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Republicans seem to have all the momentum lately when it comes to the battle for control of the U.S. Senate.

GOP chances were already looking brighter because of the drag on Democrats from the Affordable Care Act and President Obama's low approval ratings. Then came two developments that suddenly expanded the playing field: Former GOP Sen. Scott Brown recently announced his intent to run against New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, and GOP Rep. Cory Gardner jumped in against Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall.

That makes 12 states with competitive races, according to the Cook Political Report's latest update.

Democratic incumbents currently hold 10 of those seats; three of them are retiring. Republicans need to win a net of just six seats to become the Senate majority.

While their chances of doing that are clearly rising, political consultant Steve McMahon of Purple Strategies cautions against underestimating the advantages of the Democratic incumbents who will be on the ballot in November.

"The states that they are running in are states they have run in before, that they understand well and have been elected to, some repeatedly," said McMahon. "They're the kind of Democrats that match the state well."

As incumbents, they can point to all they've done for their states and they usually can raise the money they need, McMahon said. And he gives Republicans credit for producing a solid field of candidates.

"They've done a great job of recruiting this year. They've run many of the nut jobs out," McMahon said. "But they still do have primaries and primaries weaken candidates."

The president's weakness in the polls, the Affordable Care Act and widespread anxieties about the economy aren't the only factors working in favor of the GOP. Republicans also have a big advantage on voter intensity.

"We always look at the question, how interested are you in the upcoming elections on a 1 to 10 scale, with a 9 to 10 being the most interested," said Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican research firm, who pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll his firm did with Hart Research Associates.

"In a presidential election, it doesn't mean as much because everybody votes. In a midterm election, where you're looking at 40 percent turnout, it does make a difference. ... Among voters who rate their interest a 9 or 10, Republicans have a 15-point advantage, 53 [percent] to 38 [percent]. So you have Republicans now gaining the same kind of intensity they had in 2010. It's like our guys are campaigning downhill as opposed to the Democrats."

2010, of course, was the year of the historic midterm landslide in which Republicans captured 63 seats — and House control. They gained six Senate seats that November. And that was after Brown won a January special election for the Massachusetts seat long occupied by Democrat Edward Kennedy.

If this year's Republican intensity results in a 2010-style wave, there could be some surprising races, Newhouse said. Virginia and Oregon, for example, might seem like real long shots for Republicans at the moment but they might be within reach in that kind of year, he said.

With an expanded playing field and the real prospect of a flip in Senate control, both parties and their outside-group allies are likely to spend a record amount during this year's midterms.

Independent expenditures for the 2014 election cycle through March 20 have already reached $39.2 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Amid all the of necessary analysis of what Russia's move into Crimea means geopolitically and strategically, it might also be good to remember Reshat Ametov.

Mr. Ametov was buried this week. He was 39 years old, married and the father of three young children.

He was last seen at a demonstration on March 3 in Simferopol, where he joined other Crimean Tatars held a silent protest before the pro-Russian armed men in unmarked uniforms who surrounded the cabinet ministers building.

Tatars make up more than 10 percent of Crimea's population. Many Tatars, who are primarily Sunni Muslim, were brutally deported by Joseph Stalin in the 1940s, and scattered over the deserts of central Asia and Siberia. As many as 200,000 Tatars died in that government removal. Some Tatar families began to come back after Ukraine became independent in the 1990s.

Video from ATR, a local Crimean television channel, shows two armed men in green uniforms, and one in a black uniform, surrounding Reshat Ametov, taking him by the arms, and leading him away.

"He was just standing there and they took him away," Ametov's mother, Refika Ametova, told the Kyiv Post, an independent newspaper. "He stood there for about an hour and a quarter, and I suppose they were waiting for him to leave. But he didn't."

His family called the police, who said they could find nothing. Two weeks later, people in a village about 28 miles away found a man's body in a nearby forest. Local media reports suggested there was clear tape wrapped around his head and hands, and signs of torture.

Reshat Ametov's wife identified the body as her husband's.

Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into Reshat Ametov's disappearance and death, and they're concerned the crime is not isolated.

"For weeks, armed, masked men who refuse to identify themselves have harassed and intimidated people," says Rachel Denber, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. And Crimean Tatars living in Brooklyn and Queens told the New York Daily News that relatives in Crimea report that X's have been slashed in paint on the doors of some Tatar families.

Enver Ablakimov was at Reshat Ametov's funeral. He is 21 years old and told the Kyiv Post, "There were always people here who didn't like us, but before, they hid it. Now with the appearance of the Russian army, they feel protected and understand that no one will do anything."

It's that past that may make Tatars in Crimea apprehensive about the future.

The U.S. and Europe need to stand together against Moscow in the wake of its incursion in Crimea, keeping the door open for Ukraine and other countries to join NATO, former White House officials tell NPR.

Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and a former deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration and Stephen Hadley, former National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, spoke with All Things Considered , on Friday. The two agreed that the West's diplomatic efforts should be focused on dissuading Russian President Vladimir Putin from further aggressive moves.

How Should The West Respond To Crimea?

"The key thing" is for the U.S. and Europe to "maintain maximum solidarity so that this is not just a U.S. sanctions policy and it does not give the Russians a chance to split us," Talbott ATC tells host Robert Siegel.

Europe is "properly, I think, concentrating on the banking sector, because the banking sector, if it is pressed and pressured by these sanctions, may lead powerful people around Putin to begin questioning the wisdom of what he has done and perhaps putting brakes on bad things he might do," he says.

Asked whether Ukraine should be brought into NATO or remain a sort of neutral buffer state between Europe and Russia, Talbott thinks "neither."

"It would be counterproductive, which is a word we use here in Washington to mean 'stupid,' if we were to basically make a promise to Ukraine that we couldn't keep, such as to bring them into NATO as soon as possible," he says. "That would just be provocative and it would not make the lives of the Ukrainians any better.

"Nor should we say that they are going to be forever in a security limbo as a buffer state," he says. "We should keep the question of the future of NATO, the expansion of NATO on the agenda, but we should not talk about that now."

According to Hadley, military action, either now or in the future, is impractical.

"It's very difficult once the Russians start to move, just as a matter of geography, for us to respond," he says. "So, what you need is a set of policies that will make Russia decide that such a course of action is ill-advised. "

First, he says, we must "impose real costs for what [Putin] has done until he is no longer tempted to run this play again – we saw it first in Georgia in 2008, now in the Crimea with respect to Ukraine."

Second, he says, Europe "needs to make clear that the door is open for countries of central and Eastern Europe to come into the EU."

What is Putin Thinking?

Talbott warns that "changing Vladimir Putin's mind is a loser. He is in a 'make-my-day,' 'bring-it-on' [mode]. He called Putin's move in Crimea, which represents the first time Russia has moved beyond its post-Cold War borders, an "ultimate red line."

"He has a pretension for, in some sense, a new Russian empire and that is what he is trying to build," Hadley says. "A key element of that is Russians outside of Russia's borders."

Putin, says Hadley, holds a fundamentally different view of the post-Cold War order as does the West: "We thought that at the end of the Cold War, boundaries were going to be respected, sovereignty was [to be] respected, use of force explicitly or coercively was off the table, [and] that countries could choose their own alliances."

"That's not how he sees it," Hadley says.

Instead, Putin wants to a world "in which he brings into a Russian sphere of influence countries such as Kazakhstan and Belarus, [which] he already has, and particularly Ukraine.

"With Ukraine, [Russia] has real force, without Ukraine, it is much weaker," he says.

Hadley points to Putin's speech announcing the annexation of Crimea in which the Russian leader referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union when "overnight [Russians] were minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the Russian people became one of the biggest — if not the biggest — divided nations in the world."

(As we reported earlier this week, large ethnic Russian populations in former Soviet satellite countries have made for nervousness in those border regions since the Crimea incursion and the Russian invasion of Georgia's South Ossetia region in 2008)

That sentiment – that Russian minorities were essentially orphaned by the fall of the USSR, is what informs Putin's strategy, Hadley says.

By "taking a chunk" out of countries such as Georgia, Ukraine or Moldova, "he has frozen them in this neverland between Russia and the West because the western European countries are unwilling to take into the EU or NATO a country that has a territorial dispute with Russia.

"We have got to send a message to Putin that that ploy won't work," he says. "That is why sending messages [that] the EU and NATO are open to Ukraine and Moldova and Georgia is such a terribly important signal to send."

It's been 25 years since the Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Alaska, spilling millions of gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

The impact on wildlife was devastating. Cleanup crews poured into the nearby port town, also called Valdez, where an animal rescue center was set up.

"The chaos is incredibly difficult to describe or even imagine," says LJ Evans, a local resident who volunteered to help. "Somebody came back with the first bird — the reporters were so frantic, somebody got in a fight trying to take a picture of this poor little oiled bird."

"We were working 14-, 16-, 18-hour days there for the first month and a half," Suzanne Bishop, another rescue worker, tells LJ on a visit to StoryCorps in Fairbanks, Alaska. "We ran countless times a day from one room to the other with dog kennels stacked up high all the way down the hallway of otters."

"I had nightmares for years, because they screamed," LJ says. "I'd never heard a sound like that."

"I remember going home every night and sobbing, because it was not only terribly sad, it was very hard work," Suzanne adds.

"Then one joyous day, in this whole long stressful experience, we took all these birds that had been washed, and lined up all these kennels on the beach — 30 of them, 40 of them — each one with half a dozen birds," LJ recalls. "We opened all those crates, and they swarmed out into the water and made such an incredible noise. They either paddled or they flew, but they got the hell out of there.

"There was so much stress, so much tension for so many months," she adds. "At least for that moment, that little while, you could feel good about something that we had done."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud Esty-Kendall.