Month: May 2024

Kyiv, Ukraine — Two people were killed on Friday in a Russian attack on the city of Kurakhove, located in the eastern Donetsk region, which is bearing the brunt of the fighting between Kyiv and Moscow.

“Various high-rise buildings were damaged. Two people were injured, two people died,” the head of the military administration Roman Padun said on social media.

Kurakhove is near the front lines in eastern Ukraine, 40 kilometers west of the Russia-occupied main city of Donetsk.

Outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian troops in the wider region are struggling against Russian forces who are pushing toward the key town of Chasiv Yar.

Ukrainian officials have said Russian forces aimed to seize the hilltop town before May 9, when Russia marks victory over Nazi Germany of World War II, to give President Vladimir Putin a symbolic win.

In an interview with Britain’s The Times, Ukraine’s Ground Forces Commander Oleksandr Pavliuk described a dire situation around the key city.

“We are trying everything we can do to stop the Russian plan to capture Chasiv Yar before May 9,” Pavliuk was quoted as saying.

“But Russians have a 10-to-1 ratio of artillery superiority there, and total air superiority,” he said.

Ukrainian forces have been suffering from ammunition shortages, partly due to months-long delays in U.S. aid, which were approved by President Joe Biden last week after Congress finally passed the measure.

Biden vowed to ensure the aid shipments would reach Ukraine swiftly.
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LYPIVKA, Ukraine — This Orthodox Easter season, an extraordinary new church is bringing spiritual comfort to war-weary residents of the Ukrainian village of Lypivka. Two years ago, it also provided physical refuge from the horrors outside.

Almost 100 residents sheltered in a basement chapel at the Church of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary while Russian troops occupied the village in March 2022 as they closed in on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, 60 kilometers to the east.

“The fighting was right here,” the Rev. Hennadii Kharkivskyi said. He pointed to the churchyard, where a memorial stone commemorates six Ukrainian soldiers killed in the battle for Lypivka.

“They were injured and then the Russians came and shot each one, finished them off,” he said.

The two-week Russian occupation left the village shattered and the church itself — a modern replacement for an older structure — damaged while still under construction. It’s one of 129 war-damaged Ukrainian religious sites recorded by UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization.

“It’s solid concrete,” the priest said. “But it was pierced easily” by Russian shells, which blasted holes in the church and left a wall inside pockmarked with shrapnel scars. At the bottom of the basement staircase, a black scorch mark shows where a grenade was lobbed down.

But within weeks, workers were starting to repair the damage and work to finish the solid building topped by red domes that towers over the village, with its scarred and damaged buildings, blooming fruit trees and fields that the Russians left littered with land mines.

For many of those involved — including a tenacious priest, a wealthy philanthropist, a famous artist and a team of craftspeople — rebuilding this church plays a part in Ukraine’s struggle for culture, identity and its very existence. The building, a striking fusion of the ancient and the modern, reflects a country determined to express its soul even in wartime.

The building’s austere exterior masks a blaze of color inside. The vibrant red, blue, orange and gold panels decorating walls and ceiling are the work of Anatoliy Kryvolap, an artist whose bold, modernist images of saints and angels make this church unique in Ukraine.

The 77-year-old Kryvolap, whose abstract paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars at auction, said that he wanted to eschew the severe-looking icons he’d seen in many Orthodox churches.

“It seems to me that going to church to meet God should be a celebration,” he said.

There has been a church on this site for more than 300 years. An earlier building was destroyed by shelling during World War II. The small wooden church that replaced it was put to more workaday uses in Soviet times, when religion was suppressed.

Kharkivskyi reopened the parish in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and set about rebuilding the church, spiritually and physically, with funding from Bohdan Batrukh, a Ukrainian film producer and distributor.

Work stopped when Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Moscow’s forces reached the fringes of Kyiv before being driven back. Lypivka was liberated by the start of April.

Since then, fighting has been concentrated in the east and south of Ukraine, though aerial attacks with rockets, missiles and drones are a constant threat across the country.

By May 2022, workers had resumed work on the church. It has been slow going. Millions of Ukrainians fled the country when war erupted, including builders and craftspeople. Hundreds of thousands of others have joined the military.

Inside the church, a tower of wooden scaffolding climbs up to the dome, where a red and gold image of Christ raises a hand in blessing.

For now, services take place in the smaller basement, where the priest, in white and gold robes, recently conducted a service for a couple of dozen parishioners as the smell of incense wafted through the candlelit room.

He is expecting a large crowd for Easter, which falls on Sunday. Eastern Orthodox Christians usually celebrate Easter later than Catholic and Protestant churches, because they use a different method of calculating the date for the holy day that marks Christ’s resurrection.

A majority of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians, though the church is divided. Many belong to the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with which the Lypivka church is affiliated. The rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church was loyal to the patriarch in Moscow until splitting from Russia after the 2022 invasion and is viewed with suspicion by many Ukrainians.

Kharkivskyi says the size of his congregation has remained stable even though the population of the village has shrunk dramatically since the war began. In tough times, he says, people turn to religion.

“Like people say: ‘Air raid alert — go see God,’” the priest said wryly.

Liudmyla Havryliuk, who has a summer home in Lypivka, found herself drawn back to the village and its church even before the fighting stopped. When Russia invaded, she drove to Poland with her daughters, then 16 and 18 years old. But within weeks she came back to the village she loves, still besieged by the Russians.

The family hunkered down in their home, cooking with firewood, drawing water from a well, sometimes under Russian fire. Havryliuk said that when they saw Russian helicopters, they held hands and prayed.

“Not prayer in strict order, like in the book,” she said. “It was from my heart, from my soul, about what should we do? How can I save myself and especially my daughters?”

She goes to Lypivka’s church regularly, saying it’s a “place you can shelter mentally, within yourself.”

As Ukraine marks its third Easter at war, the church is nearing completion. Only a few of Kryvolap’s interior panels remain to be installed. He said that the shell holes will be left unrepaired as a reminder to future generations.

“(It’s) so that they will know what kind of ‘brothers’ we have, that these are just fascists,” he said, referring to the Russians.

“We are Orthodox, just like them, but destroying churches is something inhumane.”
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Moscow has cracked down on Russian media outlets that offer independent reporting on the war in Ukraine, prompting hundreds of journalists to flee. While in exile, these media workers have found ways to keep the news flowing into the heavily censored country. For VOA News, Lisa Bryant has the story from Paris. VOA footage by Vahid Karami.
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Kyiv, Ukraine — Ukraine has an AI-generated spokesperson called Victoria who will make official statements on behalf of its foreign ministry.

The ministry said on Wednesday that it would “for the first time in history” use a digital spokesperson to read its statements, which will still be written by humans.

Dressed in a dark suit, the spokesperson introduced herself as Victoria Shi, a “digital person,” in a presentation posted on social media.

The figure gesticulates with her hands and moves her head as she speaks.

The foreign ministry’s press service told AFP that the statements given by Shi would not be generated by AI but “written and verified by real people.”

“It’s only the visual part that the AI helps us to generate,” it said.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the new spokesperson was a “technological leap that no diplomatic service in the world has yet made.”

The main reason for creating her was “saving time and resources” for diplomats, he said.

Shi’s creators are a team called The Game Changers who have also made virtual reality content related to the war in Ukraine.

The spokesperson’s name is based on the word victory and the Ukrainian for artificial intelligence: shtuchniy intelekt.

Shi’s appearance and voice are modeled on a real person: Rosalie Nombre, a singer and former contestant on Ukraine’s version of The Bachelor reality show.

Nombre was born in the now Russian-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

She has 54,000 followers on her Instagram account, which she uses to discuss stereotypes about mixed-race Ukrainians and those who grew up as Russian speakers.

The ministry said that Nombre took part free of charge.

It stressed that Shi and Nombre “are two different people” and that only the AI figure gives official statements.

To avoid fakes, these will be accompanied by a QR code linking them to text versions on the ministry’s website.

Shi will comment on consular services, currently a controversial topic.

Ukraine last week suspended such services for men of fighting age living abroad, making it necessary for them to return to their country for administrative procedures and potentially face the draft. 
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united nations — Four hundred days.

That’s how long American journalist Evan Gershkovich has been held in a Russian prison.

Russia’s Federal Security Service detained him while he was on assignment for U.S. newspaper The Wall Street Journal in the city of Yekaterinburg and accused him of espionage.

The newspaper and the U.S. government have denied the charges against the now 32-year-old reporter.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Thursday at a U.S.-hosted event on the eve of World Press Freedom Day that reporters are too often wrongfully detained for “simply telling the truth.”

“That was Evan’s crime. Reporting the facts about Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine,” she said.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022. Gershkovich was arrested a day after publishing a report on how the war had hurt Russia’s economy.

Thomas-Greenfield said the Biden administration will not rest until Gershkovich is reunited with his family. His parents and sister were present at the event.

Mariana Katzarova, U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation, told the gathering by video from Bulgaria that she is very concerned that Gershkovich has been held for over a year without a trial or evidence.

“The arrest and detention of Evan raises serious concerns about his personal safety, as well as the safety of all foreign journalists conducting their legitimate business in Russia,” she said.

In October 2023, dual U.S.-Russian national Alsu Kurmasheva, 47, who works for VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was also arrested in Russia. She remains jailed on charges of failing to self-register as a so-called foreign agent and spreading what Moscow views as false information about the Russian military. If convicted, she could face up to 15 years in prison.

Kurmasheva was in Russia to visit her elderly and ailing mother.

Katzarova said Russia has one of the highest conviction rates in the world.

“Once charged, the likelihood of being found guilty in the Russian court is very high,” she said, “raising concerns about the fairness and independence of the judiciary in Russia and about the rights of the accused to a fair trial.”

David Rohde, an American journalist who was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008 but escaped after seven months in captivity, told the gathering that the source of attacks on journalists has shifted in the past several years.

“There has been a dramatic change where the people detaining and in some places killing journalists has shifted from extremist groups and criminal groups to a large number of states,” he said.

“It has been more than a year now, and every day is a day too long,” Danielle Gershkovich said of her brother’s detention.

“We need to do whatever it takes to bring him home now.”
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LONDON — British police arrested 45 people on Thursday after a violent protest in London against the transfer of asylum seekers form a hotel to a barge off southern England.

Dozens of protesters outside the hotel in Peckham, southeast London, attempted to stop a bus carrying the asylum seekers from leaving, reportedly deflating its tires and obstructing the vehicle by surrounding it, London’s Metropolitan Police said.

Tackling illegal migration is one of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s top priorities, and to bring down the high costs of accommodating migrants in hotels while their asylum claims are processed, the government has been trying to use barges and former military sites.

Critics, however, have called the Bibby Stockholm barge — which is docked at Portland Port in Dorset and can house up to 500 men — inhumane and compared it to a prison ship.

Several police officers were assaulted during the protest in Peckham, but none were seriously hurt, police said.

“We will always respect the right to peaceful protest, but when officers are assaulted and obstructed from their duty, then we can and will take decisive action,” Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ade Adelekan said.

Arrests were made for offenses that included obstruction of the highway, obstructing police and assault on police.

“Housing migrants in hotels costs the British taxpayer millions of pounds every day,” Home Secretary James Cleverly said on social media platform X, alongside a video of the protest.

“We will not allow this small group of students, posing for social media, to deter us from doing what is right for the British public,” he said.
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BELGRADE, Serbia — Serbian lawmakers on Thursday voted into office a new government that reinstated two pro-Russia officials who are sanctioned by the United States, reflecting persistent close ties with Moscow despite the Balkan nation’s proclaimed bid to join the European Union. 

Prime Minister Milos Vucevic’s government got backing in a 152-61 vote in the 250-member parliament. The remaining 37 lawmakers were absent. 

The government includes former intelligence chief Aleksandar Vulin, who has made several visits to Russia in recent months, as one of several vice-premiers, along with Nenad Popovic, another Russia supporter who has faced U.S. sanctions. 

The foreign minister in the previous government, Ivica Dacic, also a pro-Russia politician, will be in charge of the Interior Ministry in the new Cabinet. 

The vote followed a heated two-day debate. President Aleksandar Vucic’s ruling nationalist conservative Serbian Progressive Party holds a comfortable majority after an election in December that fueled political tensions because of reports of widespread irregularities. 

The increasingly authoritarian Vucic has refused to join Western sanctions against Moscow over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, though Serbia has condemned the aggression. 

Vucevic, the new prime minister, reiterated that Belgrade doesn’t intend to impose sanctions on Russia and “cannot and will not give up” the friendship with Russia. Integration into the EU remains a “strategic goal,” Vucevic said. 

“Best possible” relations with the U.S. also are in Serbia’s interest, Vucevic added. “I firmly believe that our relations can once again be on a high level.” 

Security analyst and a Belgrade university professor Filip Ejdus described the new government’s composition as a “spin” designed to send a message both to the West and Russia, and to voters at home. 

“It sends a message to the EU that they should not push Belgrade too much over democracy, rule of law, or Kosovo if they want to keep Serbia in its orbit,” Ejdus said. “At the same time, it signals to Moscow a readiness to strengthen the strategic partnership with Russia.” 

The U.S. imposed sanctions on Vulin in July, accusing him of involvement in illegal arms shipments, drug trafficking and misuse of public office. 

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said that Vulin used his public authority to help a U.S.-sanctioned Serbian arms dealer move illegal arms shipments across Serbia’s borders. Vulin is also accused of involvement in a drug-trafficking ring, according to U.S. authorities. 

Vulin, who in the past had served as both the army and police chief, has recently received two medals of honor from Russia, one from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and the other awarded to him by Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Popovic, a businessman and a former government minister, has “used his Russia-based businesses to enrich himself and gain close connections with Kremlin senior leaders,” the U.S. Treasury said last November in a statement. 

The U.S. sanctions against individuals and companies in the Balkans are designed to counter attempts to undermine peace and stability in the volatile region and Russia’s “malign” influence. 

The West has stepped up efforts to lure the troubled region into its fold, fearing that Russia could stir unrest to avert attention from the war in Ukraine. The Balkans went through multiple wars in the 1990s, and tensions still persist. 

Serbia’s falling democracy record has pushed the country away from EU integration, explained Ejdus. Reports of election fraud at the December 17 vote triggered street protests and clashes. 

“Vucic is still pretending to be on the EU path because it’s beneficial for Serbia’s economy, and the EU tolerates his authoritarian tendencies out of fear of instability that could be caused in its backyard if Belgrade was lost to Russia and China,” Ejdus said. 
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