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CONTENT © 2022

The Washington Post / Year 145, No. 119

Coach K done UNC

edges Duke in a

Final Four classic,

will play Kansas for

the title. SPORTS

Paid to stay clean

Cash helps addicts

kick the habit. Why

isn’t it used more?

OPINIONS ESSAY, A

Disney falls flat

First, silence on

Florida LGBTQ

law. Then, damage

control. BUSINESS

$ 126

7

BY DALTON BENNETT

khrestyshche, ukraine —

This town is slowly fading away.

Most residents have fled after

nearly a decade of bloody conflict

since Russian-backed separatists

in the eastern Ukrainian prov-

inces took up arms against the

Ukrainian state. One morning

this week, a half dozen elderly

women, some of the remaining

1,500 residents in town, huddled

outside the only church in the

village.

They were nervous. Here on

the most hotly contested front

line of the conflict, Russian air-

strikes have drawn closer and the

SEE UKRAINE ON A

In eastern

Ukraine, the

epicenter of war,

brutal fight rages

ASSOCIATED PRESS

People from Donetsk and Luhansk, territories held by separatist

governments in eastern Ukraine, at a train station in Russia.

Horrors exposed: Bodies in streets and allegations of atrocities. A

Russian economy riled: Businesses adjust to lack of Western goods. A

Logistics bog: Russian forces have firepower, struggle with supplies. A

BY NICK ANDERSON AND

DANIELLE DOUGLAS-GABRIEL

indiana, pa. — On Valentine’s

Day, her hometown college of-

fered BreAnn Stineman a seat in

its Class of 2026. The “Certificate

of Admission” from Indiana Uni-

versity of Pennsylvania validated

her achievements as a mostly A

student. “I told everybody,” the

18-year-old said. “I was so excited.”

But she’s not going yet. Stine-

man plans to take a “gap year” to

work at a nursing home after grad-

uation. High school during the

pandemic, with long spells online

or wearing masks, has felt grueling.

For now, paychecks beckon. She

wants to earn and save. “I need a

break, you know?” Stineman said.

“I definitely need a break. I just

want to work. That’s all I want to

do.”

Colleges across America face a

daunting challenge: Their student

head count has shrunk more than

5 percent since 2019, according to

a national estimate, as debate over

SEE COLLEGES ON A

Enrollment plunge has colleges scrambling

Pandemic-era loss of a million students comes amid r ising debate over value of higher education

JEFF SWENSEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

H udson Jean, 19, a sophomore at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, or IUP. Enrollment at the

school fell 40 percent the past decade, a familiar trend at many colleges across the country.

BY MIKE DEBONIS

Tens of thousands of Russian

troops massed on the Ukrainian

border in early February, Western

intelligence officials warned of an

imminent invasion and key sena-

tors worked furiously to assemble

a sanctions package that they

hoped would deter Russian Presi-

dent Vladimir Putin — or at least

demonstrate bipartisan U.S. re-

solve to oppose him.

A sanctions deal, Senate Ma-

jority Leader Charles E. Schumer

(D-N.Y.) told reporters on Feb. 8,

was “getting closer and closer”

after weeks of negotiations.

Instead, the talks fell apart.

SEE CONGRESS ON A

Congress

struggles

t o legislate

a response

BY CAROLINE KITCHENER

After Texas passed its restric-

tive abortion law last fall, Demo-

crats started talking more about

abortion than they had in dec-

ades.

House Democrats coalesced

around a bill to turn into law the

Supreme Court’s decision legaliz-

ing most abortions, Roe v. Wade,

voicing their support for the land-

mark precedent in tweets and

public statements. A few days

later, three congresswomen

shared their abortion stories on

the House floor. And when he

delivered his State of the Union

address in March, President

Biden became the first Democrat-

ic president since Roe to use that

platform to call for action on

abortion rights.

Yet as Democrats seek to mobi-

lize voters ahead of a Supreme

Court decision that could over-

turn Roe, a rhetorical divide has

emerged around the one word at

the center of the debate. Many

far-left liberals will say “abortion”

every time they talk about the

issue, while some Democrats who

will face competitive races in

2022 and 2024 — including the

president — have rarely used it,

relying instead on broader terms

such as “reproductive freedom”

and “a constitutional right.”

A diverse coalition of abortion

rights groups, led by We Testify, a

group with a large social media

following that shares the stories

of people who have had abor-

tions, has intensified its calls for

Biden and other Democrats to say

“abortion,” a move it argues

would help destigmatize the pro-

cedure at a critical moment. In

interviews with The Washington

Post, leaders at Planned Parent-

hood and NARAL Pro-Choice

America, two of the nation’s larg-

est abortion rights groups, and

SEE ABORTION ON A

Whether to say ‘abortion’

is dividing Democrats

With Roe endangered,

advocacy groups press

for the use of the word

ABCDE

Prices may vary in areas outside metropolitan Washington. K SUV1 V2 V3 V

Partly sunny, windy 61/40 • Tomorrow: Mostly sunny 59/46 C12 Democracy Dies in Darkness SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022. $3.

BY GRIFF WITTE

The Kremlin had banked on a
quick, trouble-free decapitation
to solve the problem of a neighbor
appearing to stray too far from
Moscow’s orbit.
But after its vaunted army
thundered across the border, very
little went according to plan.
The invading troops met fierce
resistance from outgunned fight-
ers defending their homeland. In-
ternational allies, including the
United States, rushed to aid the
underdogs. And a war that Mos-
cow had seen as a chance to show
off its might became instead a
bloody and embarrassing display
of weakness — one that threat-
ened the stability of its deeply
entrenched regime.
So has gone Russia’s stum-
bling, five-week-old invasion of
Ukraine. But the same descrip-
tion applies to the Soviet Union’s
ill-fated adventure in Afghani-
stan, which precipitated collapse
at home and the Cold War’s end.
Now the history of that four-de-
cade-old conflict looms over Rus-
sian President Vladimir Putin’s
decision-making as he tries to
navigate through a self-inflicted
quagmire. Veterans of the Af-
ghanistan war say he has already
failed to heed some of its most
critical lessons, including by over-
estimating his military’s capabili-
ties and misjudging his adversar-
ies.
“The Russians underestimat-
ed the Afghans in the 1980s,” said
Bruce Riedel, who worked on the
CIA’s covert program to aid the
rebels. “They seem to have un-
derestimated the Ukrainians to-
day.”
Riedel said there’s irony in that
failure: Putin, in invading
Ukraine, has appeared bent on
restoring the glory lost when the
Soviet Union broke up, an event
he has described as the “greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the
century.”
Yet, by making some of the
same mistakes that haunted So-
viet leaders until the day their
empire fell apart, Putin has put
Russian power — not to mention
his own future — in doubt.
SEE AFGHANISTAN ON A

In Putin’s new

quagmire, ghosts

of Soviet failure

in Afghanistan

BY LIZ SLY

Five weeks after Russian troops

hurtled into the country in the

hope of swiftly seizing the capital,

installing a friendly government

and subjugating Ukraine, the

Russian military appears to be

shrinking its goals to prioritize

the east, redeploying forces that

had been destined for the Kyiv

region and attempting to organize

reinforcements to compensate for

the thousands of troops that have

been killed.

The move represents a new and

substantially different phase of

the war as Russia withdraws its

troops from battered northern

and western areas to focus east-

ward, where it has already

wreaked massive destruction and

deprivation, most notably in the

city of Mariupol, where as many as

100,000 people remained trapped

in grim conditions.

The shift reflects a recognition

in Moscow that Russia can no

longer accomplish its original

goals, analysts say. After making

initial gains, its forces have stalled

on most of the fronts they ad-

vanced on, and they have mean-

while suffered huge losses in

terms of equipment and soldiers.

Washington and other Western

capitals have expressed skepti-

cism about Russia’s declared in-

tent of refocusing on the east, with

officials saying that Russia ap-

pears to be in the process of re-

grouping and repositioning its

forces rather than limiting its

goals.

And what lies ahead could

prove just as bloody as Russia

compensates for its failure to

make significant advances on the

ground by targeting civilian areas

with missiles and airstrikes. It

also sets up the likelihood of a

longer war, at least than the one

Russia originally anticipated.

But it also defers, perhaps in-

definitely, the broader threat to

Ukraine as a whole, fundamental-

ly changing the nature of the war.

“Russia has lost the big war,”

said Phillips O’Brien, professor of

strategic studies at St. Andrews

University in Scotland. “The big

war is over.”

SEE STRATEGY ON A

Russia trims war goals, pulls back from Kyiv

U KRAINE HOLDS LINE;

MOSCOW LOOKS EAST

Army lacks strength,

numbers to take capital

VADIM GHIRDA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ukrainian troops check bodies of civilians for booby traps Saturday in the formerly Russian-occupied Kyiv suburb of Bucha. As

Russia’s military pulls back from territory it had seized, a clearer picture is emerging of the human suffering unleashed by the invasion.