Category Archives: Ukraine

Ukraines president has warned Russians that continuing the invasion would exact a toll for generations after tens of thousands attended a nationalist event to hear a speech by President Vladimir Putin.

The remarks by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday came after a mass rally was held in support of Russian forces in Moscow the previous night.

Noting the 200,000 people reported to have attended the rally was similar to the number of Russian forces deployed to Ukraine, Zelenskyy said Fridays event in Moscow illustrated the high stakes of the largest ground conflict in Europe since World War II.

Picture for yourself that in that stadium in Moscow there are 14,000 dead bodies and tens of thousands more injured and maimed, the Ukrainian leader said.Those are the Russian costs throughout the invasion.

Putin lavished praise on his countrys military forces during Fridays flag-waving rally, which took place on the anniversary of Russias 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. The event included patriotic songs such as Made in the USSR, with the opening lines Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, its all my country.

We have not had unity like this for a long time, Putin told the cheering crowd.

Taking to the stage where a sign read For a world without Nazism, he railed against his foes in Ukraine with a claim they are neo-Nazis and insisted his actions were necessary to prevent genocide.

The rally took place as Russia has faced heavier-than-expected losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home. Russian police have detained thousands of antiwar protesters.

Fighting raged on multiple fronts in Ukraine more than three weeks after Russias February 24 invasion.

The northwest Kyiv suburbs of Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin and Moshchun were under fire on Saturday, the Kyiv regional administration reported. The city of Slavutich, 165km (103 miles) north of the capital, was completely isolated, the administration said.

In the besieged port city of Mariupol, the site of some of the wars greatest suffering, Ukrainian and Russian forces battled over the Azovstal steel plant, one of the biggest in Europe, Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraines interior minister, said on Saturday.

Ukrainian and Russian officials agreed to establish 10 humanitarian corridors for bringing aid in and residents out one from Mariupol and several around Kyiv and in the eastern Luhansk region, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.

She also announced plans to deliver humanitarian aid to the southern city of Kherson, which was seized by Russian forces.

In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy said Russian forces were blockading the largest cities with the goal of creating such miserable conditions that Ukrainians will surrender. But he warned Russia would pay the ultimate price.

The time has come to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine. Otherwise, Russias costs will be so high that you will not be able to rise again for several generations, he said.

Vladimir Medinsky, who has led Russian negotiators in several rounds of talks with Ukraine, said on Friday the two sides have moved closer to an agreement on the issue of Ukraine dropping its bid to join NATO and adopting a neutral status.

In remarks carried by Russian media, he said the sides are now halfway on issues regarding the demilitarisation of Ukraine.

However, Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, alleged that Moscows characterisation was intended to provoke tension in the media.

Our positions are unchanged. Ceasefire, withdrawal of troops & strong security guarantees with concrete formulas, he tweeted.

Britains foreign minister accused Putin of using the talks as a smokescreen while his forces regroup. We dont see any serious withdrawal of Russian troops or any serious proposals on the table, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told The Times newspaper.

In a phone call with Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Putin laid out plans for ending the war, according to the Turkish presidential spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin.

President Putin thinks the positions on the Donbas and Crimea are not close enough to meet President Zelenskyy. What we need is a strategic-level meeting between the two leaders. There seems to be growing consensus We are hoping there will be more convergence on these issues, and this meeting will take place sooner than later, because we all want this war to come to an end, Kalin told Al Jazeera.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, during a Saturday visit to NATO ally Bulgaria, said the Russian invasion had stalled on a number of fronts but the United States had not yet seen signs that Putin was deploying additional forces.

Major General Oleksandr Pavlyuk, who is leading the defence of the region around Kyiv, said his forces are well-positioned to defend the city.

We will never give up. We will fight until the end. To the last breath and to the last bullet, said Pavlyuk.

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Ukraines leader warns war will cost Russia for generations - Al Jazeera English

Ukraine has been an independent country for more than half Vladimir Putins adult life (he turns 70 this year). Its been a free republic for more than 30 years, long enough for the first generation of Ukrainians born since independence to have school-age children of their own. Its had seven different leaders, all of them still alive.

It would be sentimental and patronising to talk about a country having grown up. But 30 years is long enough for countries to change, for better or for worse; long enough for countries to have eras. Ukraine was well into its second era, its European era, when Putin invaded last month. Putin never accepted the right of post-Soviet Ukraine to exist in independent Ukraines first era. In terms of understanding the country, thats the period hes stuck in; Putin doesnt acknowledge that a second era began.

The west shares many of the Kremlins misapprehensions about Ukraine. We are still too ready to see the country through the cliche of a nationalist, Ukrainian-speaking west and a Russia-friendly, Russian-speaking south and east. Or, more crudely and colourfully, neo-communist miners in the east, neo-Nazis in the west. Of course it was never that simple, even in post-Soviet Ukraine. But European-era Ukraine, which emerged in 2014, overturned its own political fundamentals. Faced with an existential struggle against a powerful, ruthless neighbour, Russia, where nationalism now serves autocracy, an emergent class of Ukrainian liberals made common cause with Ukrainian nationalists. Its been an uncomfortable alliance but it has kept the country together. As Ukraine defends itself against Putins terror campaign, mutually estranged liberals and nationalists in other countries the US, England, France would do well to watch.

To talk about European Ukraine isnt to describe an achieved state but a state of hope: hope of membership in the European Union more meaningful to Ukraine, at least until Russia attacked, than membership of Nato.

Ukraines hope of Europe had its material side, a hope of grants, jobs and trade. Since the revolution of dignity also known as Maidan in 2014, trade with the EU soared while trade with Russia plunged. More than a million Ukrainians went to work, legally or otherwise, in the EU. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, much has been made in Britain of the EUs openness to Ukrainian refugees compared with the barriers put up by London. But its a depressing reflection of how mainstream anti-immigrant assumptions have become in the UK that virtually no one in Britain is aware the EU gave Ukrainians visa-free access years ago, as a reward for their countrys sacrifices in Europes name. Since 2017, as a result of that and of Brexit, Ukrainians have levelled up and Britons levelled down to identical rights of EU entry: 90 days stay without a visa.

Beyond the material hopes of European-era Ukraine, there is the prospect, less tangible and more powerful, of an alternative form of nationhood. Rather than the archaic, romantic, racial mystifications of old Ukrainian nationalism, or Putins neo-imperial vision of Ukraine pulverised and remade as a puppet state to serve Russian nationalism, its of Ukraine pursuing its free course as an equal member of a self-constraining, self-governing association of countries, the EU.

The beauty of the EU, for Ukraine, is the capaciousness of its model for both liberals and nationalists. In some ways, the aims of European-era Ukraine closely resemble those of the Scottish National party and the Irish republic: to use the economic power of the EU to leverage their own, to break out of the orbit of a delusional post-imperial culture, to find national self-determination by accepting multinational rules. As Tom Nairn wrote of Scotland, a country could aspire to a new interdependence where our nationhood will count, rather than towards mere isolation.

For Ukraines more conservative nationalists, its Poland and Hungary that offer the more appealing EU models stridently patriotic, subordinating media, courts and education to national ideals and social conservatism, all while getting subsidies and trading freely within the EU.

The prelude to Ukraines European era occurred in 2013 under president Viktor Yanukovych, a profoundly corrupt politician from the east of the country. Although seen as a proxy for Kremlin interests, and generally loyal to the idea of post-Soviet Ukraine as a Russian client state, he threw his weight behind an association agreement with the EU. He had his country on side, but Putin gave it to be understood that he considered it a betrayal Ukraine could partner with the EU or Russia, not both.

Whether Yanukovych was genuinely up for the deal with Brussels, or simply angling for a bigger bung from Moscow, he changed his mind at the last minute, took a large loan from Putin and turned his back on the EU.

It was November. Protests began in Kyiv against abandonment of the EU deal. There were calls for Yanukovych to resign. Small, peaceful protests were put down violently by the police. Parliament, then controlled by Yanukovych allies, passed repressive laws against free speech and gatherings. As 2013 passed into 2014, the protests grew, their demands expanded and their base spread. Opposition to Yanukovych and calls for deeper ties to Europe evolved into attacks on the entire corrupt, oligarchic system of business and government.

Young members of the liberal intelligentsia were joined by radical nationalist groups, by small-business owners and by factory workers. Opposition MPs aligned themselves with the protesters. Increasingly violent street battles were waged around Kyivs central square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Barricades went up. Weapons escalated from clubs and stones and shields to molotov cocktails, to stun grenades and rubber bullets, to actual bullets. Some police were shot; more than 100 protesters were killed.

In the third week of February, for reasons still mysterious perhaps because the security forces ceased to believe in the president the regime collapsed. European foreign ministers brokered a peace deal with Yanukovych, the Maidan crowd refused to accept it, and Yanukovych fled the country. Parliament voted in an interim government and prepared for new elections.

Barely had the revolutionaries victory sunk in before Russia annexed Crimea in a nearly bloodless coup de main. In Yanukovychs home region of Donbas, on the border with Russia, locals angry at the treatment of their lawfully elected president seized administrative buildings. They were quickly ousted, only to be replaced, in April, by a new wave of rebels helped by volunteers from Russia. Fighting escalated to a full-scale war, culminating in incursions by regular Russian troops. Thousands of people were killed. By 2015, the front lines had stabilised and fighting lessened, with part of Donbas under joint Russian-rebel control. The rest of Ukraine was at peace. In 2017, the association agreement with the EU came into force.

Even before the war in the Donbas began, there were warnings of what the longer term held. In what reads now as an astonishingly accurate forecast of what was to come, in an interview with a Ukrainian paper in March 2014, the former Putin adviser Andrei Illarionov spelled it out, failing only to predict that eight years would pass first. Theres an aim and a plan to attack Ukraine which was put together years ago, he said. It has many different elements Crimea, the south-east and, of course, a change of power in Kyiv. And then there are other things: a new [Ukrainian] constitution, to be written in the Kremlin, disarmament of the Ukrainian people, liquidation of Maidan, and so on.

Liquidation of Maidan sounds different from the current Kremlin programme, until you realise this is simply denazification by another name.

It might seem trivial now, when Ukraine is on fire and hundreds are being killed every day, when all that seems important is how many Russian tanks and planes and soldiers the Ukrainians have to blow up to make Putin stop, to talk about abstractions like nationalism and liberalism. And yet without these forces coming together over the past seven years of semi-peace, would Ukraine have held out this long?

I remember being surprised, when I visited Kyiv at the end of February 2014, to see how focused liberals and nationalists alike were on a European future. The spokesman for one of the most notorious radical nationalist groups, Right Sector, talked to me about Poland as a model for the country. European flags were everywhere. I went for dinner one evening with a friend of a friend, a successful businesswoman. The Maidan was very localised; a huge encampment of brown tents crowded together, wreathed in the smoke of hundreds of stoves, in which exhausted people, who had fought nightly battles in freezing conditions, lived difficult lives away from home. But right next door to it were expensive restaurants with waiters in spotless white shirts serving fine wines and tuna carpaccio. You know, the nationalists were very important, said the businesswoman, sipping her grenache. They did very good work at the leading edge.

Ive always been in two minds about that conversation with someone who had been very kind to me. On the one hand, it had that air of somebody being grateful that somebody else was doing their dirty work; that one person had education, good taste and proper gentle sentiments, and they were grateful that their interests were being protected by another person who risked their life with a petrol bomb and a brick, and whose most conservative, chauvinist views the first person would definitely not want to hear at their dinner table in peacetime. On the other hand, my friends friend was being honest about the realities of a dangerous situation, and resistance towards a nasty, increasingly repressive regime: that she was not one of natures fighters, and she was glad to have people prepared to fight for their country on her side. Nationalist and liberal, after all, are words with an extremely broad range of meanings.

For me, national is what allows me to defend Ukraine as an independent, sovereign nation, said the Ukrainian philosopher Evhen Bistritsky in 2018, at a time when disillusionment with Ukraines post-Maidan failures to get to grips with corruption and institutional inertia was running deep.

I am a liberal, defending the independence of Ukraine. Part of Ukrainian society supports conservative values, linking them to security. If were really only going to preach universal, classical, liberal values we promote discord in the country.

In a country not fighting for its existence, in the US, perhaps, or Britain, or France, in some safe part of the EU, such language would have marked Bistritsky out as a centrist, a moderate, even, more pejoratively, an undemocratic compromiser. In the present Ukrainian context, faced with the Russian killing machine, discord becomes failure to fill the ranks.

Recently the Ukrainian writer Artem Chekh published Absolute Zero, his memoir of service in the Ukrainian army on the Donbas front in 2015. In it he faces up to the strangeness of being a liberal, cosmopolitan, intellectual man serving alongside workers and farmers who see the world in patriotic, if cynical, absolutes. I went around to his flat in Kyiv a few weeks ago for coffee and cake. Now he has taken up a gun again to protect the city against the invader. In an article for the London Review of Books blog, he lists his comrades: a music producer, an owner of a household chemicals store, a teacher, an artist, a bank clerk, a former investigator, a doctor. The ability to write, paint, act, play a musical instrument or dance doesnt matter now. What counts is military experience.

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The power of the new Ukraine - The Guardian

In September,1949, two Ukrainian agents working with the C.I.A. landed near Lviv, in what was then the Soviet Union. They were the vanguard of an operation that would acquire the code name Redsox. Its aim was to connect with anti-Soviet insurgents fighting by the tens of thousands in Ukraine, as well as in smaller numbers elsewhere on Russias rim. Soviet moles betrayed the program, however, and at least three-quarters of the Redsox agents disappeared. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, Moscow had quelled Ukraines rebellion while forcibly displacing or killing hundreds of thousands of people. The C.I.A.s glancing intervention was ill-fated and tragic, an internal history concluded.

Since Vladimir Putin ordered Russias unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, on February24th, the United States has acted as if to redeem itself; the Biden Administration has led its NATO allies to airlift planeloads of Javelin anti-tank weapons and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukrainian forces, while pledging billions of dollars more in military assistance and imposing punishing sanctions on Russias economy and Putins lite. More than three weeks after the crisis began, the mood in Western capitals remains pugnacious and emotive. Last week, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, appeared by video before Canadas Parliament, and, the next day, he addressed a joint session of Congress. In both venues, politicians rose to applaud and chanted an improbably viral invocation of Ukrainian glory: Slava Ukraini!

Yet NATO has declined to provide Ukraine what Zelensky has repeatedly soughta no-fly zone to ground Russian warplanes or a transfer of fighter jetsfor fear that such actions would bring the U.S. and Russia into direct combat. We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine, Joe Biden reiterated on Twitter recently. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent. The President is, of course, right about that, and yet, as Russian planes and artillery daily pound Ukrainian apartment buildings and hospitals, he can surely understand why Zelensky is pressing for more.

Zelensky has been justly celebrated for his personal courage and his adaptations of Churchillian rhetoric for the TikTok era. His presentation to Congress last week was a study in discomforting moral provocation. He invoked Pearl Harbor and September 11th to describe Ukraines daily experience under Russian missiles and bombs, then showed a graphic video depicting the recent deaths of children and other innocents. Later that day, Biden called Putin a war criminal and announced a new package of military supplies, including anti-aircraft systems and drones. The aid may help, but it cannot relieve Zelensky of the terrible predicaments he must manage in the weeks ahead. Ukraine may be facing a long war costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, a war that may not be winnable, even with the most robust assistance that NATO is likely to provide. In any event, NATOs greatest priority is to strengthen its own defenses and dissuade Putin from attacking the alliance.

Zelenskys alternative may be to pursue a ceasefire deal with Putin that could require Ukraine to forswear future NATO membership, among other bitter concessions. In the light of Putins annexation of Crimea, in 2014, and his years-long armed support for pro-Russian enclaves in Ukraines east, such a deal would be unstable and unreliable. Still, Zelensky appears torn. Even as he asked Congress last week to do more for Ukraines war effort, he pleaded with Biden to lead the world to peace, and he recently signalled his willingness to bargain with Putin on Ukraines relationship with nato. The countrys past failure to win admission to the alliance is a truth that must be recognized, he said.

It has become common to describe Russias invasion as a watershed in history comparable to 9/11 or to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The war in Ukraine marks a turning point for our continent and our generation, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, said earlier this month. Perhaps, but some of this speculation about Europes destiny and the future of Great Power competition may be premature. Certainly, the war has already produced a humanitarian disaster of shocking and destabilizing dimensions. Three million Ukrainians have fled their country. The 1.8million of them who have gone to Poland constitute a population roughly the size of Warsaws. If the fighting drags on and Ukraine implodes, the country will export many more destitute people, and, as happened in the former Yugoslavia during the nineteen-nineties, it may also draw in opportunists, including mercenaries and extremists.

Meanwhile, Russias economy, according to the International Monetary Fund, could shrink by thirty-five per cent this year under the weight of Western sanctions. Putins oligarchs and enablers can endure the loss of super-yachts and private jets, but a sudden economic contraction on that scale would crush ordinary Russians and inevitably cost lives. (Our economy will need deep structural changes, Putin acknowledged last week, adding, They wont be easy.) Russias isolation from large swaths of global banking and trade, and its loss of access to advanced U.S. technologies, could last a long time, too: democracies often find it easier to impose sanctions than to remove them, even when the original cause of a conflict subsides. (Ask Cuba.) When the history of this era is written, Putins war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger, Biden said in his recent State of the Union address.

Still, some introspection may be in order. In his address, the President also declared that, in the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment. But Europe is troubled by illiberal populism, including in Poland. And Donald Trumpwho, just two days before Russia rolled into Ukraine, called Putins preparatory moves geniusretains a firm hold on the Republican Party, and appears to be all in for a relection campaign in 2024. As long as Trumps return to the White House is a possibility, Bidens declarations will require some asterisks.

Every night for three weeks now, Zelensky told Congress, various Ukrainian cities, Odessa and Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, Zhytomyr and Lviv, Mariupol and Dnipro, have endured attacks. We are asking for a reply, for an answer to this terror. Ukraine is an unlucky country, and the restoration of its independence and security may be a long and costly project, but it is one the U.S. cannot afford to abandon again.

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The Complexities of the Ukraine Dilemma - The New Yorker

KYIV, Ukraine A tall woman with blonde and pink hair and a small dachshund stood out among the crowd of police officers and volunteers at the checkpoint on the edge of Kyiv. She looked as if she were out for a stroll, but she had just survived a dangerous evacuation under mortar fire.

The woman, Sasha Myhova, 21, and her boyfriend, Stas Burykov, 19, were evacuated Friday from their home in Irpin, the northwestern suburb that has become one of the most fiercely contested areas in the three weeks of fighting since Russias invading troops advanced toward the capital and Ukrainian troops blocked their way.

It was dangerous, she said. They were bombing as we drove.

The heavy boom of artillery sounded again as she spoke. Shells were landing right in our yard, she said, pulling out a piece of metal shrapnel she had kept.

As the war in Ukraine settles into its fourth week, the suburbs on the edge of Kyiv have become important if unlikely front lines of the war, where the Russian and Ukrainian forces are stuck in a savage give-and-take at one of the gateways to the capital, in positions that have not really moved.

Blocked and badly mauled, Russian forces have nevertheless established positions around three sides of the capital. Ukrainian forces have successfully stalled them, and on Wednesday mounted a series of coordinated counterattacks to challenge those positions.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine hailed the defense of Kyiv, led by the commander of land forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, saying that Ukrainian forces had regained control of 30 settlements around the city in the counterattack. The enemy suffered significant losses and was driven away from the capital, he said.

Yet the mortar fire and gunfire was so heavy in Irpin that the Ukrainians stopped attempting further evacuations after the one that included Ms. Myhova. The Ukrainian counterattack seems to have been met by a ferocious response from Russian forces. Residents and volunteers helping evacuate them said Russian artillery fire and even machine gun fire had intensified over the last few days.

One man, Vitaliy Kalman, was standing beside his suitcase hoping for a lull in the fighting. He said he had tried to go back into the district to retrieve some clothes from his apartment but came under mortar fire just beyond the ruined bridge that marks the entrance into Irpin. The bridge was destroyed by Ukrainian troops to forestall advancement by Russian troops in the first days of the war.

They are very close, he said of the Russians. I saw the shell explode just near my house, and I ran back here with the evacuation team.

A volunteer member of the Territorial Defense Forces described the street fighting in Irpin as an all-out guerrilla war. On the attacking side are the Russian troops, which Western military analysts say are likely elite airborne Special Forces units.

Defending against them are local volunteers, many of whom had just been handed rifles a few days before the Russians arrived in their town, alongside veteran militia fighters and uniformed troops.

Street fighting had been raging for days, according to soldiers interviewed on the edge of the town on Saturday. As of then, Russians controlled one of the three main thoroughfares, one was contested and the third was under tenuous Ukrainian control.

The locals have been slipping out at night and shooting at Russian positions, said the volunteer, who asked only to be identified by his nickname, Spotter, for security reasons. Its understood that they will be taking no prisoners, he said of the firefights. These are people who have weapons and know the local area perfectly.

A doctor at a nearby hospital said it had received 25 wounded soldiers on Wednesday on the first day of the counterattack.

Ms. Myhova said Russian troops had twice entered her home in recent days. First, two soldiers who seemed to be scouts came into the yard, then three days ago, just before the Ukrainian counterattack, 10 Russian soldiers entered the house.

They searched everything, she said. They said they had picked up a telephone signal from the house.

The soldiers warned the family that if they informed anyone about the location of the Russian troops, they would shoot them. They pointed their guns at us, she said. They said, We can shoot you because we know your location.

When Mr. Burykovs 70-year-old grandfather, the owner of the house, began to remonstrate with them, the Russian soldiers told them that they were securing control over what was Russian land, citing the medieval kingdom of Kievan Rus, which Russia claims as its ancestral state.

My grandfather tried to argue, Mr. Burykov said. He said, Its rubbish that its your land. I was born here. Go away.

On Wednesday, the day Ukraine mounted its counter-strikes, residents said the shelling worsened dramatically. There were four explosions around the house that shook the doors, and the sound of gunfire from assault rifles in the yard, Ms. Myhova said.

When they learned that volunteers were evacuating an elderly woman nearby, the couple, along with a sister of Mr. Burykov, asked to get out. But Mr. Burykovs parents, grandfather and other siblings stayed behind.

They want to go when there is a green corridor, Ms. Myhova said, referring to a humanitarian evacuation with guarantees of safety. But there will not be any, she said, since even if one is agreed, they shoot at the cars.

The Ukrainian army and volunteers evacuated about 150 residents from Irpin on Thursday, many of them pensioners who were struggling to survive after the fighting disrupted water, gas and electricity.

They are out of strength, said a volunteer paramedic, Oleh Lutsenko, 32, who was on duty at the entrance to Irpin Thursday. He treated three wounded soldiers, one with severe wounds from artillery fire, among the evacuees, and his team also brought out the bodies of three dead civilians all grandmothers, as he called them. Maybe they died from hunger, he said.

As his team pulled out just before 5 p.m., they came under machine gun fire, he said. Despite two days of counterattack, they were still in range of Russian guns.

While Ukrainian troops had success in stalling the Russian advance as it lumbered down the main highways toward Kyiv, Russian units have continued pushing south on the eastern and western flanks of the capital in an attempt to encircle it, military analysts have said.

The long columns of tanks that had backed up on highways to the north of Irpin have now fanned out into villages and forests outside of Kyiv, according to the volunteer, Spotter, who was interviewed at a gas station in a western district of the capital.

In his mid 50s, with a salt and pepper beard, he carried a walkie-talkie and said he ran an ad hoc intelligence unit, collecting information on the Russians positions in the suburbs and outlying villages.

They are hiding tanks in villages between houses, he said, adding that soldiers were also quartering in homes to avoid the cold.

Their dispersal was complicating the Ukrainian counterattack, since the Russian armor was interspersed in villages, where civilians lived, even if most people have fled the area.

After two major ambushes on Russian positions outside Kyiv, in the suburban towns of Bucha and Brovary, which together left dozens of charred tanks on main roads, the armored vehicles are now avoiding traveling in columns, he said.

They are now digging in, Spotter said of Russian soldiers, as Ukraines artillery has been pounding them from the edge of Kyiv. They didnt expect this resistance.

Volunteers guarding the checkpoint on the main western highway that heads out of Kyiv to the city of Zhytomyr said Russian troops had seized control of the road and vehicles could no longer safely use the highway except to a nearby settlement of Chaika.

It was unclear, Spotter said, how far south Russian troops had moved after crossing the Zhytomyr highway, though it appeared the intention of the Russian forces was to keep encircling the capital and eventually seal off access routes.

The advance was now stalled. They are regrouping, he said.

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What Happened on Day 23 of Russias Invasion of Ukraine - The New York Times

Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared at a huge flag-waving rally at a packed Moscow stadium Friday and lavished praise on his troops fighting in Ukraine, three weeks into the invasion that has led to heavier-than-expected Russian losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home.

Meanwhile, the leader of Russias delegation in diplomatic talks with Ukraine said the sides have narrowed their differences. The Ukrainian side said its position remained unchanged.

The invasion has touched off a burst of antiwar protests inside Russia, and the Moscow rally was surrounded by suspicions it was a Kremlin-manufactured display of patriotism. Several Telegram channels critical of the Kremlin reported that students and employees of state institutions in a number of regions were ordered by their superiors to attend rallies and concerts marking the eighth anniversary of Moscows annexation of Crimea, which was seized from Ukraine. Those reports could not be independently verified.

Elsewhere, Russian troops continued to rain lethal fire on Ukrainian cities, including the capital, Kyiv, and pounded an aircraft repair installation on the outskirts of Lviv, close to the Polish border. Ukrainian officials said late Friday that the besieged southern port city of Mariupol lost its access to the Azov Sea, and Russian forces were still trying to storm the city. It was unclear whether they had seized it.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces are blockading the largest cities to create a humanitarian catastrophe with the goal of persuading Ukrainians to cooperate. He said the Russians are preventing supplies from reaching surrounded cities in central and southeastern Ukraine.

This is a totally deliberate tactic, Zelenskyy said in his nighttime video address to the nation, which was recorded outside in Kyiv, with the presidential office behind him.

In a rare public appearance by Putin since the start of the war, he praised Russian troops: Shoulder to shoulder, they help and support each other, he said. We have not had unity like this for a long time, he added to cheers from the crowd.

Moscow police said more than 200,000 people were in and around the Luzhniki stadium. The event included patriotic songs, including a performance of Made in the U.S.S.R., with the opening lines Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, its all my country.

Seeking to portray the war as just, Putin paraphrased the Bible to say of Russias troops: There is no greater love than giving up ones soul for ones friends.

Taking to the stage where a sign read For a world without Nazism, he railed against his foes in Ukraine with a baseless claim that they are neo-Nazis. Putin continued to insist his actions were necessary to prevent genocide an idea flatly rejected by leaders around the globe.

Video feeds of the event cut out at times but showed a loudly cheering crowd that broke into chants of Russia!

Putins appearance marked a change from his relative isolation of recent weeks, when he has been shown meeting with world leaders and his staff either at extraordinarily long tables or via videoconference.

In the wake of the invasion, the Kremlin has clamped down harder on dissent and the flow of information, arresting thousands of antiwar protesters, banning sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and instituting tough prison sentences for what is deemed to be false reporting on the war, which Moscow refers to as a special military operation.

The OVD-Info rights group that monitors political arrests reported that at least seven independent journalists had been detained ahead of or while covering the anniversary events in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

High above the conflict, three Russian cosmonauts arrived Friday at the International Space Station wearing bright yellow flight suits with blue accents matching the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Video of one of the cosmonauts taken as the capsule prepared to dock with the space station showed him wearing a blue flight suit. It was unclear what, if any, message the yellow uniforms were intended to send.

When cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev was asked about the yellow suits, he said every crew chooses its own suits, and they had a lot of yellow material they needed to use so thats why we had to wear yellow.

Since the war started, many people have used the Ukrainian flag and its colors to show solidarity with the country.

Back in Moscow, Putin stood on stage in a white turtleneck and a blue down jacket and spoke for about five minutes. Some people, including presenters at the event, wore T-shirts or jackets with a Z a symbol seen on Russian tanks and other military vehicles in Ukraine and embraced by supporters of the war.

Putins quoting of the Bible and an 18th-century Russian admiral reflected his increasing focus in recent years on history and religion as binding forces in Russias post-Soviet society. His branding of his enemies as Nazis evoked what many Russians consider their countrys finest hour, the defense of the motherland from Germany during World War II.

The rally came as Vladimir Medinsky, who led Russian negotiators in several rounds of talks with Ukraine, said that the sides have moved closer to agreement on the issue of Ukraine dropping its bid to join NATO and adopting a neutral status.

That is the issue where the parties have made their positions maximally close, Medinsky said in remarks carried by Russian media. He added that the sides are now halfway on issues regarding the demilitarization of Ukraine.

Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, characterized the Russian assessment as intended to provoke tension in the media. He tweeted: Our positions are unchanged. Ceasefire, withdrawal of troops & strong security guarantees with concrete formulas.

Zelenskyy again appealed to Putin to hold talks with him directly. Its time to meet, time to speak, he said. I want to be heard by everyone, especially in Moscow.

In other developments, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke for nearly two hours in a bid by the U.S. to deter Beijing from providing military or economic assistance for Russias invasion.

Earlier Friday, one person was reported killed in the missile attack near Lviv. Satellite photos showed the strike destroyed a repair hangar and appeared to damage two other buildings. Ukraine said it had shot down two of six missiles in the volley, which came from the Black Sea.

The early morning attack was the closest strike yet to the center of Lviv, which has become a crossroads for people fleeing from other parts of Ukraine and for others entering to deliver aid or join the fight. The war has swelled the citys population by some 200,000.

Zelenskyy boasted that Ukraines defenses have proved much stronger than expected, and Russia didnt know what we had for defense or how we prepared to meet the blow.

But British Chief of Defense Intelligence Lt. Gen. Jim Hockenhull warned that after failing to take major Ukrainian cities, Russian forces are shifting to a strategy of attrition that will entail reckless and indiscriminate use of firepower, resulting in higher civilian casualties and a worsening humanitarian crisis.

In city after city around Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people sought safety have been attacked. Rescue workers continued to search for survivors in the ruins of a theater that was being used a shelter when it was blasted by a Russian airstrike Wednesday in Mariupol.

Ludmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian Parliaments human rights commissioner, said at least 130 people had survived the theater bombing.

But according to our data, there are still more than 1,300 people in these basements, in this bomb shelter, Denisova told Ukrainian television. We pray that they will all be alive, but so far there is no information about them.

Satellite images on Friday from Maxar Technologies showed a long line of cars leaving Mariupol as people tried to evacuate, as well as devastation to homes, apartment buildings and stores.

Early morning barrages also hit a residential building in the Podil neighborhood of Kyiv, killing at least one person, according to emergency services, who said 98 people were evacuated from the building. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said 19 were wounded in the shelling.

Ukrainian officials said a fireman was killed when Russian forces shelled an area where firefighters were trying to put out a blaze in the village of Nataevka, in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Two others were killed when strikes hit residential and administrative buildings in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, according to the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko.

Maj. Gen. Oleksandr Pavlyuk, who is leading the defense of the region around Ukraines capital, said his forces are well-positioned to defend the city and vowed: We will never give up. We will fight until the end. To the last breath and to the last bullet.

___

Associated Press writer Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and other AP journalists around the world contributed to this report.

___

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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Putin appears at big rally as troops press attack in Ukraine - The Associated Press - en Espaol

A bloodied man empties his wallet to his creditor while being mercilessly attacked by an unprovoked assailant. This is the plight of Ukraine, which recently made a scheduled interest payment to private lenders as tanks rolled over its land and missiles struck its cities. Even before Vladimir Putin started bombing apartment blocks and maternity hospitals, Ukraine was Europes poorest country as measured by GDP per capita significantly poorer than Albania. Yet this war-ravaged country is saddled with unsustainable debt and as the piles of rubble grow, so do the repayments. Thats debt for Ukraine, but profits for western hedge funds. War, for some, is the ultimate money-spinner.

Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 triggering a conflict in the east that had claimed thousands of lives before the current invasion Ukraine has been forced to borrow $61bn (46bn) from external lenders, according to calculations by the Jubilee Debt Campaign; a small sliver has been paid off, but what remains represents about a third of the countrys total economy. Ukraine was due to cough up $7.3bn this year alone more than its annual education budget. For a rich country blessed with peace, that would be manageable, but Ukrainians are poorer today than when the Soviet Union collapsed three decades ago. At least $100bn worth of damage has already been inflicted to infrastructure from roads to bridges, hospitals to schools and, as you read this, that figure only mounts. Yet almost all of the financial assistance being given to Ukraine is in the form of loans. Precious funds will be diverted from rebuilding a shattered country, instead filling the coffers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and private bondholders.

Putins barbaric siege of Mariupol underlines just how urgent debt cancellation is. While the Russian army seeks to starve and bomb it into submission, the city increasingly suffers the fate of Grozny during the second Chechen war: razed to the ground, piece by piece. It is macabre but necessary to state that Mariupols present state may well be the future of other Ukrainian cities. Each day, billions are added to Ukraines reconstruction bill: it would be pure cruelty to expect this to be repaid as debt.

Thats why Ukrainian civil society organisations have launched a petition demanding Ukraines debt is cancelled. They note, too, that much of the supposed assistance given to the country has been accompanied by strict conditions: the IMF calls it economic restructuring, but its more honestly described as the imposition of free-market dogma, resulting, for instance, in a 650% surge in household gas prices since 2014. Previous governments had two options: either to fairly tax the fat cats and bring them out of the shadows, or to borrow from the IMF and others, Ukrainian economist Oleksandr Kravchuk told me. They chose the latter.

The Jubilee Debt Campaign has taken up this demand and begun to lobby MPs in Britain. Like millions of us, executive director Heidi Chow had that gnawing, helpless sense of weve got to do something. For some, that manifested itself in the demand for a no-fly zone. But in practice, she tells me, thats a shoot Russian military aircraft out of the sky zone, which could easily escalate into nuclear war. In contrast, this is a tangible and hugely impactful proposal with no risk of military escalation.

So why hasnt this commonsense demand been taken up by the powerful? In part, perhaps, its because Ukraines own government hasnt officially called for it, although some high-ranking officials have. They were quite keen before the war to pay debts and push forward their standing in Europe and the world, suggests Chow. Applying for any form of debt relief is a complicated and drawn-out process. Any fears that their ability to borrow and their global reputation may be damaged clearly need alleviating.

Yet the grisly fact is that as yet more loans are granted even though now without conditions vast profits are to be made. Ukrainian bonds are trading at about 25 cents in a dollar, and so if repayments continue, hedge funds and banks are set to make profits of more than 300%. That the profit margins of the already obscenely rich are being inflated by the bloody slaughter of civilians should surely be a cause of universal revulsion and sufficient impetus to action.

But if the IMF and World Bank cancel Ukraines debt, critics may ask, doesnt that mean less money in the pot to lend to other poorer countries? But theres a straightforward solution: richer countries, like our own, should contribute more to make up the shortfall. There is a precedent of sorts the G20s debt service suspension initiative suspended or cancelled nearly $11bn of poorer countries external debt because of Covid-19. If a pandemic is reason enough to write off debt, surely a war of aggression is too.

When this all ends hopefully in failure for Putin then Ukraine will need a modern-day Marshall plan, made up of grants, not a reconstruction financed by loans. In terms of the current moment, as the Jubilee Debt Campaign suggests, there should be a mechanism to automatically suspend debt repayments for countries suffering severe external shocks. Ukraine is in the midst of existential crisis as the Ukrainian social scientist Volodymyr Ishchenko told me: Personally, it feels like the country in which I was born may simply disappear. A country battered and bruised by war needs space to breathe. Thats in our power: cancel the debt.

Original post:

Theres an easy way to help Ukraine without military escalation: cancel its foreign debt - The Guardian

Recently, at a closed ski resort in Ukraines Carpathian Mountains, Roman Davydov leaned into a microphone and announced the latest news from the war. Kryvyi Rih, in southern Ukraine, was being attacked; a U.S. journalist had been shot; and the British Foreign Secretary had announced new sanctions on Russian oligarchs in London. Davydov, who is forty-three, with dark hair and an oft-furrowed brow, is the voice of Kraina FM, an independent radio station that, after Russian bombing began in Kyiv, relocated to an undisclosed location. (The staff of Kraina FM asked me not to identify the village, for security reasons.) Outside Davydovs improvised booth, a corner office lent to Kraina FM by a local accountant, an odd sense of normalcy reigned. Beyond the ski-rental shop, where a cluster of sandbags had been piled, a man in a blue jacket and ski goggles operated a small lift for a childrens slope in the bright sunshine.

The area, which is several hours south of Lviv, has become a shelter for displaced people, Bogdan Bolkhovetsky, Davydovs colleague, told me. Bolkhovetsky, Kraina FMs station general manager, said that he and Davydov had arrived in the village by pure chance. The west of the country is full of refugees, and there are few places for families to stay as they make their way toward the borders of Europe. We found this place because it was the only place vacant, Bolkhovetsky said. They arrived in the evening on February 27th; just days later they were setting up the station in a sloped-ceilinged, wood-panelled space that barely fit their two desks. They acquired laptops and a mixer from the supply of aid making its way from the rest of Europe to Ukraine. We called our friends in Austria and they were so quick, Bolkhovetsky said. Guys weve never met just sent us the equipment, and a friend of ours brought this equipment in. I mean, they brought us these German laptops and the mixing console and weve never seen these people before.

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Kraina FM is an independent radio station that grew out of a now defunct channel called Radio EU. Until the Russian invasion, the station mainly played Ukrainian rock and pop, although it also featured childrens programming and occasional news flashes that, when the channel was launched, in 2016, Davydov said would be the most independent among Kyivs radio stations. Kraina FM was more funny and easy, Davydov told me later, in an e-mail. Now its mostly just rock and not happy information. Like millions of other Ukrainians who have fled their homes, most of the stations staff left Kyiv after the fighting began. Everyone was scattered for two or three days, Bolkhovetsky told me. You look at Google Maps, you see the name of the city and you just start calling hotels to stay overnight.

Bolkhovetsky, who is forty-nine, had awoken from a terrible nightmare on February 24th, when he saw a news alertPutin addresses the nationand heard the first low thuds of Russian bombs exploding around the capital. I just started packing the bags, throwing everything in, he said. With his wife and nine-year-old son, he fled to a summer house outside Kyiv. Within days, Russian helicopters were attacking nearby. Some flew low enough for him to see the pilots in the cockpit. The faces look like you, he said. Just people on the job, like fucking robots. His son spent most of the day in the basement, still in his pajamas. At one point, when the helicopters flew off, Bolkhovetsky piled his family into the car. Once he had reached a town that was not being attacked, he called Davydov, and together they searched for a safe place to set up the station.

Davydov had fled Kyiv with his wife and three-year-old daughter, heading to his wifes office in central Kyiv, where they thought they would be safe. But Russian shelling forced them to seek shelter underground for days. Davydov had a microphone and a connector in the trunk of his car, a setup that he had previously used to record soccer news late at night for early-morning bulletins. Despite the shelling, Davydov kept the broadcasts going, recording one-man news items and uploading them remotely during pauses in the explosions. For two or three days we broadcast only with my one microphone, he said. In the background of these first recordings, one can hear children and dogsDavydov was recording them in the crowded shelter with his head enveloped in a plaid shirt to muffle the sound.

Both Bolkhovetsky and Davydov have spent most of their careers working in radio. Davydov studied economics, but, when he was eighteen, he started doing humor programs for a station in what is now called Kamianske, a city of more than two hundred thousand people on the Dnieper River, and never looked back. He has worked just about every job on the air sincecopywriter, traffic manager, music director, brand voices, program director. In 2004, he moved to Kyiv. Bolkhovetsky, who was born in Luhansk, an eastern region of Ukraine claimed by Russia-backed separatists, worked as an English and French teacher before going into radio in the late nineteen-nineties. He moved to Kyiv in 2005 and worked at a succession of different radio stations.

Once they got Kraina FM up and running at their mountain location, a representative from the National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting in Ukraine requested that they play a national broadcast. Everybody else switched to the national station, Bolkhovetsky told me. It was a continuous broadcast of just one program on TV stations and everywhere. Bolkhovetsky and Davydov decided to continue their own programming. I mean, you tune in to any station and it is the same, Bolkhovetsky told me. Whats the point? Lets have one which is different. They decided to re-create Kraina FM as the station of national resistance.

At the moment, Kraina FM is broadcasting to some twenty cities and online. During the first week, the programming was almost exclusively news about the Russian advance. By the second week, the station had morphed into something profoundly different, cordinating humanitarian logistics and explaining which towns needed what. And a lighter side also crept into the programming. In the first week, we didnt think about something funny, Davydov said. And now its humor about Russiansaggressive humorpoetry, patriotic poetry, some little features about Ukrainians. They broadcast a famous Ukrainian Father Christmas telling childrens tales at night and a psychologist who gives advice for how to care for children during days marked by shelling and air strikestalk to them kindly, show love, listen, and dont contradict what the child says.

A network of around fifteen people, in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia, helps them put out Kraina FMs programs remotely. They use Ukrainian news agencies and the app Telegram to source and put together bulletins. The Internet connection is awful, and theyre often unable to upload stories and recordings. Usually, Kraina FMs programming reaches about a million people, but these days they have no idea how many people are listening. The person who would normally monitor that is likely still in Kyiv, presumably with more urgent matters to contemplate. Perhaps the real measure of the stations popularity has been its drives to locate supplies for the Ukrainian military, first responders, and other humanitarian groups. One day a television producer in Kyiv told them that the military needed a hundred laptops. Davydov and Bolkhovetsky announced the request on air. We made the announcement, like, every fifteen minutes or twenty minutes, Bolkhovetsky said. About two hours later, the military called back; they had enough laptops. Nevertheless, laptops continued to flood in. When I asked why they continued to produce the show, Bolkhovetsky pointed to this experience. What other reason do you need in this moment?

The ski village is something of a transit hub for people fleeing across the border. People come, people go, Bolkhovetsky told me. Thats how it works here.At a certain point, the time came for their own families to leavetheir wives and children had been anxiously spending their days in the resorts hotel rooms while Bolkhovetsky and Davydov got the station running. Both families fled to other parts of Europe. Its better to be by ourselves, Bolkhovetsky told me. They will take care of themselves and well take care of business and ourselves. Still, saying goodbye, he said, was terrible, like never before. Its not compared to anything in my life, to anything.

Under Ukraines current martial law, military reservists between the age of eighteen and sixty have to register to be conscripted into the Army, and all other men in that age group are not supposed to leave the country. Even if Bolkhovetsky and Davydov wanted to leave, they would not be able to. I asked Bolkhovetsky and Davydov whether, if called up, they would fight against the Russians. On one of their first days in the village, Bolkhovetsky told me, We went to the local military station and we said, We are here. What do you want us to do?

What can you do? the local soldiers asked them.

We can do radio, Bolkhovetsky replied.

On hearing this, the unit chief looked at him. So go and make radio, he said.

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Ukraines Radio Station of National Resistance - The New Yorker

After two years of political divisions and economic disruptions bolstered by an unending pandemic, many Americans say they are coming together around a common cause: support for Ukraine, a country under daily siege by Russian forces.

The rare moment of solidarity is driven, in part, by the perception of America as a steadfast global defender of freedom and democracy. Many Americans say they see a lopsided fight pitting a great power against a weaker neighbor. They see relentless images of dead families and collapsed cities. They see Ukraines president pleading for help.

In polls and interviews since the attack, Americans across the political spectrum said the nation had a duty to respond to President Vladimir V. Putins brazen invasion even if that means feeling, at least in the short term, the pinch of high gas prices and inflation.

I understand we want to stay out of it, but whats happening is worse than anyone could imagine. We can do without gas when there are children there being killed, said Danna Bone, a 65-year-old retiree in McMinnville, Ore., and a Republican. Its horrific whats happening there, and we need to be doing our part. I would like to see them doing more. What that looks like, I really dont know.

Yet interviews with more than three dozen Americans from Georgia to California show that, beyond broad consensus that Ukraine deserves support, they are unsettled and even divided on essential questions: How far should America go to defend Ukraine without thrusting the nation into another Cold War? Does the war demand U.S. military involvement?

The Biden administration has imposed an array of painful economic sanctions on Russia and blocked its oil, gas and coal imports. The administration has already approved $1.2 billion in aid to Ukraine, and President Biden is expected to announce another $800 million in military assistance. Three weeks into the invasion, most Americans in both political parties support U.S. aid to Ukraine and overwhelmingly support economic sanctions, a new Pew Research Center survey found.

Already, the issue of Americas role in Ukraine is scrambling U.S. politics and reinvigorating the bond between the United States and its European allies.

About a third of Americans said the United States was providing the appropriate amount of support to Ukraine, but an even larger share, 42 percent, is in favor of the country doing even more, the Pew survey showed. The same poll found, however, that about two-thirds of Americans do not support military intervention.

In pockets across the country, how people saw Americas global might and obligations was often influenced by their individual circumstances and economic stability. They often drew a line, if a crooked one, between the war and the crises at home. Conversations about Russian strikes and shellshocked refugees fleeing Ukraine quickly gave way to discussion about the personal cost of gas and food, a sputtering economy and the enduring pain of the pandemic, the kind of grievances that might temper support for Ukraine over time.

North of Detroit, where Macomb and Oakland Counties sit side by side but have been moving in opposite political directions in recent years Macomb to the right, Oakland to the left liberals and conservatives are united in a belief that what is happening in Ukraine is wrong and that the United States could be doing more. But they offered divergent opinions on the causes of the war or whether Mr. Biden has been adept at handling the foreign policy crisis.

I call it Russias unfinished business, Roland Benberry Jr., 61, an artist and illustrator, said of the invasion. Mr. Benberry served in the Air Force in the early 1980s when Russia was considered an imminent threat. Thirty years later, he is experiencing those feelings again. We thought we were done with that, he said. We thought the Soviet Union was gone, and it basically just went underground for a while.

Mr. Benberry, a Democrat who lives in Oakland County, believes that sanctions could be the most powerful and effective tool against Russia, and that the U.S. military should only get involved directly if the Ukrainian military is forced to fall back. He saw Mr. Putin as a lone demagogue acting on his own, against the will of many of his own citizens.

Like Mr. Benberry, Natasha Jenkins, 34, a Democrat and a liberal arts student at a community college in Oakland County, said she was willing to tolerate higher gas prices to punish Mr. Putin. But she said she wished Mr. Biden would also push for higher wages so that people could have an easier time making ends meet. She sees firsthand the impact of Americas economic strains in the grocery store, where she works the night shift as a cashier. Parents complain to her about the expensive prices of produce or the burdens of teaching their children at home amid the pandemic. Some supplies shortages linger, and she cannot keep all the shelves stocked.

Ms. Jenkins said she was reluctant to see direct U.S. military involvement in Ukraine. She has several close friends still scarred from Americas wars in the Middle East, she said, and she does not want to see more American soldiers deployed to fight abroad.

Indeed, for many Americans, the support for Ukraine firmly ends at the doorstep of military intervention. History plays a role. The long-running war and pullout from Afghanistan, along with memories of the first Cold War, has dampened the tolerance for a direct confrontation with Russia.

On a suburban street in Macomb County, Kathleen Pate, 75, has helped to organize donated clothing and medication to be sent to Ukraine. Her son and her daughter-in-law, who is from Ukraine, converted their garage into a makeshift donation hub.

The support is overwhelming, said Ms. Pate, a Republican who has spent her recent days worrying about Ukrainian families. I cant sleep at night. I cant get it out of mind.

She said she supported establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine and had been unhappy with the U.S. response so far. I truly believe that it could be doing more to help, she said. It is the humane thing to do.

An Economist/YouGov survey conducted in early March showed that a majority of Americans, about 73 percent, sympathized more with Ukraine than Russia. The poll also showed that 68 percent approved of imposing economic sanctions, and slightly less approved of sending financial aid or weapons. But only 20 percent favored sending American troops to fight Russians in Ukraine.

Alejandro Tenorio, 24, said sanctions ought to be the primary tool to force Mr. Putin to back down, and maybe motivate the Russian people to act.

I think these political sanctions should continue. Let the people from Russia take matters into their own hands to maybe try to change the government and change their ways, said Mr. Tenorio, a tech support specialist for a data company who described himself as a left-leaning moderate.

The Biden administration, said Mr. Tenorio, who lives in Johns Creek, Ga., could be a bit more aggressive, with more things to hurt their economy.

I think that should be about it, he said. I think Biden is doing as much as he can, or as much as hes allowed to do.

Others believe that American troops on the ground are a dangerous but necessary response.

Dan Cunha is a 74-year-old Vietnam veteran and retired small business owner who lives in Anaheim, Calif. He describes himself as a political independent, and wrote in John Kasich, the Republican former governor of Ohio, in the 2020 election.

It breaks my heart to see what is happening there now, to see an autocrat rise to power, and were not doing anything to stop it, he said. He is nationalist in the extreme. If it were up to me, I would put troops there. Putin is a bully, and bullies need to be slapped back.

Mr. Cunha regularly spends time at the local V.F.W. outpost, where most of his friends are what he describes as die-hard Republicans, and said that many argue that the conflict would not have happened at all if Donald J. Trump were still president.

The majority of the veterans I talk to say the same thing as I do boots on the ground, he said.

While supportive of Ukraines plight, some Middle Eastern refugees and immigrants outside of Detroit said this conflict felt different from those in Afghanistan and Iraq, because the world is paying attention to the suffering of white European families in a way they felt that it had not with their own.

I grew up watching my country get torn apart, said Maria, a Syrian college student who asked that her full name not be used for fear of endangering her family still in the country. She emphasized that she felt and understood Ukrainians pain, and that she herself had been stunned to see Europeans go to war. But she said she hoped that Americans would realize that this is what life had been like for people in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries for decades.

The war feels personal for Maryana and Radion Vacarciuc, a young Ukrainian couple who have been living in the United States with their children for the last three years but still have relatives in Ukraine.

They are pained by the predicament of their homeland and family members and recall the last conflict in 2014 but said they recognize the limitations of the U.S. government.

America is its own country, Mr. Vacarciuc said. Ukraine, Russia, theyre fighting their own battles.

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Russias Ukraine Invasion Rallies a Divided Nation: The United States - The New York Times

Eleven Ukrainian political parties have been suspended because of their links with Russia, according to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The countrys national security and defence council took the decision to ban the parties from any political activity. Most of the parties affected were small, but one of them, the Opposition Platform for Life, has 44 seats in the 450-seat Ukrainian parliament.

The activities of those politicians aimed at division or collusion will not succeed, but will receive a harsh response, Zelenskiy said, in a video address on Sunday.

Therefore, the national security and defence council decided, given the full-scale war unleashed by Russia, and the political ties that a number of political structures have with this state, to suspend any activity of a number of political parties for the period of martial law, the Ukrainian leader added.

The Opposition Platform for Life, Ukraines biggest opposition party, is led by Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Moscow oligarch with close ties to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Party officials later said the suspension had no legal basis.

The Ukrainian authorities last year charged Medvedchuk, a longtime ally of Putin who is believed to be the godfather of Medvedchuks daughter, with treason and placed the oligarch under house arrest, a move that angered the Kremlin.

Ukraine said Medvedchuk escaped house arrest three days after Russia started its invasion of Ukraine on 24 February and his whereabouts are currently unknown.

The list of parties banned on Sunday also included the Nashi (Ours) party led by Yevhen Murayev, as well as a number of smaller parties not represented in the parliament. Prior to the start of the war, unspecified British intelligence claimed that Russia was considering installing Murayev to lead a Kremlin-controlled puppet government in Kyiv, claims that Murayev strongly denied.

Ukraines decision to suspend a number of parties was slammed by senior Russian officials on Sunday, with the chair of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, saying it was another mistake made by Zelenskiy that will divide the country, while ex-president and top security official Dmitry Medvedev sarcastically wrote that the move would bring Ukraine closer to the west.

The most democratic president of modern Ukraine has taken another step towards the western ideals of democracy. By decision of the Council for National Defence and Security, he completely banned any activity of opposition parties in Ukraine. They are not needed! Well done! Keep it up, Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel.

The political move comes as Zelenskiy aims to further assert his influence over the countrys media sphere. On Sunday, the Ukrainian leader signed a decree that aims to unite all national TV channels into one platform, citing the importance of a unified information policy under martial law.

Originally posted here:

Ukraine suspends 11 political parties with links to Russia - The Guardian

Tanya Kobzar stands in front of the Taras Shevchenko Monument in Lviv. When Ukraine went to war last month, Kobzar a 49-year-old mother of two decided to follow in her grandmother's footsteps and enlist in the army. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

Tanya Kobzar stands in front of the Taras Shevchenko Monument in Lviv. When Ukraine went to war last month, Kobzar a 49-year-old mother of two decided to follow in her grandmother's footsteps and enlist in the army.

LVIV, Ukraine In the lead-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tanya Kobzar was having nightmares.

"I was waking up in the middle of the night, terrified. I would look at a black-and-white photo of my grandmother, which I have framed on a table," she recalls. "She reminds me of how brave a person can be."

Kobzar's late grandmother was an army medic in World War II. It's become part of the family lore how brave she was, treating soldiers on the front lines. So when Ukraine went to war again last month, Kobzar a 49-year-old mother of two decided to follow in her grandmother's footsteps. She left her office job in health care supply chains and enlisted in the army.

Tanya Kobzar's late grandmother was an army medic in World War II. It's become part of the family lore how brave she was, treating soldiers on the front lines. Tanya Kobzar hide caption

"I did this for my children and for my country," says Kobzar, who's using her military nickname in this NPR interview, rather than her full surname, for security reasons.

Her first stop was boot camp, where she learned how to fire a weapon. She found it surprisingly easy. "Easier than making borscht!" she says and laughs.

Now Kobzar is deployed at a military academy in the western city of Lviv, where she's teaching soldiers how to set up field hospitals. It's a training role. But many other Ukrainian women are on the front lines.

Under martial law, Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 are prohibited from leaving the country, and encouraged to fight. Women are under no such mandate. Still, many of them have nevertheless taken up arms against the Russians in this war, and in past ones.

Ukrainian women have actually been serving in combat almost a century longer than American women. There were female Ukrainian officers in World War I, in the Austro-Hungarian army, and in World War II, in the Red Army.

"The Bolsheviks and the Communist parties, they declared equality between men and women in all the spheres, including the military," says feminist historian Oksana Kis.

Despite that history though, it wasn't until after Russia's 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine that women enlisted here in the Ukrainian armed forces in huge numbers and were officially recognized as combat veterans, with full military pensions. Before conscription, nearly a quarter of Ukraine's military was female.

Some of the iconic images of the current war on propaganda posters and on social media are of female combatants. They're reminiscent of those of the women who fought in the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, of female Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka in the early 2000s and of Kurdish women fighting in Syria.

"It's very familiar iconography, when it comes to imagining a nation protecting herself fighting for her independence and freedom," Kis says.

Alina Mykhailova, 27, is a veteran of the 2014 war in eastern Ukraine who now serves on the Kyiv City Council. Earlier this year, she re-enlisted in the army and says she's seeing heavy combat. Alina Mykhailova hide caption

Alina Mykhailova, 27, is a veteran of the 2014 war in eastern Ukraine who now serves on the Kyiv City Council. Earlier this year, she re-enlisted in the army and says she's seeing heavy combat.

That's what Alina Mykhailova was doing when NPR reached her by phone on the front lines, somewhere in central Ukraine. She couldn't reveal her exact location. But her commander had given her permission to speak to the media and to post images of the war on social media. She'd recently posted a video on Instagram of incoming artillery.

Mykhailova, 27, is a veteran of the 2014 war in eastern Ukraine who now serves on the Kyiv City Council. Earlier this year, she re-enlisted in the army. And she says she's seeing heavy combat.

"We just burned a Russian tank. Actually, not just one! We wiped out their entire position!" she tells NPR. "Their tanks took a direct hit from our shells."

Her mother is especially worried: Mykhailova and her father are both in the same combat unit.

"I am the only woman in our unit, and it's difficult. Some of the soldiers we've lost are my friends my brothers-in-arms," Mykhailova says. "But as a woman, I'm cautious about showing too much emotion. I don't want to hurt the morale of our unit the combat spirit of the guys."

The combat spirit in Ukraine right now appears to be pretty robust. Only men face conscription. But lots of them haven't even been called up yet, because the military has already been inundated with volunteers of all genders.

"They said, 'OK, you will be in a line. But now we have too many people,' " says Olga Limarenko, about her experience trying to volunteer at her local branch of Ukraine's territorial defense force in Kyiv.

She and her girlfriends went together, but were turned away. Officials said they didn't need anyone else at the moment. So Limarenko, a 36-year-old architect who has since relocated to Lviv, decided to contribute another way: by making Molotov cocktails to deliver to Ukrainian cities under Russian occupation.

"During the last week, we made about 1,000 of them," she says.

NPR met Limarenko at a library in Lviv that had been transformed into a bustling command center for volunteers mostly women making Molotov cocktails and camouflage nets. She says she'd fight in combat if asked. But for now, she says, make no mistake about the commitment of Ukrainian women to this war.

"We are not weak. We are just waiting," Limarenko says.

Waiting for a spot to open in Ukraine's military, she says so that they can fight.

Producer Olena Lysenko also contributed to this report.

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Ukrainian women are volunteering to fight, continuing a tradition - NPR