Russia’s New Push to Torment Kyiv, and a Whistle-Blower’s Warning on Mail-In Voting

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**Will Jarvis** (0:32)
From the New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Will Jarvis, in for Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, September 2nd. Here's what we're covering.

**Siobhán O'Grady** (0:45)
Here in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, drone and missile attacks have become so common over the last few years that people, including myself, have really stopped responding to the air raid alarms. But the sense of danger in Kyiv lately has really increased.

**Will Jarvis** (0:59)
Siobhán O'Grady is part of a team of Times reporters covering the war in Ukraine.

**Siobhán O'Grady** (1:03)
The most common Russian tactic used to be sending waves of drones overnight into Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. But last week, Russia started using a new tactic. Now they're sending drones constantly into Kyiv, literally nonstop.

**Will Jarvis** (1:17)
Siobhán says that according to Ukraine's president, over the course of just four days in the past week, Russia launched nearly 1,500 drones into Ukraine, including one that hit a weapons depot in the Kyiv suburbs, killing at least 37 people. She says that beyond the new frequency of the attacks, the type of weapons Russia is using is also changing.

**Siobhán O'Grady** (1:38)
The drones are powered by jet engines, most of them, and so they fly really, really fast, fast enough that you don't even have a chance to hide sometimes or hear the familiar hum of the drone before it hits its target. And this huge escalation from Russia is coming at the same time that Ukraine has been warning that they're running very dangerously low on interceptors that can intercept ballistic missiles.
So all of this put together has really changed how people here are responding. Ukrainians are now checking live maps of drones as they advance on the city, getting used to just the constant sound of explosions in the sky. Even as people are walking their dogs, eating at outdoor restaurants, you'll just hear this boom and understand that another drone has just been shot down or has landed somewhere. And it really has all together made the city feel like it's at its most dangerous moment since the very beginning of the full scale invasion in 2022

**Will Jarvis** (2:31)
Siobhán says that Ukrainian officials have framed the new surge of Russian attacks as a strategy to both wear down morale and paralyze the capital economically. And at a press conference yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened that Russian strikes across Ukraine targeting cities, energy infrastructure and key ports on the Black Sea might spark a financial crisis in the country.
At the US. Postal Service, a whistleblower is sounding the alarm, alleging that the agency is defying court orders and pushing ahead with President Trump's effort to exert federal control over mail-in voting.
Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order that would create a national database of voters and could bar the postal service from sending ballots to people in states that don't cooperate. That effort was quickly challenged in a number of lawsuits, and the most aggressive parts of the plan were blocked in court. But the whistleblower says that behind the scenes, the USPS is moving forward with a secretive effort to put them in place, including by building out the voter database. The whistleblower, a USPS official, said that it's been a rushed and haphazard process and could lead to a quote catastrophic failure in the mail ballot system. They warned the new technology could potentially reject tens of thousands of ballots in a single batch if even one barcode on one ballot failed the scan. The official alleged that overall millions of voters could have trouble getting their ballots. In a statement, the Postal Service confirmed that it has been continuing to work on the database, but said that it was within the bounds of what the court had allowed. There are multiple legal challenges to Trump's executive order playing out in the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court. And some election experts have warned that the situation is bringing a swirl of chaos and confusion to the elections process, with less than two months to go until the midterms.
In the US and around the world over the past few weeks, there's been a surge of volatility in the financial markets, with investors rushing to sell off government bonds. Now, just to break this down, bonds are bits of government debt, essentially a way for you, me or anyone to lend money to the government. You can buy bonds or other debt and get paid back in 10 years or 20 or 30 with interest. In bond market lingo, the interest rate is called a yield. Investors generally view US government bonds as an especially stable place to put their money. But when they start feeling uneasy about the economy, that can change, leading them to demand higher yields so they can feel confident they'll still get a good return. That is what's happening now, with yields on 30-year US Treasury bonds hovering around a two-decade high.