalo, New York were shocked by a record-breaking blizzard, but not because they weren’t warned. Despite the timely forecast of a “once-in-a-generation storm,” and “life-threatening conditions,” nearly fifty people died. As with so many recent disasters, the data was there, but the interpretation wasn’t. I have been grappling with this dissonance since 2016, when a similar failure of imagination collided with one of the 21st century’s worst urban fires. Despite accurate and timely forecasts predicting record heat, explosive fire conditions and dangerous winds, officials in the petroleum hub of Fort McMurray, Alberta were caught flat-footed when a wildfire that had been raging in the nearby forest for days, overran the city in an afternoon. The Fort McMurray Fire, nicknamed The Beast, was not only the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history, it forced the world’s largest, most rapid evacuation due to fire in modern times—nearly 90,000 people.

Six hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, Fort McMurray (aka “the tar sands”) may seem remote, but nearly half of all American petroleum imports—around four million barrels per day—originate there. Rendering bitumen into a useable petroleum requires astonishing quantities of natural gas, and it’s why Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise while those of other G-7 nations have been dropping for a decade or more. Following a boom that dwarfed the recent fracking sprees in North Dakota and Texas, Fort McMurray’s’s bitumen extraction and “upgrading” industry has grown into the largest, most expensive, most energy-intensive hydrocarbon recovery project on earth.

Darryl Dyck-Bloomberg A wildfire burns on Highway 63 south of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, on Saturday, May 7, 2016. Wildfires raging through Alberta have spread to the main oil-sands facilities north of Fort McMurray, knocking out an estimated 1 million barrels of production from Canada’s energy hub.

On May 3, 2016, a human-caused fire combined with record-shattering heat unleashed a dayslong series of firestorms that annihilated neighborhoods from one end of Fort McMurray to the other. In many places, piles of nails and the warped husks of cars were all that remained. More than 2,400 homes were destroyed, and thousands more were damaged. The bitumen plants were shut down for weeks—a first. But like the driving ban in the Buffalo blizzard, and the evacuation order for Hurricane Ian, the mortal threat to Fort McMurray was identified perilously late. Hours before the fire roared into town, Fort McMurray’s fire chief advised parents to take their children to school and go to work themselves. That no one died in those hundred-foot-high, metal-melting flames is a miracle—a confluence of the isolated city’s strong community and young, industry-trained demographic, combined with raw courage and sheer luck.

Baffling to those trying to communicate the hazards of 21st century weather is the way in which responsible authorities continually underestimate accurate predictions, despite persistent warnings (over decades now), that we must expect lethal and unfamiliar extremes from every kind of weather. Most dismaying to climate scientists and weather analysts is how each of these failures mirrors, in microcosm, our collective failure to prepare for the larger, systemic threats posed by global climate disruption. In March, the IPCC issued its latest report, which said, in effect, Time’s up! on the supreme challenge of cutting CO2 emissions. As she watched this red alert from world-class scientists slip down the rankings on The New York Times homepage, a scholar and climate activist named Genevieve Guenther tweeted, “It’s utterly surreal, the dissonance.”

Dissonance is becoming a hallmark of the 21st century. In some cases—like 2018’s EF-3 fire tornado in Redding, California, or Tropical Storm Harvey’s fifty-inch deluge in Houston, or this year’s 300% snowpack in the south Sierras—no human being has ever experienced what two centuries of relentless fossil fuel burning are now enabling in our atmosphere. The Lucretius Problem has proven itself to be a feature rather than a bug in our society’s response to this lethal new reality. Unexamined, it gives climate change an almost insurmountable advantage over us.

But there is a solution: and it is to act—as we do every time we fasten our seatbelts—on the precautionary principle. While many of us may be blinkered by our loyalty to past experience, there are those able to see—and anticipate—beyond these limitations. We are fortunate to have earnest, well-informed meteorologists and climate scientists laboring on our behalf, trying to prepare us for the extremes that lie ahead. As we head into another spring marked by broken temperature records and a fire season well underway from Spain to Kansas, let’s listen to these climate forecasters—let’s listen, and act. Heeding their timely warnings will reduce the dissonance in our heads, and guide us toward a safer, more sustainable future for our communities and loved ones.

Adapted from Valliant’s Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

source https://time.com/6285551/wildfire-smoke-climate-change-abnormal-essay/

The U.K. Must Do More to Stop the Iranian Terrorists Who Keep Trying to Kill On British Soil

As the U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak makes his first visit to the White House on June 8 to renew the “special relationship,” it is crucial that President Biden urges him to take decisive action against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The time to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization is now.

As an advocate for human rights and freedom of speech, I have first-hand experience with the IRGC’s reign of terror. Last month, during my visit to London, I was placed under 24-hour armed guard by the Metropolitan Police due to credible threats on my life. I did not learn the names of the quiet, serious detectives who maintained this protective cordon around me, but I do know the name of the evil force from whom they were assigned to keep me safe: the IRGC.
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They have wanted to kill me for some time now. They have tried several times. The last thing I expected was to have the Metropolitan Police turning up at my hotel after a television interview with Piers Morgan. The police told me that they had intelligence suggesting that there was a serious threat to my life. They did not leave my side from that point onwards.

The fear and uncertainty that come with being a target of the IRGC are indescribable. Their attempts to silence me and others who dare to speak out against the Iranian regime have been relentless. From assassination plots to hired killers showing up at my doorstep, I have faced the horrors unleashed by this terrorist organization firsthand.

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Last July, a hired killer came to my front door in Brooklyn, New York, armed with an AK-47. He was part of an Eastern European criminal syndicate likely recruited by the IRGC. One year earlier, the FBI foiled a plot to kidnap me organized by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry.

But my story is not unique. The IRGC’s reach extends far beyond my personal experiences. MI5, the UK’s domestic security agency, recently revealed that British security forces have responded to at least 15 credible threats to kill or kidnap individuals targeted by the Iranian regime since the start of 2022. The magnitude of this threat is staggering, and it demands immediate action.

The situation in the U.K. had already become so dire that Iran International—a Persian language media outlet which has invited the chagrin of the regime for daring to beam reliable news into Iran via satellite—was forced to flee the U.K. in February 2023. The channel’s relocation to Washington was deemed necessary despite the stationing of armed anti-terrorist police outside Iran International’s Chiswick office and the provision of round the clock protection to several of its journalists.

How is it possible that the U.K.—with one of the most sophisticated security apparatuses in the world—cannot even protect people on its own soil?

It is not enough to announce piecemeal sanctions on entities and individuals who have no assets abroad and are unlikely to travel there in the future. The U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly insists that the British government has sanctioned the IRGC in its entirety already. But those very same sanctions are scheduled to be lifted in October under the JCPOA and the power of proscription as a terrorist organization is greater than the weapons of mass destruction-related authorities under which the IRGC is already sanctioned.

To make matters worse, the U.K. has not even punished the Islamic Republic after its own citizens were maimed and killed. For instance, in July 2021 after the IRGC’s Aerospace Force attacked the Mercer Street commercial vessel killing two European nationals, including one British citizen, not even one sanction was levied on the Islamic Republic. Fast forward to 2022 and after a brutal stabbing attack on author Salman Rushdie, who also holds U.K. citizenship, in New York by a reported IRGC sympathizer, London merely issued a statement but did not publicly act. Soon after, then candidate for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak voiced his support for the IRGC to be designated as a terrorist group, saying the attack should serve as a “wake up call for the West.”

The challenge facing Europe is not only about protecting its own citizens but also about standing up for the values of freedom, democracy, and human rights. By designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization, the prime minister can send a powerful message that he will not tolerate state-sponsored terrorism and will defend those who fight for justice and liberty.

The painful reality remains that European governments remain paralyzed by inaction. London is taking a leading role in fortifying Ukraine against nuclear-armed Russia. But when it comes to merely sanctioning the IRGC, which does not yet have nuclear weapons, it hesitates.

U.S. lawmakers have grown so concerned with this dynamic that they have written letters to their counterparts on a bipartisan basis strongly encouraging them to add the IRGC to their terrorism lists just as Washington has already done. President Biden should follow suit. To date, the Biden administration has not made a clear public statement specifically calling on its allies to sanction the IRGC as a terrorist organization. It has only made vague remarks that it is working with its allies and partners to hold the Iranian regime accountable and that it encourages them to consider any applicable sanctions authorities, including an IRGC designation.

As a survivor of the IRGC’s campaign of terror, I implore the U.K. government to take concrete action and prioritize the safety and security of its citizens by proscribing the IRGC as a terrorist organization. I also call on President Biden to use this opportunity to remind the U.K. prime minister that if the “special relationship” between our two countries is to mean anything, it is time to call the IRGC what it is: a terrorist organization.

Lives depend on it.

source https://time.com/6285400/uk-must-do-more-to-stop-the-iranian-terrorists-irgc/

The Outlaw Ocean Ep. 8 | The Loophole Artist

source https://time.com/6285203/the-outlaw-ocean-ep-8-the-loophole-artist/

The Outlaw Ocean Ep. 7 | Chasing Ghosts

source https://time.com/6285075/the-outlaw-ocean-ep-7-chasing-ghosts/

Has Ukraine’s Long-Awaited Counteroffensive Begun? Here’s What We Know

For months, observers have wondered when and where Ukraine might finally launch its long-anticipated spring counteroffensive to wrest back control of territory captured by Russia. “We are ready,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Wall Street Journal in a Jun. 3 interview, without specifying a start date. But he indicated that the campaign would be imminent. “We would like to have certain things,” he said, in an apparent reference to further Western-supplied weapons, such as fighter jets, “but we can’t wait for months.”

Just a day later, on Sunday, the Russian government claimed to repel what it described as “a large-scale offensive” by Ukrainian forces in the southeastern region of Donetsk—one of four Ukrainian provinces illegally annexed by Moscow following sham referenda last year. While a number of international news outlets have reported that the counteroffensive appears to be underway, citing Western officials and observers, Kyiv has so far refused to confirm and dismissed Russia’s claims as disinformation.
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Then, two days after that, on Tuesday, the Nova Kakhovka dam was destroyed in Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine’s Kherson region in the early morning hours, prompting further speculation about whether the counteroffensive began and the potential impact that the dam’s destruction could have on its success. The dam breach, which both Ukraine and Russia blame each other for, stands to be the single most damaging event of the war so far.

Read More: Ukraine Declares State of Emergency After Nova Kakhovka Dam Attack. Here’s What We Know So Far

It remains unclear who or what was responsible for the dam’s destruction. However, the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War think tank forecasted the possibility of Russia targeting the dam in October. “Ukraine has no material interest in blowing the dam, which could flood 80 Ukrainian cities and displace hundreds of thousands of people while damaging Ukraine’s already-tenuous electricity supply,” ISW wrote at the time. “Russia, however, has every reason to attempt to provide cover to its retreating forces and to widen the Dnipro River, which Ukrainian forces would need to cross to continue their counteroffensive.” (While ISW stands by its reasoning in October, it said on Tuesday it could not assess that Russia was responsible for the attack at this stage.)

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter that the goal of the dam’s destruction was evident: “to create insurmountable obstacles on the way of the advancing [Ukrainian army] … to slow down the fair final of the war.”

Below, what to know about the high-stakes counterattack.

Where do things stand in the fighting?

Fighting between Ukrainian and Russian troops is taking place along large parts of the 600-mile eastern frontline, according to ISW, from Kharkiv Oblast in the northeast of Ukraine down to Donetsk Oblast in the southwest. This includes areas around the besieged eastern city of Bakhmut—the site of the longest and bloodiest battle of the war so far that Russia recently claimed to have captured after months of intense fighting—as well as parts of Russian-occupied Luhansk and Zaporizhia Oblasts.

Ukraine’s plans for ejecting Russian troops from its territory have been shrouded in secrecy—perhaps because so much is riding on its success. As Kyiv sees it, there is no incentive in broadcasting its plans. “Words are very unnecessary / They can only do harm,” the country’s defense minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a not-so-cryptic tweet on Sunday, quoting the English band Depeche Mode’s song “Enjoy the Silence.” An attached video depicted Ukrainian soldiers holding fingers to their lips. Its tagline: “Plans love silence. There will be no announcement about the start.”

While Ukraine has, for obvious reasons, not forecast its plans for its counteroffensive, many observers expect Ukrainian forces to push south toward the Sea of Azov in a bid to cut off the so-called land bridge connecting Crimea (which has been occupied by Russia since 2014) and mainland Russia. Other options involve Ukraine attempting to encircle Russian troops in Bakhmut.

What is the Ukrainian government saying about the counteroffensive?

Not a lot. The Ukrainian government remains tight-lipped about its plans, even after the Nova Kakhovka dam attack. But there has been recent confirmation that some offensive measures are currently underway. Ukrainian deputy defense minister Hanna Maliar wrote on Telegram on Monday that Ukrainian troops are carrying out “offensive actions” in multiple locations along the eastern front, noting that Bakhmut remains the “epicenter of hostilities.” Maliar also said that Russian claims about the start of the counteroffensive were designed to “divert attention” from Bakhmut, where Moscow has reportedly lost ground, according to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner.

“We know that Russians are preparing a number of disinformation campaigns on our counteroffensive,” Ukrainian parliamentarian Alona Shkrum tells TIME, adding that people should “not believe Russian Telegram channels and other fake news, which are used as war strategies.” Ukraine, for its part, has also been known to include disinformation in its wartime arsenal—most notably last September, when Kyiv staged a counteroffensive in the northeast of the country after announcing a much-publicized southern offensive designed to catch Moscow off guard.

“The Ukrainians want to achieve operational surprise,” says Karolina Hird, a Russia analyst at ISW—a strategy that involves maintaining the fog of war as long as strategically possible. As for when we’ll know that the counteroffensive has begun, Hird says that there isn’t likely to be a single moment or event. “Defining one set of tactical actions as ‘the counteroffensive’ doesn’t really track with the reality on the ground,” she says, noting that past Ukrainian efforts to reclaim Russian-occupied territory were not limited to single offensive actions. “This counteroffensive, whenever it may be, will be a series of simultaneous and successive operations that happen across the entire theater.”

What is at stake in the spring counteroffensive?

The counteroffensive stands to mark a pivotal moment in the nearly 16-month war. For Kyiv, it will be the culmination of months of grinding, attritional conflict—one that, if successful, could see Ukraine retake significant swathes of Russian-occupied territory for the first time since November and, ultimately, shape the outcome of the war.

For its allies in the West, which have provided billions in military and financial aid to the Ukrainian war effort, the success of the campaign could lead to further pledges of assistance and longer-term commitments for Kyiv. Should it fail, however, it could prompt Ukraine’s partners, which have so far been loath to push Kyiv toward negotiating with Moscow, to question whether Ukraine can retake all of its captured territory at all.

source https://time.com/6285236/ukraine-counteroffensive-beginning/