Category: WORLD

South Carolina voters head to the polls on Saturday to cast ballots in a Republican presidential primary that could well determine the political fate of the state’s former governor, Nikki Haley, in her long-shot bid to derail former President Donald J. Trump’s march to the Republican nomination.

Here is what to watch in the Palmetto State as votes are tallied Saturday night.

How quickly will the race be called?

As we saw in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary last month, the speed of a race call can give the victor — in both of those cases Mr. Trump — a sense of momentum, even an air of inevitability. Iowa was called for Mr. Trump before the caucuses had even ended.

Polls in South Carolina will close at 7 p.m., and Ms. Haley is expected to speak in Charleston once the winner is declared. The Trump campaign will hold a “watch party” in the state capital of Columbia, where the former president is expected to speak.

An early night for the two remaining candidates will say a lot about where the race is heading as they turn to Michigan next week ahead of Super Tuesday on March 5, when 15 states will vote to award 874 of 2,429 Republican delegates.

If the contest results in the drumming that polling suggests it will, Ms. Haley, once thought to be South Carolina’s political star, is about to be trounced. Polling averages have her trailing Mr. Trump by 30 percentage points.

Just after the New Hampshire primary, Mark Harris, the chief strategist for Ms. Haley’s super PAC, SFA Fund, said that the former governor did not have to win her home state but that she did have to exceed her share of the vote in New Hampshire — 43 percent — to show she is making progress with Republican voters.

Betsy Ankney, Ms. Haley’s campaign manager, walked that back on Friday, saying: “We have never gotten into those benchmarks. We won’t start now.” But short of a victory, Ms. Haley needs to take some kind of consolation prize from the state where she was born, raised, served as governor and still lives.

Ms. Haley has said resolutely that she will stay in the race, regardless of the outcome in South Carolina. Still, she would like to exceed expectations so that she can remind voters of her favorite campaign T-shirt, ”Underestimate me. That’ll be fun.”

Poll after poll has found that most Americans do not relish a rematch between President Biden and Mr. Trump, the major party nominees in 2020. Mr. Biden won the Democratic primary in South Carolina on Feb. 8 with more than 96 percent of the vote. But only 131,302 people voted, on the low end of an expected turnout that was always forecast to be anemic.

Unlike Iowa, where subzero temperatures and blowing snow most likely held down turnout, the weather in South Carolina will be fine on Saturday — gorgeous even. A low turnout could be attributed to the lack of drama in the state: Even Ms. Haley’s supporters evince little confidence that she could win. But a poor showing of South Carolinians could add a data point to Ms. Haley’s contention that Americans are desperate for a fresh, younger face to vote for in November — or more broadly, the point that none of the candidates have inspired voters in a surly mood.

How will the Lowcountry go?

South Carolinians like to divide themselves into three sections: the Upstate around Greenville and Spartanburg, where the question is, what church do you belong to?; the Midlands, dominated by the state capital, where the question is, what agency do you work for?; and the mellower Lowcountry of Charleston and the coast, where the question is, what do you drink?

Mr. Trump’s strength will be with evangelical conservatives in the Upstate, and his dominance with elected state officials in Columbia is a testament to Ms. Haley’s weakness in the Midlands, either because of the feathers she ruffled as governor or the tendency of politicians to side with the favorite.

That leaves the Lowcountry, where affluent Republicans fix up 19th-century mansions in Charleston and Beaufort, golf on Hilton Head or build sumptuous beach houses in the Charleston suburbs of Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island — and where Ms. Haley lives, on Kiawah Island. The Lowcountry should be Haley country.

But a surge of newcomers — the largest cohort from New York and New Jersey — has swelled more middle-class, inland suburbs around Charleston, as well as in Horry County, home to Myrtle Beach. They were not around for Governor Haley.

How this region votes will speak to Mr. Trump’s appeal with the educated, affluent Republicans who once controlled the party, and with suburbanites not influenced by their prior experience with Ms. Haley.

As voters in South Carolina prepare to take to the polls on Saturday, Nikki Haley has vowed to continue challenging former President Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination — to the dismay of her onetime boss.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley, former governor of South Carolina and U.N. ambassador in the Trump administration, have dialed up their attacks on each other.

Mr. Trump has mocked the absence of Ms. Haley’s husband, Maj. Michael Haley, a National Guardsman who is deployed to Africa. His campaign suggested that her staying in the race, despite being well behind Mr. Trump in delegates, was “like any wailing loser hellbent on an alternative reality.” Ms. Haley has said that her rival has “gotten more unstable and unhinged” and that he has “mental deficiencies.”

But while attacking each other’s record and policies, both have turned to false and misleading claims.

Here’s a fact check.

WHAT WAS SAID

“Every poll shows that he can’t beat Biden. Some are down by five, some are down by seven. On his best day, it’s margin of error.”
— Ms. Haley, referring to Mr. Trump during a Fox News town hall this month

False. National general election polls do show a tight race in a potential Trump-Biden rematch and Ms. Haley has emphasized select polls that show her beating Mr. Biden by double digits. But Mr. Trump comes in slightly higher than his successor in many — though not all — surveys.

For example, Morning Consult recently found Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden by four points, outside the survey’s margin of error.

Other polls show Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden, albeit within the margin of error: an NBC News poll in January surveying registered voters found that 47 percent said they would vote for Mr. Trump, compared with Mr. Biden’s 42 percent. (However, the results shifted in Mr. Biden’s favor when the respondents were asked to consider the same matchup if Mr. Trump were to be convicted of a felony.) In yet other polls, Mr. Biden holds a slight lead over Mr. Trump.

As of Friday, the Real Clear Politics average, which incorporates multiple polls, showed Mr. Trump ahead of Mr. Biden by 1.9 percentage points. The average in a hypothetical Haley-Biden matchup showed Ms. Haley ahead by 4.9 percentage points.

“The polls at this point aren’t very useful for predicting the eventual winner, but they do indicate that it’s likely to be a close election,” Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, said of a Trump-Biden contest.

WHAT WAS SAID

“Nikki Haley wants to charge the working class a 23 percent national sales tax.”
— Mr. Trump during a January rally

This is misleading.Ms. Haley has not called for such a policy as she campaigns for president. Instead, Mr. Trump’s campaign has cited a 2012 post from Ms. Haley supporting a “Fair Tax.”

“Yes, I support the Fair Tax and any reform that would eliminate income tax,” Ms. Haley wrote in the 2012 post on Facebook.

Ms. Haley’s campaign did not say what she was referring to in that post, but she could have been referencing the Fair Tax Act, a proposal that has been repeatedly put forward in Congress to no avail. The legislation seeks to eliminate federal taxes — including income, payroll, estate and gift taxes — and instead impose a national sales tax of 23 percent. It also calls for abolishing the Internal Revenue Service.

Many prominent Republicans, including Ron DeSantis, now governor of Florida, and former Vice President Mike Pence, have supported the proposal at some point over the years. Critics of the legislation have said the bill would raise the tax burden of many Americans but spare the wealthy.

However, Ms. Haley also could have been referring to state-level “fair tax” legislation that lawmakers in South Carolina — and elsewhere — were proposing around that time, calling for the elimination of specific state taxes, including the income tax, in favor of a higher state sales tax. (South Carolina’s proposal would have reportedly raised the sales tax to an estimated 6 to 7 percent from 5 percent.) In a 2015 Facebook comment, Ms. Haley clearly indicated she supported the state proposal, saying that “the legislature knows that if they send it to me, I will sign it.”

WHAT WAS SAID

“Donald Trump needs to answer to the fact that why did he propose an 18 cent per gallon gas tax increase in 2018 when he was president?”
— Ms. Haley this month during a Fox News town hall

False. Mr. Trump never formally proposed a gas tax increase, as Ms. Haley suggested. Instead, some lawmakers said that Mr. Trump had entertained the idea of increasing the gas tax by 25 cents — not 18 cents — during a private, bipartisan meeting.

After that meeting in February 2018, Senator Thomas R. Carper, a Democrat, said Mr. Trump had endorsed the idea to pay for an infrastructure plan released by the White House. Some critics quickly denounced the notion.

It was not the first time Mr. Trump had signaled openness to a gas tax hike. In 2017, he told Bloomberg News that he would consider such an increase. And in January 2018, The Washington Post, citing an unnamed person familiar with the deliberations, reported that Mr. Trump had privately “mused about a gas tax increase to 50 cents per gallon.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Trump never formally put forward such proposals.

The Trump campaign has also repurposed a misleading claim about Ms. Haley’s record on gas taxes. A recent ad suggests Ms. Haley called for raising the gas tax in South Carolina as governor but has since lied about it. In fact, Ms. Haley rebuffed calls to increase the state gas tax as a stand-alone measure and proposed raising it by 10 cents over three years only if the state reduced the income tax rate to 5 percent, from 7 percent, and made changes to the state’s Transportation Department.

WHAT WAS SAID

Nikki Haley “actually dropped Romney for a little while for Obama.”
— Mr. Trump during a rally this month

False. There is no record of Ms. Haley politically backing former President Barack Obama. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for evidence of such support.

Mr. Trump similarly claimed on Truth Social that Ms. Haley “was also a Barack Hussein Obama supporter as seen here.” The post included a video clip from a 2012 campaign event for Mitt Romney, then a Republican presidential candidate, showing Ms. Haley accidentally using Mr. Obama’s name when she meant to reference Mr. Romney.

Ms. Haley said: “Obama wants to strengthen our military and will never apologize for America.” But Mr. Romney quickly corrected her, as the clip shows, and the two laughed as Ms. Haley recognized the slip.

WHAT WAS SAID

“What is Trump saying he’ll actually do in office? A 10 percent across-the-board tax increase.”
—Haley campaign in an ad this month

This is misleading. Mr. Trump hasn’t proposed a “10 percent across-the-board tax increase” on Americans, but he did float a proposal to impose a 10 percent tariff on imported goods — which economists say would affect prices for U.S. companies and consumers.

The ad cites a January CNBC article about comments Mr. Trump made in an August interview with Fox Business.

“I think when companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay automatically, let’s say, a 10 percent tax,” Mr. Trump told Larry Kudlow, who served as director of the National Economic Council during the Trump administration. “That money would be used to pay off debt.”

“A 10 percent tariff on all imports is a 10 percent across-the-board tax on imports,” Katheryn N. Russ, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, said in an email. “It is not an across-the-board tax on all goods.”

There are elements of Mr. Trump’s vision that remain unclear, including whether the new tariff would apply to imports from countries with which the United States has free trade deals, as The New York Times has reported.

Experts have said Mr. Trump’s proposal would result in higher prices for Americans and most likely cause trading partners to retaliate. An economist at the right-leaning Tax Foundation said such a 10 percent tariff would effectively “raise taxes on American consumers by more than $300 billion a year” and slightly reduce the size of the U.S. economy.

Tariffs are paid by the U.S.-based importer. While exporters could absorb some of the cost by lowering prices, research on tariffs put in place under the Trump administration suggests the costs largely fell on U.S. firms and consumers.

How much of a new tariff would get shouldered by consumers remains an open question, Ms. Russ said, noting that importing firms could reduce profit margins instead of passing the cost to consumers. But tariffs can also result in higher prices for domestic products — if a firm raises prices strategically, given more expensive imported products on the market, or if the manufacturer relies on imported inputs.

Imported goods and services were equivalent to about 14 percent of the United States gross domestic product last year, according to federal data.

WHAT WAS SAID

“Nikki Haley joined Biden in opposing President Trump’s border wall.”
— Trump campaign in an ad this month

False. Ms. Haley did not oppose Mr. Trump’s border wall. She said in 2015, when Mr. Trump launched his first bid for the presidency, that a wall was not the sole answer.

To support its claim about the border wall, the ad cites a 2023 Time article. But that article doesn’t offer evidence that Ms. Haley opposed the wall. Instead, it quotes comments Ms. Haley made during a National Press Club event, linking to a Washington Post opinion piece from September 2015 describing the event.

The Time article quoted Ms. Haley telling Republicans “to remember that the fabric of America came from these legal immigrants,” and drawing a distinction between them and immigrants who enter the country illegally.

Ms. Haley’s full comments made clear that she did not reject the idea of a border wall, as long as it was part of a broader plan.

“Don’t say you’re just going to build a wall, because a wall’s not going to do it,” she said at the time. “You’ve got to have commitment of ground troops, equipment, money — all of that, to bring it together.”

During her campaign for president, Ms. Haley has also supported the idea of expanding the wall.

Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com.

In a sprawling tent encampment in Gaza, the Israeli bombs fall close enough to hear and feel. But daily life is also a struggle against hunger, cold and a growing sanitation crisis.

A lack of sufficient toilets and clean water, as well as open sewage, are problems that displaced Palestinians have struggled with since the early days of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

For two months after Salwa al-Masri, 75, and her family fled to the city of Rafah, at the southernmost tip of Gaza, to escape Israel’s military offensive, she said she would walk 200 yards to reach the nearest bathroom. If she was lucky, younger women in line would let her jump ahead. Other times, she might wait up to an hour to use a dirty toilet shared with thousands of other people.

“It’s horrible,” Ms. al-Masri said via WhatsApp recently from her family’s ramshackle tent, which they made out of wood and plastic sheeting. “I wouldn’t drink water. I would stay thirsty so I wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom. I stopped drinking coffee and tea.”

Many other Gazans, already facing hunger and thirst as a result of Israel’s more than four-month siege of the territory, say they, too, have tried to cut back on eating and drinking even more to avoid an uncomfortable and unsanitary visit to the toilet.

Recently, Ms. al-Masri’s son and other relatives bought a cement toilet basin and dug a hole behind their tent, where the sewage gathers. It is a closer bathroom and one she shares with fewer people.

But the challenges of getting water to wash with and of the accumulating sewage are threatening their health, and the stench of sewage fills their makeshift encampment.

Last month, the World Health Organization reported that cases of hepatitis A had been confirmed in Gaza. It also said that there were several thousand people with jaundice, which is caused by hepatitis A, among other conditions. Cases of diarrhea among children have also skyrocketed. All of it is linked to poor sanitation, according to UNICEF.

“The inhumane living conditions — barely any clean water, clean toilets and possibility to keep the surroundings clean — will enable hepatitis A to spread further,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O., wrote on social media at the time, “and highlight how explosively dangerous the environment is for the spread of disease.”

Prominent epidemiologists have estimated that an escalation of the war in Gaza could cause up to 85,000 Palestinian deaths over the next six months from injuries, disease and lack of medical care, in addition to the nearly 30,000 that local authorities have already reported since early October. Their estimate represents “excess deaths” that would not have been expected without the war.

Schools, hospitals, mosques and churches have become overcrowded shelters for Palestinians seeking safety from Israeli airstrikes. The few available bathrooms have to be shared among hundreds or thousands of people who sometimes wait in lines for hours to use them.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the accompanying ground offensive have increasingly pushed Palestinians south into the overcrowded corner of Gaza around Rafah and forced them to erect makeshift tents. As a result, access to bathrooms and sanitation has only worsened.

Some 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are now in Rafah — more than half of Gaza’s total population of about 2.2 million — even as Israel threatens to invade the area.

After the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, Israel’s near-complete siege on Gaza has prevented most things from coming into the territory, creating a dire shortage of food, water and medicines. Additionally, representatives of both UNICEF and the Palestine Red Crescent Society said their organizations have tried to bring in portable toilets and materials to build sanitation facilities, but the Israeli authorities prevented them.

“It is a public health concern,” said Abrassac Kamara, a UNICEF manager for the Palestine WASH program, which helps deliver safe water and sanitation services. “But the second thing is simply just dignity. It is something we take for granted, but it’s really how we are taking dignity away from people.”

Israel’s civil administration, the bureaucratic arm of its military in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, said the restrictions on certain goods entering Gaza prevented the entry of items that could also be used for military purposes.

Hamas “exploits civilian resources in order to strengthen itself militarily at the expense of caring for the civilian population,” the civil administration said, without explaining how portable bathrooms could serve military needs.

UNICEF officials said they have had to resort to constructing toilets out of wood, concrete and plastic sheeting — materials already available in Gaza — often at a high cost. The agency plans to make 500 such toilets in Rafah to help reduce the congestion.

“At the moment, anything that is considered construction material — mostly metal, but also sandwich panels, nails, reinforcement rods — are all banned,” Mr. Kamara said. “We are making do.”

UNICEF had planned to build another 500 toilets in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, but had to abandon those efforts as Israel’s ground offensive moved into the area recently.

“They will literally put any sort of privacy screening — plastic at the back of the tent — and just dig and bury when they need to relieve themselves,” Mr. Kamara said. “We are back to the basic sanitation of digging a hole and covering it.”

In a video posted on Instagram last month, Bisan Owda, a Gazan journalist and documentary filmmaker, chronicled the daily struggle of finding a latrine. As she walked past tents in the street, carrying a large jug of water, she narrated her challenges.

“This is my daily routine,” she said, “walking for almost 20 to 25 minutes to reach a bathroom — struggling to reach a bathroom, actually.”

Other women have lamented a desperate lack of sanitary pads in the territory, and at least one of them told The New York Times that she had started taking birth control pills to stop her period altogether.

Sana Kabariti, 33, a pharmacist from Gaza City, in the north, said she fled home with her family to the town of Nuseirat, in central Gaza, as Israeli bombs rained down on their neighborhood in the first few days of the war. She and some 40 members of her extended family, including 10 children, cloistered in a small room and shared one bathroom, she said. But there was no water and no toilet paper.

So despite the dangers, they returned to their homes.

“With regards to the toilet, there wasn’t any water,” she said. “And this is what led to the families with us to return to Gaza City, and to the danger, because they couldn’t handle the lack of water and lack of toilet paper.”

Eventually, the bombing in Gaza City became so intense that she and her family had to flee again. They headed south, first to the city of Deir al Balah and eventually to Rafah.

They are better off than many in Rafah because they are sheltering in a room in a house shared among many. But the bathroom is small, and they must trek each day to get water to wash themselves and try to keep the bathroom clean. Showering is a luxury they can rarely afford.

They do not use toilet paper. Even if they can find it at markets, the price is exorbitant: Israel’s siege has driven up the cost of what few goods are still available in Gaza.

Instead, the family cuts up pieces of fabric to use, Ms. Kabariti said.

“There are many people who aren’t willing to use the bathroom more than once a day,” she said.

In her neighborhood, she recounted meeting an older woman who refused to use the bathroom in the center where she was sheltering because it was so dirty and unhygienic. Instead, neighbors allowed her to use their bathroom.

But not wanting to impose, she uses it only once a day — right after sunrise when she has said her morning prayers. Afterward, she holds it in until the next morning.

“I don’t know how long a person’s body can continue like this after nearly four months,” Ms. Kabariti said.

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.

His attempts to escape the Russian siege had failed. He and his fellow Ukrainian marines were surrounded, dozens of miles from friendly lines. They were nearly out of food and water. Some panicked, others quietly resigned themselves to what would come next.

Then, about a day later, Serhiy Hrebinyk, a senior sailor, and his comrades emerged from their final holdout inside the sprawling Ilyich Iron and Steel Works in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. He quickly messaged his older sister: “Hi Anna. Our brigade surrenders in captivity today. Me too. I don’t know what will happen next. I love you all.”

That was April 12, 2022.

Nearly two years later, on the second anniversary of the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Serhiy, now 24, remains in captivity as a prisoner of war, held somewhere in Russia. His family sits in purgatory, trapped between that day in April and the present.

The initial panicked flurry of calls and visits to the Red Cross, the Ukrainian military and local officials quickly subsided; official proof of life took months to come. The war dragged on, and now, like thousands of other Ukrainian families with relatives in captivity, the Hrebinyks wait.

“Life, of course, has changed. Almost every day is filled with tears,” Svitlana Hrebinyk, Serhiy’s mother, said from her living room this month.

Waiting is as much the Hrebinyks’ war as the one audible from their home in Trostyanets, a town in northeastern Ukraine. Their modest single-story house is not far from the Russian border, where they can sometimes hear the whine of drones or the echo of distant explosions.

They pass the days as best they can until Serhiy comes home. Svitlana frequently goes to church with her two daughters, Anna and Kateryna. They pray for his return and good health. Anna and Kateryna wake up each day and scour messages on Russian channels on Telegram, hoping for the sight of him at the edge of a blurry picture or in a video. Their father, Ihor, checks Facebook groups, where volunteers share updates on Ukrainian prisoners of war.

“Sometimes I think that maybe this happened to other people,” said Svitlana, 48. “And then I ask: ‘Why Serhiy? Why did he have to be captured?’” The Ukrainian government said 3,574 Ukrainian military personnel were in captivity as of November.

April 12, 2022, was a beautiful day on the outskirts of Trostyanets, 260 miles northwest of Mariupol. The sun was up. Winter had finally retreated, as had the town’s Russian occupiers after the Kremlin’s failed attempts to capture Kyiv, the capital. Just two weeks earlier, Trostyanets had been liberated by Ukrainian troops after a brief, but intense, battle that damaged the hospital and ravaged the train station, where Svitlana has worked for 26 years.

But down south, Russian forces were finishing their brutal siege of Mariupol.

“There was a feeling that the war would soon be over. And then the message came. I read it, and I was speechless,” Anna recounted this month, sitting beside her mother. “We all started crying.”

More than 1,000 marines from the 36th brigade were taken captive in Mariupol, the Russian Defense Ministry announced the next day, April 13. Roughly a month later, the Russian siege of the city ended when the last Ukrainian defenders finally surrendered.

Anna, 27, sent a message, but her little brother was gone, stripped of his belongings as a combatant. His tenure as a prisoner of war had begun.

“Serhiy, we love you,” she sent. “Everything will be okay.”

Almost two years after Serhiy’s capture, the Hrebinyks have trained themselves to endure his absence by building a routine, but that was certainly not the case in those early weeks as they frantically searched for him.

The day after Serhiy surrendered, Russian news clips showed the captured Ukrainian marines from his brigade, their uniforms dirty and disheveled. The family scoured the footage frame by frame until they saw a partly obscured face, hands raised and arms half bent, a family trait. It was Serhiy, they thought.

“This is him,” Anna remembers saying. They submitted screenshots of the video and his passport to a national coordination center as proof. Three months later, the Ukrainian government called the Hrebinyks to say the Russians had confirmed Serhiy was in captivity.

Serhiy’s path to the military was an unlikely one. In school, he was an average student. He played soccer, wrestled and went fishing — often with grand designs of a mighty catch, only to return with enough only for the family cat. Serhiy stayed out of trouble, mostly, said Olha Vlezko, 51, one of his former teachers. She spoke warmly of him.

Serhiy smiled a lot. In his early teenage years, his face was boyish and round with welcoming dimples and a mop of brown hair. And he rarely talked to his siblings about the war in the east that began in 2014, let alone fighting in it.

He was mobilized in 2019 for a year of compulsory service that most Ukrainian men have to undertake. Then, unbeknown to his family, he signed a contract with the military six months later. His hair got shorter, his cheeks sharper and more pronounced. But in one military portrait, Serhiy still looked like a child in his uniform as he gripped a Kalashnikov rifle that seemed a little too big.

“I was saddened, of course,” his father, Ihor, 51, sighed, recalling when Serhiy signed the contract. “He was young then. Why did he go to serve?”

By Feb. 23, 2022, the day before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Serhiy was a tank mechanic in the 36th Marine Brigade and aspired to climb the ranks. He had spent time on the front on the outskirts of Mariupol as Ukrainian troops fought Russian-backed separatists there and was accustomed to the sounds of combat. Serhiy, then 22, suddenly looked much older on the eve of a far bigger war.

“When we called him on the 23rd of February, there was no expression on his face,” Anna said. “We tried to cheer him up, but he didn’t show any emotion. He already knew there would be war.”

What happened after Serhiy’s capture on April 12, 2022, remains murky, but the Hrebinyks have managed to scrape together a rough timeline from social media posts and from speaking to Ukrainian soldiers who were released in prisoner exchanges. These transfers have freed more than 3,000 Ukrainians to date, but have been infrequent at best and were paused for much of 2023. Nevertheless, two exchanges this year have given the family hope that Serhiy could be freed sooner rather than later.

One released captive, a Ukrainian marine who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect those still in captivity, said that he was captured alongside Serhiy. The marine’s legs were wounded by rifle and mortar fire during an attempt to break through the siege.

He was Serhiy’s friend, he said, and in their final days of fighting, the 22-year-old from Trostyanets shared what little rations he could with his wounded friend.

“He brought crackers, cookies and canned food and asked how I was feeling,” the marine said. “He helped me.” After they surrendered, the two were taken to Olenivka, a prison in Russian-occupied Ukraine, where they were thrown into an open barracks room with around 90 other prisoners. They slept on whatever they could find. They talked about cigarettes, home and food.

And they waited.

Serhiy was taken away for questioning and returned, only to be transferred to another prison. Masked men took him from the cell. “He said goodbye to me, and that was it,” the marine said.

A second Ukrainian captive passed on another story to the Hrebinyks. He had met Serhiy in another prison, in Kamyshin, a city on the Volga River in western Russia. There, the story goes, most of the captives had caught tuberculosis, common in Russian prisons, but Serhiy had avoided the disease. Instead, he developed back issues from the beatings doled out by his captors.

The information was helpful, but the most concrete update came on Feb. 26, 2023. It was a video posted on Telegram from a Russian volunteer who visits Ukrainian prisoners. In it, Serhiy, who is dressed in a black collared shirt, stares at the camera with his hands on both legs. His head is shaved and he looks concerned, as if he is worried about forgetting the script he is about to recite.

“Hello Mom, Dad, sister, sister. Everything is fine with me. I am in Russian captivity. They do not beat me, they treat us normally. I have nothing against the Russian Federation. We are fed three times a day. I have enough. Good portions. I hope to return home soon. And everything will be fine with us,” he says before the video cuts off.

It was the last time the Hrebinyks saw him, and time has marched on since his capture. Anna had a baby boy and married. His grandfathers died. Svitlana is back working occasional nights at the train station, and Simba, a gray cat, joined the family.

“We haven’t seen him for so long, so this video helps us a little,” said Anna, who sometimes watches it before she goes to bed. “Every day we wait, and sometimes we imagine what it would look like when he walks through that door.”

Daria Mitiuk and Natalia Yermak contributed reporting.

Her supporters tend to be moderate and college educated — precisely the type of voters who have helped decide recent presidential races. We spoke with nearly 40 to see where they’re leaning.

Feb. 24, 2024

Many Americans are dreading a Trump-Biden rematch, but no one feels the anguish quite like a Nikki Haley voter.

“She would make a great president, and the alternatives are not appealing,” said Patti Gramling, 72, standing outside a bustling early-voting site on Wednesday in an upscale suburb of Charleston, S.C. “Biden is too old. And I think Donald Trump is horrible.”

Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, is learning the limits of relying on moderate, college-educated and Trump-skeptical voters in today’s Republican Party. Former President Donald J. Trump is widely expected to defeat her, perhaps by a large margin, in her home-state primary on Saturday.

She has vowed to press on, but a crucial new equation is emerging in 2024’s electoral math: Where would her voters — and voters like them in key battlegrounds across the country — go in a general election contest between Mr. Trump and President Biden?

“The million-dollar question is, will they vote, will they sit it out — or will they vote for Joe Biden?” former Gov. Jim Hodges, a South Carolina Democrat, said of Ms. Haley’s centrist supporters in the state. “A moderate Republican voter in Charleston is not all that different than a moderate Republican voter in the Milwaukee suburbs.”

In recent interviews with nearly 40 Haley supporters across South Carolina’s Lowcountry, primarily conducted in historically more moderate enclaves of the state, many fell into what pollsters call the “double haters” camp — voters who don’t like either expected nominee.

“It just infuriates me that we have the choices that we do,” said Roberta Gilman, a former teacher and a resident of affluent Mount Pleasant, S.C., who is in her 70s.

Roughly half of those interviewed, including Ms. Gilman, said that in a Biden-Trump matchup, they would side with the Republican, while expressing varying degrees of discomfort. That number would almost certainly be higher in the actual results of the general election, after Americans have retreated further into partisan corners.

Others, like Ms. Gramling, made it clear that Mr. Trump — who has driven many moderate and suburban voters out of his party over the last eight years — faces even graver challenges with those Americans now.

“Everything about him bothers me — his arrogance, his lack of support of the military,” said Ms. Gramling, who was also a teacher. She supported Mr. Trump in 2016 before backing Mr. Biden in 2020 and would back the Democrat again over Mr. Trump. “Everything that he does is uncalled for.”

Here’s how some of these Haley voters are thinking through a choice they hope they won’t have to make:

The drifting-from-Trump voters

America has very few persuadable voters left, and that may be especially true in a Biden-Trump rematch. Both men have been on the national stage for decades, and voters formed opinions of them long ago.

But a few Haley voters who said they had supported Mr. Trump in 2020 stressed that they would not do so again. They cited his behavior after his defeat, including his election denialism that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Any erosion in 2020 support for either Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden could prove consequential this year, especially with third-party candidates in the mix.

“If he was my choice, or Biden was my choice, I would have no choice,” said Julia Trout, 55, of Mount Pleasant, adding that she had always voted for the Republican ticket but would probably sit out a Biden-Trump matchup.

Asked what had changed her views on Mr. Trump since 2020, she replied, “the insurrection.”

“What would we do if we had another civil war?” she said. “If we can support something like that insurrection, there’s no telling what could happen.”

Mr. Trump, she said, is not a politician — “he’s a tyrant.”

Jeff Heikkinen, 41, a caddie who lives in Summerville, S.C., said he had supported Mr. Trump in past elections but was troubled by his personal attacks on Ms. Haley involving her husband, a National Guardsman, and her background as the daughter of Indian immigrants.

“He’s just trying so hard to separate people, making fun of her husband rather than be a grown-up,” he said. If his choices were Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, he added, “I probably wouldn’t vote — I’m just that disenchanted with both of them.”

Joy Hunter, 64, of Summerville, declined to share how she had voted in the last election — though she said she had “never voted Democrat” — but ruled out supporting Mr. Trump this year, citing, in part, the Capitol riot.

“I know people say, ‘Just ignore his character and instead focus on what he’s done,’ but I don’t know that you can separate entirely a person’s character from their policies,” Ms. Hunter said. She added of Ms. Haley, “I’m going to beg her not to drop out.”

The cognitive-dissonance Republicans

Andrew Osborne, 58, a retired business owner from Summerville, said he disliked Mr. Trump “with a passion,” declaring: “I could not take four more years of him. In fact, I’d probably consider leaving the country if that was our alternative.”

He would theoretically consider a Democrat, he said, because of his moderate positions on issues like abortion rights and gun rights.

But in a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, he said, he would still vote for the Republican, citing concerns about Mr. Biden’s age.

Mr. Osborne pointed to the release of a special counsel’s report that described Mr. Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and a verbal slip Mr. Biden made soon after, referring to the president of Egypt as the “president of Mexico.”

“He’s a similar age to my father-in-law, and I love him to death, but I wouldn’t trust him to make me a cup of coffee,” Mr. Osborne said. “This is the commander in chief of the last superpower.”

The interviews highlighted just how polarized the nation has become and underscored the limits of Mr. Biden’s bipartisan appeal, something he had in small but significant measures in 2020.

Joe Mayo, 72, a retired operator at a nuclear power plant who now lives in Mount Pleasant, called Mr. Trump “arrogant” and “stupid” and said that he did not “represent my thoughts about the way business should be done.”

But if he is the Republican nominee, Mr. Mayo said, he will still support him, because “the Democratic Party is worse than Donald Trump.”

He is hardly alone: A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll found that 82 percent of Haley voters overall said they would back Mr. Trump if he faced Mr. Biden.

Lynn Harrison Dyer, a businesswoman in her 60s from Mount Pleasant, noted proudly that she was the daughter of a World War II veteran and said she was supporting Ms. Haley in part because she “honors the military.”

Mr. Trump, she noted, has denigrated veterans.

“That goes against everything I truly believe in,” she said. “I honor and respect the military.”

But in a Trump-Biden contest, she said, she would support Mr. Trump, describing worries about Mr. Biden’s age.

Mr. Biden is 81 and Mr. Trump is 77, but polls show the age issue tends to hurt Mr. Biden more.

“I’ve seen time and time again when he’s speaking — it’s deeply concerning to me,” she said, politely adding, “I don’t mean any disrespect for his age whatsoever.”

The Haley-Biden voters

South Carolina’s open primary system allows voters to participate in either party’s contest. In interviews, some Democrats who voted early said they had voted for Ms. Haley to try to slow Mr. Trump’s march to the nomination, not because they were sold on her candidacy.

But a number of voters who said they typically supported Democrats added that, for now, they would prefer Ms. Haley over Mr. Biden in a hypothetical general-election matchup, even though they would back him over Mr. Trump.

Their desire for change suggests both a weakness for Mr. Biden and a lost opportunity for Republicans.

“I like Nikki Haley,” said Brenda LaMont, 65, an options trader who lives in Charleston. “She understands world affairs. I think she’s a strong leader. And I’m certainly going to vote for a woman if I get the chance.”

And, she added: “I’m not as Democrat as I used to be. I do believe it has gotten a little too liberal.”

Scott Soenen, 47, a financial adviser who lives in Mount Pleasant, is a political independent who thinks Ms. Haley would offer a “fresh change.”

He also said that he worried “just a little bit” about the migrant crisis, saying it was “not as un-bad, for lack of a better term, as the Biden administration wants us to think.”

At an upscale gastropub in Beaufort, S.C., on Wednesday night, Jeannie Benjamin, 63, was having dinner after attending a sedate sunset rally for Ms. Haley.

Ms. Haley had impressed her, she said, and despite her Democratic leanings, she was concerned about Mr. Biden’s ability to handle the pressures of the presidency at his age. He would be 86 at the end of a second term.

Asked about the prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch, she lamented, “That’s the problem.”

“One person’s getting old, and I do think he has some issues,” she said. “And then the other one is the worst person on earth to have in your White House.”

The Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos should be considered children has forced Americans to grapple with a mess of complicated realities about law, infertility, medicine and politics.

At the heart of the decision, there is also Christian theology. “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, wrote in his decision.

Among conservative Christians, the belief that life begins at conception has been a driving force behind anti-abortion policies for years. Among the most ardent abortion opponents, that thinking has also led to uncompromising opposition to in vitro fertilization.

“That is the fundamental premise of our entire movement,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, which opposes abortion. I.V.F., she said, “is literally a business model built on disposable children and treating children as commodities.”

But on the morality of I.V.F., there is a more noticeable divide between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic teaching expressly forbids it. Protestants tend to be more open, in part because there is no similar top-down authority structure requiring a shared doctrine.

Evangelical tradition has built a public identity around being pro-family and pro-children, and many adherents are inclined to see I.V.F. positively because it creates more children. Pastors rarely preach on fertility, though they may on abortion.

But the Alabama decision “is a very morally honest opinion,” said Andrew T. Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The ruling, he said, shows the direct line of reasoning between belief that life begins at conception, and opposition to abortion and I.V.F.

“It’s going to force conservative Christians to reckon with potentially their own complicity in the in vitro fertilization industry,” he said.

The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the largest institution in the world that opposes I.V.F. Nearly all modern fertility interventions are morally forbidden.

The I.V.F. process typically includes many elements that the Catholic Church opposes. There’s masturbation — an “offense against chastity,” according to the catechism, or teaching — often required to collect sperm. There’s the fertilization of an egg and sperm outside a woman’s body — outside the sacramental “conjugal act” of sex between a husband and wife. And there is the creation of multiple embryos that are often destroyed or not implanted — an “abortive practice.”

The church’s first major statement opposing I.V.F. came in response to the world’s first “test tube baby,” born in England in 1978. Written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI, the document addressed a variety of fertility technologies, like artificial insemination, I.V.F. and surrogacy.

Last month, Pope Francis condemned surrogacy as “despicable” and called for a global ban on the practice. An unborn child should not be “turned into an object of trafficking,” he said.

Many Catholics use contraception and I.V.F. treatment in violation of church teaching. But for observant Catholics, opposition to I.V.F. is part of an ecosystem of beliefs about marriage, family and especially sex.

The marital act of sex must be performed in conception and the embryo must not be subject to “different indignities, being poked and prodded” by scientists, said Joseph Meaney, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center.

In cases of infertility, some “assistive” technologies might be OK, he said, but not “replacement” ones like I.V.F. That distinction may seem immaterial, but it stresses the importance of sex in Catholicism as holy act exclusively for a husband and wife who want children.

For instance, Mr. Meaney said, he and his wife faced fertility challenges and used methods to conceive that included an operation to address scar tissue and deep tissue massages. “Assisting means there has to be sex,” he said. “Replacing means there is no sexual act taking place.”

But the bioethics of I.V.F. is not a subject most conservative Christians have on their radar.Evangelicals typically rely on literal readings of the Bible, not centuries of Catholic social philosophy and anthropology. And the Bible, an ancient text, of course does not mention I.V.F.

Mr. Walker said that when he had considered introducing a resolution about artificial reproductive technology at the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, friends and colleagues reacted with hesitation.

But evangelical and Catholic communities have increasingly blended together over shared conservative political beliefs. Now the unavoidable politics on fertility in America may shape evangelical belief and practice on I.V.F.

Emma Waters, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation, hopes evangelical pastors will work to train their churches about the theological reasons to oppose I.V.F., as Catholics have. She sees potential openings with Gen Z evangelicals who are opposed to hormonal birth control and the broad ways technology has infiltrated their lives.

“I.V.F. is just the very beginning of reproductive technologies,” she said. “We are just woefully unprepared to address the onslaught of issues that are coming.”

Two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States has the capacity to keep Kyiv supplied with the weapons, technology and intelligence to fend off a takeover by Moscow. But Washington is now perceived around Europe to have lost its will.

The Europeans, in contrast, have the will — they just committed another $54 billion to reconstruct the country — but when it comes to repelling Russia’s revived offensive, they do not have the capacity.

That is the essence of the conundrum facing Ukraine and the NATO allies on the dismal second anniversary of the war. It is a stunning reversal. Only a year ago, many here predicted that Ukraine’s counteroffensive, bolstered by European tanks and missiles and American artillery and air defenses, could push the Russians back to where they were on Feb. 24, 2022.

Now, some harsh lessons have emerged. The sanctions that were supposed to bring Russia’s economy to its knees — “the ruble almost is immediately reduced to rubble,” President Biden declared in Warsaw in March 2022 — have lost their sting. The International Monetary Fund’s prediction that the Russian economy would shrink considerably was only briefly true; with the huge stimulus of military spending, it is growing faster than Germany’s. Income from oil exports is greater than it was before the invasion.

With the setbacks, and the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, hope has just about collapsed that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will conclude anytime soon that he can make no further gains and should enter a serious negotiation to end the war.

American and European intelligence officials now assess that Mr. Putin is determined to hold on, even at the cost of huge casualties, in the hope that a failure in Congress to fund Ukraine’s effort sufficiently or a victory by former President Donald J. Trump in November will make up for the Russian leader’s many early mistakes.

Biden administration officials still insist that Mr. Putin has already suffered a “strategic defeat.” His military is humiliated by its early failures and huge casualties, and Russia can count on only China, Iran and North Korea as reliable suppliers.

At the same time, NATO has enlarged. Sweden is set to become the 32nd member state within a few days, after the addition of Finland last year, and two-thirds of its members will each spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense this year, a significant increase.

For the first time since NATO was founded in 1949, Europeans are finally taking seriously the need for a defense infrastructure independent of the United States.

Still, as recent intelligence reports in Europe indicate that NATO nations might be Mr. Putin’s target in the next three to five years, the question remains: Without a durable American commitment, can Ukraine and Europe defend against a new Russian threat?

Strategic Stalemate

At the core of the current strategic stalemate is the absence of any serious prospect of a negotiated settlement.

As recently as last summer, senior members of the Biden administration held out hope that Ukrainian advances on the battlefield would force Mr. Putin to find a face-saving way out. The most commonly discussed possibility was a negotiated settlement that left unclear the future of the parts of Ukraine seized or annexed by Russia, but which would at least end the fighting.

At the same time, at a NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, Mr. Biden and his aides were discussing with President Volodymyr Zelensky putting together an “Israel model” of aid for Ukraine. Even if short of actual membership, the plan aspired to provide a decade-long guarantee of the arms and training that Ukraine would need to keep Russia at bay.

But even hope for those muddled outcomes has been cast aside amid the congressional debate over renewing short-term help for Ukraine, and as pessimism sets in that Ukraine can hold out long enough to think about the long term.

As isolationism rises in a Republican-controlled Congress beholden to Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden has shifted from promising to give Ukraine “whatever it needs, for as long as it takes” to last December’s less ambitious “as long as we can.”

At the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, struck an even more sober note: Ukraine would have to learn how to fight on a tight budget.

Even if the “$61 billion of supplemental aid to Ukraine goes through, I have to be honest with you, that is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield,” he said. “The amount of munitions that we can send to Ukraine right now is very limited.”

Mr. Vance went on to make a second point: Those limited resources should be saved for competing with China and defending Taiwan.

“There are a lot of bad guys all over the world,” he said. “And I’m much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now than I am in Europe.”

Mr. Vance’s assessment was met with a stony silence. Shortly afterward, a senior American military official who declined to speak on the record said that the Republican debate in Washington and the mood among Ukraine’s ground forces were reinforcing each other, “and not in a positive way.”

In the view of Charles A. Kupchan, a Georgetown University professor who served as a national security official in the Obama administration, that means the United States should be exploring ways to get negotiations started to end the war.

“Even if Russia can stay the course, I don’t think Ukraine can,” he said. After two years of war, Mr. Kupchan said, “there is no foreseeable pathway toward a battlefield victory for Ukraine,” even with the imminent arrival of long-range missiles or F-16s.

Mr. Zelensky faces a stark choice, he said: whether to keep every inch of sovereign Ukrainian territory, or find a way to secure an economically viable state, with a democratic future, Western security guarantees and eventual membership in the European Union and in NATO.

In private, some senior Biden administration officials say they have been trying to nudge Mr. Zelensky in that direction. But Mr. Biden has instructed his staff not to deviate from the slogan it used at the beginning of the war: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

The result is that American military officials in Europe, led by Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, have been quietly warning that the best the Ukrainians can hope for is a largely frozen conflict.

General Cavoli rarely speaks publicly, but officials emerging from recent briefings with him described a downbeat assessment, one in which, at best, the Ukrainians use 2024 to defend, rebuild and attempt another counteroffensive next year.

Even in Europe, where support for Ukraine has been strongest, public opinion is shifting, too. In a recent opinion poll conducted in January for the European Council on Foreign Relations in 12 countries, only 10 percent of Europeans said they believed Ukraine would win the war, though what would constitute a win was not clearly defined. Twenty percent said they believed that Russia would win, and a plurality, 37 percent, thought the war would end in some kind of settlement.

But if the United States withdraws support from Ukraine and presses Kyiv for a deal, 41 percent of Europeans polled said their governments should either increase support to try to replace Washington or continue support at the current level. Roughly a third said that European countries should follow Washington and pressure Kyiv to settle.

“Things are not going well,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, the foreign minister of Lithuania, said bluntly as he left the Munich Security Conference last week.

“Ukraine is starved of ammunition and forced to pull back, Europe is facing challenges which might test Article 5, and global instability emerges because autocrats are emboldened by Russia’s action and our cautious response,” Mr. Landsbergis said on the social media platform X, in a reference to the section of the NATO treaty that calls for each member to come to the aid of any member under attack. “This is not pessimism. This is fact.”

Awakening to a Larger Threat

For years, American officials have urged Europe to spend more on its defense. Now, Europeans are beginning to confront the cost of complacency.

No matter who Americans elect as their next president in November, the United States may no longer be willing to take its traditional lead in deterring Russia or defending the West. That will inevitably place more of the burden on a Europe that is not yet fully prepared.

Germany’s military is better equipped, but it is not of the size or skill level needed to face the challenges ahead, its defense secretary, Boris Pistorius, has warned. Finland adds considerable technological capability to NATO, but Sweden’s military, American officials say, will need to be rebuilt.

Meanwhile, Europe is piecing together packages of help for Ukraine that were first meant to supplement, but now may be intended to replace, aid from the United States.

This month, European Union leaders pledged another 50 billion euros, about $54 billion, in new aid to Ukraine over the next four years. In aggregate, European countries have outpaced the United States in aid provided to Ukraine.

To date, said Victoria Nuland, the under secretary of state for political affairs, the United States has provided $75 billion in security, economic, and humanitarian assistance. But, she said, “Europe and our global partners have provided even more, $107 billion, in addition to hosting 4.5 million Ukrainian refugees in countries across Europe.”

Yet to fully replace American military assistance this year, according to an assessment by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Europe would still have “to double its current level and pace of arms assistance.”

And European efforts to provide another 5 billion euros, about $5.4 billion, over each of the next four years to buy arms for Ukraine have stalled because of objections by Germany and France.

The Germans say they are paying too much into the fund, given their large bilateral funding of aid to Ukraine, the second largest in the world after the United States.

The French are, as ever, insisting that weapons purchased with European money should be made or at least partly made in Europe — though Europe doesn’t have the capacity to provide them.

And European promises to deliver one million artillery shells to Ukraine by March have fallen well short.

Still, European arms production has been increasing, with senior European officials saying that the continent should be able to produce a million shells a year by the end of this year, compared with about 350,000 shells 18 months ago.

While Europeans point proudly to the changes they have made, it remains far from certain that those changes are happening as fast as the world demands, especially when it comes to Ukraine.

“Strategically the goal should be to change Putin’s calculations,” said Mr. Kupchan, the former Obama administration official. “Disrupt the field. I know it’s not easy, but it is better to admit mistakes and chart a new path forward rather than to engage in empty self-congratulation.”

In the late 1970s, in Montreal, photography students were obsessed with getting deep blacks — “max black” — in our prints, squeezing the full range of tones out of our black-and-white photo paper. Knowing that light meters were designed to average a scene out to gray, we recalibrated ours to make the shadows in our shots as darkly lush as an Ansel Adams moonrise.

Few of us realized there might be more to blackness than a lack of light. We didn’t understand that in the right hands, the deep, deep blacks might speak to far more than a darkroom technique — to issues of race and segregation.

Four hundred miles south of us, in New York, Ray Francis was printing shots that had the bold shadows we were striving for. Thirty-two of his prints are on view now in “Waiting to Be Seen: Illuminating the Photographs of Ray Francis,” at the Bruce Silverstein gallery in Chelsea, a posthumous show that is Francis’s first solo presentation. He died in 2006, at 69.

In 1963, he helped found the Kamoinge Workshop in New York, a collective dedicated to “photography’s power as an independent art form that depicts Black communities,” according to the Workshop, which is furthering its mission today. The photos on view at Silverstein suggest that, in the circle of Kamoinge, depicting Black people was likely to involve thinking about black tones in a print.

Francis’s images, with their reflections on race, seem to get a special energy and power because of their links to art photography that cared so deeply about the darkness in a black-and-white print.

In his portraits of African Americans, faces are often lit so one side is bright and the other falls off into darkness. He’s hardly the only photographer to use that split lighting, but what’s striking is that he lets the dark side of his faces descend into almost pure black, without the range of velvety tones that “fine art” photography was keen on in his day. That wasn’t because he didn’t know how to achieve that range: His show includes still lifes whose shadows are as subtle as could be; the gallery told me Francis was known in the Kamoinge for his technical expertise. Allowing shadows to fade to pure black seems like a way to assert the role that race played in his subjects’ lives, and also to celebrate it.

Other shots by Francis seem to speak to the same issues, but this time by looking deep into those shadows. A view of a woman’s naked back runs through every shade of near lightlessness, from midnight to charcoal to ebony. But in achieving them, Francis was working against a technology that, used unthinkingly, would have changed her skin tone into a middling gray — the skin tone, say, of a white model with a nice tan. (It’s well known that color film, which Francis does not seem to have used, was once calibrated to flatter Caucasian skin.) Francis would have known that, for more than a century before he was born, in 1937, photographic technique — lighting and exposure, in the studio, and then developing and printing and even retouching, in the darkroom — had deliberately been used to lighten Black complexions, and negate them. Hard not to read the lush blacks in his naked Black back as a criticism of that.

Beginning at least in the 1980s, other artists of color — Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon — have also made important work about how black tones, on a surface, relate to the idea of a Black race, and that has been much studied among curators and academics. But Francis was working in the quite particular context of what was then called, and hived off as, “fine art photography” — a world ruled by the likes of Adams, Minor White and Edward Weston, none of whom have mattered much within the world of so-called serious contemporary art where Marshall and his peers play their part. Working in that context, however, let Francis make images of African Americans where shadows get added meaning.

And once you’re thinking in those terms, even the black tones in his still lifes start to have a social charge. One still life foregrounds a glass of red wine, which turns into “black” wine in Francis’s black-and-white shot. That glass and its wine takes up just the space that a head would in a close-up portrait; it seems a surrogate for a face. A dark wine bottle, like the one featured as a prop in several Francis portraits, is glimpsed through the stem of his glass; it reads as the body of a Black onlooker, maybe even as an avatar of Francis himself as he takes the shot.

If expertise in achieving black tones was a road to success in the fine-art photography of Francis’s era, invoking the Blackness of race was almost sure to leave you sidelined. Francis had to make his living teaching and doing commercial work, which left him little time to make art. The gallery believes that the prints in this show make up the vast majority of Francis’s surviving work as a fine artist. In his final decade, when photography had at last begun to care, Francis’s production was limited by the diabetes that cost him both legs.

You’ll still sometimes hear people say that a work of art should be judged only on what you can see right on its surface. This show proves that, on the contrary, to reap a work’s meanings you need to know all about who made it, and when. To understand the best photos in the Silverstein show, you need to know about the shadows in an Ansel Adams print — and the Black community Ray Francis set out to honor.

Waiting to Be Seen: Illuminating the Photographs of Ray Francis

Through March 23, Bruce Silverstein gallery, 529 West 20th Street, Manhattan; 212-627-3930, brucesilverstein.com.