Month: August 2023

From a hospital bed, her legs still covered in blood, Diana Kazakova described the horror of a Russian missile hitting the heart of Chernihiv city in northern Ukraine on Saturday.  She was inside a fabric store when the strike happened around 11:30 a.m. local time, moments after warning sirens sounded across the city.  “The window completely fell on me, and I fell,” she told AFP from the hospital where she is being treated for a concussion and leg injuries. “Then I woke up later and was completely stunned and shocked.”  In the street outside, “people were crying, shouting … it …

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This year’s World Humanitarian Day is being commemorated at a time of increased risk for the thousands of aid workers who put their lives on the line every day to help millions of people affected by conflict and natural and human-made disasters. The United Nations says humanitarian workers are in far greater danger today than 20 years ago, when the U.N.’s headquarters in the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq, was bombed. The attack killed 22 staffers, including Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, and injuring some 150 others. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, says …

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is visiting Sweden on Saturday — his first visit to the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the Swedish government said. It said Zelenskyy will meet Swedish government officials in Harpsund, about 120 kilometers west of Stockholm. He will also meet Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia at a palace in the area. Sweden abandoned its longstanding policy of military nonalignment to support Ukraine with weapons and other aid in the war against Russia. It also applied for NATO membership but is still waiting to join the alliance. Meanwhile, Russian President …

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits Sweden on Saturday, where he is scheduled to meet with government officials and King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia. It is the Ukrainian leader’s first trip to Sweden since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sweden changed its long-established policy of military nonalignment to back Ukraine with weapons and other support in the war against Russia. Sweden has applied for NATO membership and is in progress to join the alliance. Also Saturday, the Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited Rostov on Don, the headquarters for Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. The Russian leader …

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RIVNE, Ukraine (AP) — Along a bustling street in a western Ukrainian city, Denys Abdulin takes his first independent strides since he was severely wounded and blinded while fighting invading Russian troops more than a year ago. The 34-year-old former soldier, wearing black glasses and gripping a white mobility cane, steps onto a more crowded stretch of sidewalk. His movements become tentative and tense. He accidentally blocks the path of a woman approaching an ATM to withdraw cash. Like many other pedestrians, she responds with a compassionate smile and gracefully moves aside. Gradually, Abdulin covers 600 meters (almost 3/10 of …

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The city where Anne Frank wrote her World War II diary while hiding with her family from the brutal Nazi occupation is hosting an exhibition about the Ukraine war with grim echoes of her plight more than three-quarters of a century later. The exhibition that opened Thursday at Amsterdam City Hall offers a vision of the war in Ukraine as experienced by children caught in the devastating conflict. “This exhibition is about the pain through the children’s eyes,” Khrystyna Khranovska, who developed the idea, said at the opening. “It strikes into the very heart of every adult to be aware …

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German authorities have said they are investigating an apparent poisoning of an exiled Russian journalist in Munich. Elena Kostyuchenko, who had worked for the independent Russian media outlet Novaya Gazeta, fell ill with symptoms of being poisoned while traveling from Munich to Berlin last October. Authorities reopened the investigation into the case in July, according to the British newspaper The Guardian. The inquiry comes as details emerged that two other female journalists or critics experienced similar symptoms. The independent Russian media outlet The Insider this week revealed that at least three exiled Russians, including Kostyuchenko, appear to have been targeted …

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The World Health Organization and U.S. health authorities said Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown. The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance “due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries,” it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday. So far, the variant has been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control confirmed it is also closely monitoring the variant, in a message on the social platform X, formerly known …

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A British nurse who described herself as a “horrible evil person” was found guilty on Friday of murdering seven newborn babies and trying to kill another six in the neonatal unit of a hospital in northwest England where she worked. Lucy Letby, 33, was convicted of killing five baby boys and two baby girls at the Countess of Chester hospital and attacking other newborns, often while working night shifts, in 2015 and 2016. The verdict, following a harrowing 10-month trial at Manchester Crown Court, makes Letby Britain’s most prolific serial child killer in modern history, local media said. She was …

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After a series of attacks on Ukrainian ports, residents say they feel the country’s now-defunct grain deal with Russia allowed them a modicum of protection, which is also now lost. Port officials say they are working to expand alternative routes where they may, at best, only export roughly a third of the agricultural goods they did before the war. VOA’s Heather Murdock reports with videographer Yan Boechat from Odesa, Ukraine. …

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Angry Turkish Cypriots punched and kicked a group of international peacekeepers who obstructed crews working on a road that would encroach on a U.N.-controlled buffer zone in ethnically divided Cyprus, the United Nations said Friday. It said the attack happened as peacekeepers stood in the way of work crews building a road to connect the village of Arsos, in the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north, with the mixed Greek Cypriot-Turkish Cypriot village of Pyla, inside the buffer zone and abutting the Greek Cypriot south, where the island’s internationally recognized government is seated. A video seen by The Associated Press showed scores …

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The United States has given the nod to allies Denmark and the Netherlands to send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, according to officials. It was not immediately clear when Ukraine might receive the jets, which it has been seeking for a long time to counter Russia’s air superiority. In a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said: “We welcome Washington’s decision to pave the way for sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.” The U.S. must approve F-16 transactions because the jets are made in the United States. Despite the news, it was …

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