On Tuesday, the U.S. government levied sanctions on 17 Mexican and Chinese companies for their suspected involvement in the production of illicit fentanyl. The target, however, should be the two governments themselves, according to former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Victor Avila. The Biden administration imposed sanctions on May 30 on 17 people and organizations it says are distributing equipment used in producing illicit pills that frequently include fentanyl. This synthetic opioid painkiller is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. Spearheaded by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the action also involves the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP)….

The United States is seeking to bring Russia and China to the negotiating table in order to prevent a new nuclear arms race, according to a senior White House Official. President Joe Biden’s administration is prepared to pursue nuclear negotiations with either power “without preconditions,” said White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Such talks, he said, were necessary to prevent a new nuclear arms race and to keep at bay the specter of nuclear annihilation that has haunted the world since the closing of World War II. “Today, we now stand at what our president would call an ‘inflection point’ in our nuclear stability and security,” Sullivan said during a June 2 meeting of the Arms Control Association….

This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission. At the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Yulia was living in the southern city of Kherson with her second husband and three children, two from her first marriage. Just before the outbreak of hostilities, Yulia, a Ukrainian woman who asked to use a pseudonym, sent her eldest, 8-year-old Marina, to see the girl’s father in a nearby district. But when Russian forces invaded, swiftly occupying much of the Kherson region, Yulia quickly left town with her two other children, seeking safety in Ukraine’s west. She said she lost contact with Marina and her estranged ex-husband. She was flabbergasted seven months later to find out where Marina ended up: on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. Yulia’s ex-husband had left their daughter with a neighbor and the neighbor, who enthusiastically supported the Russian-occupation administration, took the girl to Crimea. It took Yulia another three months to find out that Marina had been put up in a residential school in the peninsula port of Feodosia — and it took until January this year to figure out how to go get her and bring her back. Though Yulia was ultimately reunited with her daughter, her case is emblematic of one of the more shocking dimensions of Russia’s 13-month-old invasion: the relocation, or deportation, of many thousands of Ukrainian children to Russian controlled territories. Some Ukrainians call it outright kidnapping. Since February 24, 2022, at least 19,505 children have been taken from Ukraine to Russia and Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, according to official data from Ukrainian authorities. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said in April that the number exceeded 20,000. As of May 31, just 371 children had been returned, Zelenskiy said. But those are only the cases