German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Monday, pledging solidarity with that country amid fears of a Russian invasion.

Speaking at a news conference with his counterpart, Scholz said Ukraine’s sovereignty is non-negotiable, adding that he expects Russia to take clear steps to deescalate tensions.

Scholz also issued a threat of “far-reaching sanctions” if Moscow sends troops over the border. However, he didn’t provide specific details on what those might be.

But the German leader has refused Ukraine’s repeated pleas to send military aid and weapons as the United States and Britain have done, saying Germany has a longstanding policy of not sending that type of help to conflict zones.

Instead, Scholz stressed Germany’s role as the largest source of financial aid to Ukraine, making a new pledge to extend 150 million euros to Kyiv.

Ukraine responds to reports of an imminent attack

After the meeting, Zelenskyy said the two nations “share the common vision that the escalation on the Ukrainian-Russian border is an unprecedented challenge for Europe and the world.”

And in a news conference alongside Scholz, Zelenskyy suggested the possibility of dropping Ukraine’s goal of NATO membership — an issue at the heart of the conflict with Russia. It is a major reversal for Zelenskyy, who as recently as Sunday said he would continue to pursue joining the international alliance, regardless of Russian threats and skepticism among western countries.

“Maybe the question of open doors is for us like a dream,” Zelenskyy said on Monday.

He added: “How much should Ukraine go on that path? … Who will support us?”

Zelenskyy also responded to U.S. reports that Russia could be planning to launch an attack on Wednesday, according to the BBC.

“We are being threatened with a big war and the date of the military invasion is set again,” he said in a statement, according to the BBC.

The leader praised the strength of his own country and proclaimed “our state today is stronger than ever.”

“We want peace and we want to resolve all issues exclusively through negotiations,” Zelenskyy reportedly said, predicting that the violence in Donbas and Crimea would soon end. Both regions, he said, would return to Ukrainian control through diplomatic means.

Wednesday would not be a day of war but rather a day of unity, he added.

Russian leaders say there’s no intent to invade

Meanwhile, Russia denies plans to invade its neighbor, despite massing 100,000 soldiers on Ukraine’s borders and another 30,000 soldiers near the Belarus-Ukraine border. The explanation it has offered the world is that it is merely conducting military exercises.

The Kremlin last week said its forces along the Belarus border would eventually return back to home bases in Russia but officials did not provide a timeframe for the withdrawal.

The White House says the operation is yet another escalation of tensions along the Ukraine border.

U.S. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders, including European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, have warned Russia that if it sends its forces into Ukraine, as it did in 2014, they will prevent the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from coming online. That pipeline would transport gas from Russia to Germany — Europe’s longtime economic engine.

Scholz is planning on flying to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.

The leader’s attempts to diffuse tensions and find a peaceful resolution, comes as several nations, including Germany, Australia, Israel, Japan and South Korea, are telling their citizens to evacuate from Ukraine.

On Monday, the U.S. State Department announced it is in the process of temporarily relocating its embassy operations from Kyiv to Lviv “due to the dramatic acceleration in the buildup of Russian forces.”

“The Embassy will remain engaged with the Ukrainian government, coordinating diplomatic engagement in Ukraine. We are also continuing our intensive diplomatic efforts to deescalate the crisis,” officials said in a statement.

The families of embassy staff were ordered to leave Ukraine on Jan. 23. On Monday evening, the State Department also told all U.S. citizens to depart Belarus, in part over Russia’s military buildup.

Following a call with Zelenskyy on Sunday, the White House issued a statement saying “President Biden made clear that the United States would respond swiftly and decisively, together with its Allies and partners, to any further Russian aggression against Ukraine.”

Weeks ahead of the state’s March 1 primary, local election officials in Texas are sending mail-in ballots back to thousands of voters who’d turned them in, citing issues with ID requirements created by the state’s controversial new voting law.

In Harris County — Texas’ largest county, which is home to Houston — election officials said they’d received 6,548 mail-in ballots as of Saturday and had returned almost 2,500 — nearly 38% — for correction because of an incorrect ID.

That’s a far higher rejection rate than is typical.

Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator, says it’s a serious problem.

“Mail ballots are people’s votes,” Longoria says. “So, I am very concerned — not just with the complexity of the process, but how that added complexity is going to increase the number of mail ballots that we have to reject.”

Voting for the March 1 primary that is currently underway in Texas is the first big election held in the state since Senate Bill 1, a GOP-backed law that introduced sweeping changes to the Texas election code, went into effect.

Why mail ballots are being rejected

Across the country, several states have cracked down on their vote-by-mail programs following the 2020 election. Texas, however, already had one of the most limited programs. Only voters who are over 65, disabled, out of town or in jail are able to cast a mail-in ballot in Texas.

Despite warnings from groups representing older voters and voters with disabilities, state lawmakers included new restrictions for vote by mail in the law.

SB 1 requires that the ID voters use when they vote by mail — whether it’s a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number — matches what’s on their voter registration record. This new rule applies to both the application to vote by mail as well as the return envelope voters use to send their ballot back to election officials.

This requirement has already tripped up thousands of voters applying for a mail-in ballot who didn’t remember what ID they used to register — sometimes decades ago.

Chris Davis, the elections administrator in Williamson County north of Austin, says he and many other local officials were nervous this problem would be even bigger as voters returned their ballots.

“All of us county election officials are unfortunately anticipating a higher number of mail ballot rejections,” he says. “And the window to fix that is much, much narrower.”

How ballot issues can be fixed

James Slattery, a senior staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, says election officials and voters face a big time crunch when it comes to sorting out any ID issues that arise with a returned vote-by-mail ballot.

“Basically if there is a problem with your ID number on a vote-by-mail ballot return envelope, the process depends on when the problem is identified,” he says.

If the problem is caught very early, election officials can send the ballot back to be fixed and then the voter can mail it back again. However, Slattery says a lot of issues with vote-by-mail ballots are identified late in the game. That’s because sometimes it takes a while for the ballot to get mailed to the voter. People also like to take their time with their ballot, he says, so they return it pretty close to the deadline.

Slattery says that’s why it’s more likely that election officials will have to resort to another process.

“The county may — but is not required to — contact the voter and say, ‘You can either cancel your mail ballot and vote in person, or come to the clerk’s office in person within six days of the election to fix the problem,’ ” he says. “That is a very convoluted process … that obviously is not helpful for people who are not in Texas.”

State election officials say there are steps voters can take to prevent these issues.

Sam Taylor, assistant secretary of state for communications, says a Texas voter who is already registered can update their registration online — even after the registration deadline — on a new website the state created, to make sure it has all the IDs the voter uses.

“You are not changing anything by adding information to your voter registration record, you are just making it more complete,” he says. “So that doesn’t start the clock over in terms of whether or not you were registered by the deadline for the March primary.”

But Grace Chimene, president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, says that’s not an ideal solution — especially for older and disabled voters.

“To be told that there’s changes like this and then the expectation that they are supposed to log on in a complicated manner and be able to figure out how to update their voter registration card, I think it is really a shame,” she says.

Taylor says his office is also recommending that voters provide both their Social Security and driver’s license numbers — if they have them — on their application and return ballots, just in case.

Taylor says state election officials do not want to see vote-by-mail ballots get rejected.

“The secretary’s stated open position is that we hope that number is zero,” he says. “Obviously we don’t want anyone who is eligible to vote by mail to have their ballot-by-mail application rejected, or to have their ballot rejected.”

Voting groups in Texas are telling voters to return their mail-in ballots as early as they possibly can; that way there’s enough time to fix a problem. And local election officials say they are doing their best to catch voters up on what’s changed.

Ultimately, says Harris County’s Longoria, county election workers have limited time and limited resources to sort out confusion created by the new voting rules.

“This is not something I can outwork,” she says. “No matter how many hours I stay up in the day, no matter how many team members we get here, no matter how many people we put on the phones to help voters — at the end of the day, this hurts voters.”

The Russian threat to Ukraine has Washington on edge. No one wants the heightened tensions in Eastern Europe to escalate into war. But there’s at least one prominent Republican in the Capitol not complaining that the media spotlight has shifted overseas.

Last week, Mitch McConnell, the seven-term Republican senator from Kentucky who has been his party’s leader in the Senate for the past 15 years, found himself locked in a high-profile confrontation with the former president, who insists he is still the party’s leader.

It was not the first round of this long-running bout, but it was perhaps the most clarifying and the most consequential for the elections this fall and in 2024.

McConnell had felt compelled to respond when the Republican National Committee censured two Republican members of the House for serving on the special committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The RNC had characterized the events on Jan. 6 as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

McConnell would have none of that. Unlike the members of the RNC, he actually witnessed what happened in the Capitol on that day. And he has always been clear about what he saw and what it meant.

“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” McConnell said last week.

That was no more than most of his party colleagues in the Senate or among the nation’s governors would say. But he was saying it in plain English in public with reporters gathered to hear it. And he was saying it in the certain knowledge that his defense of the investigating committee and the legitimacy of the 2020 election would bring down the wrath of Donald Trump.

“Mitch McConnell does not speak for the Republican Party and does not represent the views of the vast majority of its voters,” Trump shot back in a statement released by his Save America PAC. “He did nothing to fight for his constituents and stop the most fraudulent election in American history.”

It is hard to find a comparable exchange between a president and a Senate leader of the same party anywhere in U.S. history.

To be sure, presidents have often crossed swords with the leaders of the opposition party and not infrequently disagreed with those of their own party. But the latter disputes are generally not put out for public consumption. The fratricidal nature and sharp wording of the Trump-McConnell feud are unprecedented.

The scenario was different in 2002

Late in 2002, Republican President George W. Bush distanced himself from his own party’s Senate leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, after Lott made a stunning remark at a retirement party for Strom Thurmond. Lott had suggested the country “wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years” if Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, when Thurmond was the segregationist nominee of the States Rights Party.

That led to Lott stepping down as leader, making way for another senator with closer ties with the White House. But Bush was the sitting president at the time, still riding a huge wave of public support in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and preparing the nation for an impending war with Iraq.

Trump is scarcely in a comparable position, having lost his bid for reelection and deeply divided the country.

And McConnell is in no sense likely to step down. He has far more experience and far more achievements as leader than Lott. The crux is that he is backed by most of the GOP senators who are his most immediate and important “constituents.”

That is why McConnell is well-positioned to break out to the upside on his current status as the minority leader in a 50-50 Senate. Republicans need just one more seat to make that happen, and it could happen any time a vacancy occurs, or it could come with the midterm elections in November. McConnell’s colleagues know there is no one more likely to oversee a successful electoral season than McConnell.

In 2014, for example, while serving in the Senate minority leader role, McConnell helped recruit and raise money for that fall’s strong lineup of challengers who defeated five Democratic incumbents and captured an additional four seats from Democrats who had retired. That gain of nine seats (no GOP seat went Democratic) set McConnell up with a clear majority to resist Barack Obama on nearly every front in his last two years as president.

But McConnell knows that a sweep of that kind is far from automatic. He was also the party leader for the Senate election cycle in 2012, when vulnerable Democrats in Missouri and Indiana escaped because the Republicans nominated weaker candidates. At that time, the surging influence of the Tea Party was being felt throughout the country and helping hard-line insurgents win primaries over more mainstream Republicans.

If something similar were to happen this year, one of two scenarios that McConnell wishes to avoid could play out in the next round of voting for party leader. In one, the pro-Trump rivals who beat McConnell’s preferred candidates get to Washington and vote for someone other than McConnell for leader. Two have already pledged to do so.

In the alternative scenario, the pro-Trump rivals get the GOP nominations and lose to the Democrats in November. That might not only frustrate McConnell’s drive for a clear majority but endanger his base of 50. Republican nominations are up for grabs in at least three states (Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina) where Democrats have a shot at winning this fall.

In that event, if his party were to lose ground when it expects to gain, the octogenarian McConnell would be less assured of keeping his job. This would be especially true assuming Republicans do take over in the House and Trump becomes an official candidate for 2024 and calls for McConnell’s ouster.

McConnell’s real problem is that the Republican primary voters this year may well resemble those of 2012 more than those of 2014. The party has continued to move in the direction once denoted in the phrase Tea Party and now symbolized by Trump.

That is the message in the RNC statement and in countless polls showing most Republicans say Trump actually won reelection in 2020 – despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary.

The problem is that McConnell is not just dealing with Trump. He is dealing with the realities of the Republican Party that elevated Trump in 2016 and have most of the party’s ranks following Trump’s lead today.

Any lingering doubts about this can be dispelled by reading the new book by New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters, Insurgency: How The Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted. Peters has been following developments on the American right in the years since the original Tea Party demonstrations in 2009.

He has interviewed Trump, but most of his book is what he learned from interviewing several hundred others relevant to his overall subject over a period of years. Among them is Patrick Buchanan, the speechwriter for Ronald Reagan who became a columnist and TV commentator and three-time candidate for president. Peters argues that the “pitchfork Pat” ethos of Buchanan’s campaigns in the 1990s kept right on marching through the first decades of the new century.

The movement was diverted but not derailed by the years of the War on Terror. Then, in 2008, its anger was back on a domestic track with the mortgage meltdown and Wall Street bailouts, then the elevation of the Obamas (Michelle almost as much as Barack). The movement found its next leading figure in Sarah Palin (whose 2008 speech as the vice presidential nominee has iconic status) and found its populist sweet spot with the rise of the Tea Party and opposition to Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act).

But the Tea Party could not get Obama out of office, and 2012 nominee Mitt Romney proved disappointing. The field of candidates for 2016 was huge, but the insurgents soon found their new voice in Trump, the celebrity wheeler-dealer and reality TV star. Trump fixated issues such as the birth certificate and the “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York City. He also savaged immigrants from Mexico and from Muslim countries. And he began denigrating the integrity of elections before he had even been a candidate.

Peters has a notebook full of other characters and campaigns, from the speechwriters who worked with Palin to the on-air personalities who labored for Roger Ailes, the legendary creator of Fox News. Peters seems to have been present and reporting at every significant turn in the Republican road, watching the party gradually shed its country club image in favor of pickup trucks and gun racks.

Trump is a product of toxic political climate, not a cause

Along the way, we meet many media figures who will figure in Trump’s eventual rise, including Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity but also the shadowy Andrew Breitbart and his buddy and successor Steve Bannon. We see the roles played by David Bossie at Citizens United and Stephen Miller as a Senate staffer, well before they become part of Trump’s inner circle of hard-liners. Later, we see how they assume roles inside Trump’s new regime, along with all those Fox personalities, one by one.

Peters conveys a keen sense of having been present, not at the creation of this new GOP but for a critical stage of its transformation. His conclusion is that Trump is less a cause of the toxic political climate than he is a product of it. One might add that if Trump is neither the fuel nor the fire, he has surely been a highly effective accelerant. Thanks to him, what had been smoldering in our political culture has burst forth with far greater reach and intensity.

Trump has brought the heat. To date, Mitch McConnell has managed to convert that heat in service of the conservative agenda he himself wanted to achieve. The results have included a paring back of federal regulations and taxes and the repopulating of the federal judiciary.

This year, with Trump out of office but never out of mind, McConnell has to harness his insurgent energy again to pursue his own goals. And that will be a special challenge given that this time much of the heat is now being directed at him.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Police in Albuquerque arrested a man suspected of stabbing 11 people as he rode a bicycle around the city over the weekend, leaving two victims critically injured, authorities said.

The suspect was identified as Tobias Gutierrez, a 42-year-old man with a criminal history that includes felony offenses that range from burglary to battery and possession of a controlled substance.

He was booked into jail on charges of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, police in New Mexico’s largest city said in a statement Monday. Booking documents said he was homeless.

The stabbings appeared to have been committed at random within hours along Central Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. One of the crime scenes included a homeless encampment and another was near a smoke shop where the suspect asked a victim for money and yelled obscenities before swinging a knife, according to a criminal complaint.

“There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason” to the attacks, police spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said.

There was no immediate information on whether Gutierrez had a lawyer who could speak on his behalf.

New Mexico court records show Gutierrez also had been charged over the years with drug possession and driving while intoxicated.

In 2014, Gutierrez failed to appear in court for driving on a revoked license, records show. He responded to the court with a handwritten note saying that he was in federal custody in another county and that he was making an effort to better himself while incarcerated.

His federal prison sentence stemmed from a case in which he entered a tribal casino north of Albuquerque while carrying a revolver and ammunition.

Authorities said Gutierrez got into an altercation with a casino security officer, dropped the revolver, got into a vehicle and led police on a chase through a suburb until he crashed and was found hiding.

Records show he was released from federal custody in 2020.

Records also show that police were called to his mother’s home twice last September for domestic altercations, including one in which he was accused of stabbing her husband. No charges were filed.

Sunday’s attacks began around 11:15 a.m., when officers responded to a crime scene downtown and found a man suffering a laceration to his hand. About an hour later, another call came in about the stabbing outside a smoke shop near the University of New Mexico a couple miles away.

Police were called to two more stabbings along Central Avenue over the next two hours before another call came in at 2 p.m. about a man trying to stab people outside a convenience store. Arriving officers found two victims with neck wounds.

Within the next 20 minutes, two more calls came in — and the final one involved a victim stabbed outside of a restaurant along another busy street less than a mile away.

The witnesses identified a man on a bike armed with a large knife. Some described the man as acting strangely and said he appeared to be upset.

According to the criminal complaint, an officer saw a suspect who fit the description and saw him toss something into a trash can before the officer stopped the suspect. A search warrant was issued, and a knife was found.

The victims were taken to different hospitals. While two suffered critical injuries, all of those hospitalized were in stable condition, police said. Some were treated for their injuries and released.