World
Russian attack on hospital stirs outrage as talks stall
A Russian airstrike on a Mariupol maternity hospital that killed three people brought condemnation down on Moscow on Thursday, with Ukrainian and Western officials branding it a war crime, while the highest-level talks yet yielded no progress toward stopping the fighting.
Emergency workers renewed efforts to get food and medical supplies into besieged cities and get traumatized civilians out.
Ukrainian authorities said a child was among the dead in Wednesday’s airstrike in the vital southern port of Mariupol. Seventeen people were also wounded, including women waiting to give birth, doctors, and children buried in the rubble.
Images of pregnant women covered in dust and blood dominated news reports in many countries and brought a new wave of horror over the 2-week-old war sparked by Russia’s invasion, which has killed thousands of soldiers and civilians, shaken the foundations of European security and driven more than 2.3 million people from Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Russian leaders that the invasion will backfire on them as their economy is strangled. Western sanctions have already dealt a severe blow to the economy, causing the ruble to plunge, foreign businesses to flee — including, on Thursday, investment bank Goldman Sachs — and prices to rise sharply.
“You will definitely be prosecuted for complicity in war crimes,” Zelenskyy said in a video address. “And then, it will definitely happen, you will be hated by Russian citizens — everyone whom you have been deceiving constantly, daily, for many years in a row, when they feel the consequences of your lies in their wallets, in their shrinking possibilities, in the stolen future of Russian children.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed such talk, saying the country has endured sanctions before.
″Just as we overcame these difficulties in the previous years, we will overcome them now,” he said at a televised meeting of government officials. He did, however, acknowledge the sanctions create “certain challenges.”
Millions more have been displaced inside Ukraine. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said about 2 million people — half the population of the metropolitan area — have left the capital, which has become practically a fortress.
“Every street, every house … is being fortified,” he said. “Even people who in their lives never intended to change their clothes, now they are in uniform with machine guns in their hands.”
Bombs fell on two hospitals in a city west of Kyiv on Wednesday, its mayor said. The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the invasion began.
Western officials said Russian forces have made little progress on the ground in recent days. But they have intensified the bombardment of Mariupol and other cities, trapping hundreds of thousands of people, with food and water running short.
Staff at one hospital on the outskirts of Kyiv say they’ve never seen anything like the flood of often-badly injured patients streaming through their doors. Many are civilians.
At a hospital on the outskirts of Kyiv, a 14-year-old girl named Katya was recovering Thursday after her family was ambushed as they tried to flee the area. She was shot in the hand when their car was raked with gunfire from a roadside forest, said her mother, who identified herself only as Nina.
The girl’s father, who drove frantically from the ambush on blown-out tires, was in surgery at the Brovary Central District Hospital. His wife said he had been shot in the head and had two fingers blown off.
Temporary cease-fires to allow evacuations and humanitarian aid have repeatedly faltered, with Ukraine accusing Russia of continuing its bombardments. But Zelenskyy said 35,000 people managed to get out on Wednesday from several besieged towns, and more efforts were underway on Thursday in eastern and southern Ukraine — including Mariupol — as well as in the Kyiv suburbs.
The Mariupol city council posted a video showing buses driving down a highway. It said a convoy bringing food and medicine was on the way despite several days of thwarted efforts to reach the city.
“Everyone is working to get help to the people of Mariupol. And it will come,” said Mayor Vadym Boychenko.
Images from the city, where hundreds have died and workers hurried to bury bodies in a mass grave, have drawn condemnation from around the world. Residents have resorted to breaking into stores for food and melting snow for water. The city has been without heat for days as nighttime temperatures fall below freezing and daytime ones hover just above it.
“The only thing (I want) is for this to be finished,” Volodymyr Bykovskyi said as he stood by a freshly dug trench where bodies were being buried. “I don’t know who’s guilty, who’s right, who started this. Damn them all, those people who started this!”
When the series of blasts hit the children’s and maternity hospital in Mariupol, the ground shook more than a mile away. Explosions blew out windows and ripped away much of the front of one building. Police and soldiers rushed to the scene to evacuate victims, carrying a bleeding woman with a swollen belly on a stretcher past burning and mangled cars. Another woman wailed as she clutched her child.
Britain’s Armed Forces minister, James Heappey, said that whether the hospital was hit by indiscriminate fire or deliberately targeted, “it is a war crime.” French President Emmanuel Macron called it “a shameful and immoral act of war.”
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, on a visit to Ukraine’s neighbor Poland, backed calls for an international war-crimes investigation into the invasion, saying, “The eyes of the world are on this war and what Russia has done in terms of this aggression and these atrocities.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed concerns about civilian casualties as “pathetic shrieks” from Russia’s enemies, and denied Moscow had even invaded.
He also claimed without providing evidence that the Mariupol hospital had been seized by far-right radical fighters who were using it as a base — despite the fact that photographs from the aftermath showed pregnant women and children at the site.
“We have not invaded Ukraine,” he insisted.
Several rounds of talks have not stopped the fighting, and a meeting in a Turkish Mediterranean resort between Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, failed to find much common ground.
In their highest-level talks since the war began, the two sides discussed a 24-hour cease-fire but did not make progress, Kuleba said. He said Russia was still seeking “surrender from Ukraine.”
“This is not what they are going to get,” he said, adding that he was willing to continue the dialogue.
Lavrov said Russia was ready for more negotiations but showed no sign of softening Moscow’s demands.
Russia has alleged that Western-looking, U.S.-backed Ukraine poses a threat to its security. Western officials suspect Putin wants to install a government friendly to Moscow in Kyiv as part of an effort to draw the former Soviet state back into its orbit.
Russia’s military is struggling, facing heavier losses and stronger Ukrainian resistance than it apparently anticipated. But Putin’s forces have used airpower to pummel key cities, often shelling populated areas.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, 91-year-old Alevtina Shernina sat wrapped in a blanket, an electric heater at her feet, as cold air blew in through a damaged window. She survived the brutal World War II siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, and is now under siege again, her health too fragile to be moved.
Her daughter-in-law Natalia said she was angry that Shernina “began her life in Leningrad under the siege as a girl who was starving, who lived in cold and hunger, and she’s ending her life” in similar circumstances.
“There were fascists there and there are fascists here who came and bombed our buildings and windows,” she said.
US colleges cut partnerships, financial ties with Russia
Colleges across the U.S. are pulling students from study abroad programs in Russia, ending research partnerships and cutting financial ties as part of a global wave of condemnation over the invasion of Ukraine.
At the same time, colleges have promised to support Russian students on their campuses, opposing calls from a few in Congress to remove them from the country as a sanction against their homeland.
The moves are mostly symbolic — U.S. colleges have little power to sway Russia or squeeze its finances, and academic exchange between the nations has always been meager. But the suggestion that some or all Russian students should forfeit the opportunity to study here has drawn new attention to the role of universities in global disputes.
Last academic year, U.S. colleges hosted nearly 5,000 students from Russia, less than 1% of all international students. Advocates for international education say losing those students would forgo a chance to expose them to western ideals, and they say Russians who choose to study in America are already more likely to want change back home.
“Leaders need to make a distinction between Putin and Russian people who want a better life,” said Jill Welch, a senior adviser for the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a coalition of university presidents. “Sending anyone back wouldn’t shorten any war by a day.”
Many universities have called for compassion for students from Russia who, like those from Ukraine, may fear for the safety of family members or face sudden financial difficulty.
In a message to students, Columbia University’s president said students from both countries face a “bewildering and uncertain road ahead.”
Read: Airstrike hits Ukraine maternity hospital, 17 reported hurt
At the University of Washington, President Ana Mari Cauce said the campus stands with Ukraine but “must also take care to not let the actions of Russia’s authoritarian government affect our treatment of Russian students, scholars and community members who have no role in its policies.”
Some in Congress have pushed for visa restrictions against Russian students. Speaking on CNN last month, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., said the U.S. should consider “kicking every Russian student out of the United States” as a way to stir backlash against Vladimir Putin in Russia.
The idea has gained little support in Washington, but the White House later suggested that its separate sanctions against Russian oligarchs are partly intended to block access to U.S. universities.
“What we’re talking about here is seizing their assets, seizing their yachts, and making it harder for them to send their children to colleges and universities in the West,” press secretary Jen Psaki said last week while discussing the sanctions.
College leaders aren’t fighting the idea that oligarchs and their children should lose access to American education. But wider action against Russian students would carry echoes of America’s discrimination toward Japanese and German immigrants during World War II, advocates say.
“In our country, we do not punish children for the crimes of their parents,” said Barbara Snyder, president of the Association of American Universities and a former president of Case Western Reserve University. “You have to think carefully about the consequences of targeting people because of their country of origin.”
For many colleges, the first priority has been to remove American students studying in Russia or Ukraine, although few are believed to have been there. A total of 1,400 Americans studied in those nations in 2018, and overall study abroad figures have plummeted during the pandemic.
Middlebury College in Vermont suspended a study abroad program in Russia at the end of February citing safety concerns, urging the 12 students to return home. Among them was Zavier Ridgley, who was studying in Moscow when he was told to book a flight home quickly.
Read: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed after two years?
The 22-year-old said he respects the decision but was disappointed. A senior at Tulane University, he had been trying to get into the Middlebury program since 2019, but it had been delayed by the pandemic.
“The month I’ve been here has been nothing short of the opportunity of a lifetime, and to have it cut so short so abruptly really is terribly sad,” said Ridgley, who has since returned home.
Other schools have joined in barring student travel to Russia, and some including Dartmouth College have canceled upcoming study abroad programs. A growing number are also severing financial and academic ties as a rebuke of Putin, but the U.S. response has been more scattered compared with Europe, where nations including Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark have ordered colleges to freeze academic exchange with Russia.
Soon after the invasion began, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it was ending its partnership with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, a research university it helped found near Moscow in 2011. MIT officials called it a rejection of “the unacceptable military actions against Ukraine.”
After Colorado Gov. Jared Polis urged universities to cut investments with Russia last week, the University of Colorado said it was divesting all holdings in the country, including $3.5 million in mutual funds.
Several other states have also told colleges to pull investments, including Virginia, Ohio and Arizona.
Presidents of Arizona’s public universities notified the state Monday that they were ending financial and academic ties with Russia in response to an order from the state’s board of regents. Arizona State University announced it will part with a corporate training center in Moscow affiliated with its business school.
Other colleges are reviewing contracts or financial donations from Russian sources, but some had no plans to return the money or end deals.
Stanford University received $1.6 million through a contract with an undisclosed Russian source in December 2020, according to U.S. Education Department records. A university spokesperson said it’s an agreement for online business courses and that Stanford is in “full compliance” with U.S. sanctions.
Last year, Rutgers University reported a new contract with Russia. The school said it’s a deal with the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow for research and information exchange through November 2023. Officials said the agreement is currently inactive.
Riding on 'Brand Modi', BJP wins big in India state elections
Bucking anti-incumbency and proving critics wrong, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday scripted history by retaining power in four of the five Indian states that went to polls last month.
The BJP not only swept back to victory with a thumping majority in India's largest and politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, seen as a referendum on PM Modi halfway through his second term in power, but also won Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur.
The fifth state -- Punjab in northern India -- however went to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), led by former civil servant-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal, that unseated the country's main opposition Congress by a huge margin. AAP currently governs Delhi.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP, led by monk-turned-politician Yogi Adityanath, came back to power for the second consecutive five-year term, bucking anti-incumbency and staving off a massive challenge from the state's main opposition Samajwadi Party.
Also read: Modi's BJP all set to retain India's largest state of Uttar Pradesh
The BJP safely crossed the 250 mark in the 403-member assembly, as per latest results and trends published by India's Election Commission. The Samajwadi Party, led by its young leader and former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, came a distant second.
Uttar Pradesh voted in seven phases --February 10, 14, 20, 23, 27, and March 3 and 7 -- adhering to all Covid-safety protocols.
While the opposition parties harped on issues like rising joblessness, high inflation and the BJP's Hindutva politics, the BJP highlighted law-and-order problems during the Samajwadi Party rule. The party's poll campaign was spearheaded by Modi.
Uttar Pradesh is crucial for the saffron outfit as it's said that the road to Delhi passes through Lucknow, its capital, and the party that wins the state stands a fair chance of forming the next federal government. The general elections in India are due in 2024.
Also read: Veteran politician Sharad Pawar ruling BJP's choice for next Indian President?
Amid heavy shelling, Ukraine’s Mariupol city uses mass grave
With bodies piling up in Russia’s nine-day siege of Mariupol, the port city of 430,000 in southeastern Ukraine, local authorities are hurrying to bury the dead in a mass grave.
City workers made quick signs of the cross gestures as they pushed bodies wrapped in carpets or bags into a deep trench some 25 meters (80 feet) long on the outskirts of the city.
More than 70 bodies have been interred in the common grave since it was opened Tuesday.
No breakthrough in Ukraine-Russia talks
Ukraine’s foreign minister says talks between the top diplomats of Moscow and Kyiv produced no breakthrough on ending the war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said he attended the meeting Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Turkey to discuss humanitarian corridors and a cease-fire.
Kuleba said there are “other decision-makers” in Russia who need to be consulted, adding that he agreed with Lavrov to continue to seek a solution to humanitarian issues caused by the war.
Also read: Russia, Ukraine officials open talks in Turkey
He said Moscow is not ready to offer a cease-fire. He said: “They seek Ukraine’s surrender. This is not going to happen.”
Kuleba said “the last thing” he wanted was to kill hope for Ukrainians seeking safe passage out of cities besieged by Russian bombardments and attacks.
Also read: United on Ukraine, EU tackles the devil in details at summit
UK sanctions Russians, including Abramovich
Britain has imposed a travel ban and asset freezes on seven more wealthy Russians, including Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Premier League soccer club Chelsea.
The government said Thursday that Abramovich’s assets are frozen, he is banned from visiting the U.K. and he is barred from transactions with U.K. individuals and businesses.
Also read: New Zealand passes Russia sanctions bill
Abramovich said last week he was trying to sell Chelsea as the threat of sanctions loomed.
Also added to the U.K. sanctions list are industrialist Oleg Deripaska and Rosneft chief executive Igor Sechin.
The sanctions are being imposed in response to Russia's invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
Also read: Singapore announces sanctions against Russia
United on Ukraine, EU tackles the devil in details at summit
When French President Emmanuel Macron picked the lavish Versailles Palace for this week's summit of European Union leaders, he didn't anticipate the grimness of the Ukraine war.
With the coronavirus pandemic receding, the two-day meeting starting Thursday should have been devoted to optimistic discussions on the EU’s new economic growth and investment model.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade his neighbor turned everything upside down.
With European nations united in backing Ukraine's resistance with unprecedented economic sanctions, three main topics now dominate the agenda: Ukraine's application for fast-track EU membership; how to wean the bloc off its Russian energy dependency; and bolstering the region's defense capabilities.
Read:Attack on Ukraine hospital kills 3, wounds 17, officials say
The EU has showed remarkable cohesion since the war started last month. It quickly adopted massive sanctions targeting Putin himself, Russia's financial system and its high-maintenance oligarchs. It also took the unprecedented step of collectively supplying weapons to a country under attack.
The EU agreed to spend 450 million euros ($500 million) on buying weapons for Ukraine. Meanwhile, Germany said it would raise defense spending above 2% of gross domestic product — and broke with a long tradition of refusing to export weapons to conflict zones when it agreed to send anti-tank and air defense missiles to Ukraine.
“In stepping up European defense, we must find a consensus within the EU, that sometimes the best way of achieving peace is the willingness to use military strength," Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said.
According to a draft of the summit's conclusions obtained by The Associated Press, leaders will agree in Versailles that they “must bolster resolutely (their) investment in defense capabilities and innovative technologies,” and to continue efforts to make the EU "a stronger and more capable security provider.”
But two weeks into the war, divisions among leaders have started to surface on integrating Ukraine and severing energy ties with Moscow.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants his country to quickly become an EU member, but an agreement on that point won't be achieved this week, despite more prodding from Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
“This step would provide an enormous injection of hope to the Ukrainian people. In these dark times, we need this hope more than ever,” Kubela wrote in an opinion article in the Financial Times. “Leaders of the EU, it is your turn to make history.”
The Ukrainian fast-track bid has received warm support in Eastern European countries, but EU officials have stressed the process could take years, with unanimity among current members required to allow a newcomer in the club.
“This will not happen in the short term, because this is a whole process taking many years,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Wednesday.
Another key deterrent to a hasty decision is the specific EU treaty clause that if a member falls victim to armed aggression, the other EU countries have an obligation to aid and assist it by all the means in their power.
“The chance of all member states agreeing to admit Ukraine while it is at war with Russia is virtually zero, as it could trigger conflict with Moscow,” said Luigi Scazzieri, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform.
Read:Foreign Ministers of Russia, Ukraine begin talk in Turkey
On energy, all agree that the EU should reduce its dependency on imports of Russian gas, oil and coal while accelerating the green transition. The EU imports 90% of the natural gas used to generate electricity, heat homes and supply industry, with Russia supplying almost 40% of EU gas and a quarter of its oil.
Earlier this week, the European Commission proposed to diversify natural gas supplies and speed up renewable energy development in a bid to reduce EU demand for Russian gas by two-thirds before the end of the year.
EU leaders are expected to agree on that, but it's highly unlikely they will follow Washington's lead and unanimously endorse a full embargo on Russian oil and gas imports. France won't defend what it considers a radical measure and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has made clear he opposes the idea.
Efforts to agree on a boycott are complicated because some EU countries, including Germany and Italy, are much more dependent than others on Russia. Poland gets 67% of its oil from Russia, while Ireland receives only 5%.
Rutte said it was essential that the EU should “not (go) hastily in the direction of a complete ban on gas and oil from Russia."
“Because we are very much dependent, that’s the painful reality,” he said. “(A ban) would have huge ramifications on all our economies ... but even up to Ukraine itself, because we still have to find the diesel to put in the trucks which are driving into Ukraine to help them.”
Some countries could however decide to go solo and impose an embargo even without an EU deal, since members are free to make their own energy choices.
Attack on Ukraine hospital kills 3, wounds 17, officials say
An airstrike on a hospital in the port city of Mariupol killed three people, including a child, the city council said Thursday, as Russian forces intensified their siege of Ukrainian cities, as the top Russian and Ukrainian diplomats met for the first time since the war began.
The attack a day earlier in the besieged southern port city wounded 17 people, including women waiting to give birth, doctors and children buried in the rubble. Bombs also fell on two hospitals in another city west of the capital.
The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the Russian invasion began two weeks ago.
Two weeks since the invasion began, the sides held their highest-level talks so far. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he hoped the meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba in a Turkish Mediterranean resort “will open the door to a permanent cease-fire.” But Kuleba said he did not have “high expectations.”
Ahead of those talks, artillery fire was heard on the western edge of Kyiv, Deputy Interior Minister Vadym Denysenko said. He told Ukrainian TV channel Rada that residents had a “rather difficult” night on the outskirts of the capital in which Russian forces started by targeting military sites but then hit residential areas.
Some Ukrainian officials have called the medial facility attacked Wednesday a children’s hospital, others a maternity one. It was not clear if perhaps it hosted both services.
Read: Maternity hospital among 18 Ukraine medical centers hit: WHO
The ground shook more than a mile away when the series of blasts hit. Explosions blew out windows and ripped away much of the front of one building. Police and soldiers rushed to the scene to evacuate victims, carrying a bleeding woman with a swollen belly on a stretcher past burning and mangled cars.
Another woman wailed as she clutched her child. In the courtyard, a blast crater extended at least two stories deep.
“Today Russia committed a huge crime,” said Volodymir Nikulin, a top regional police official, standing in the ruins. “It is a war crime without any justification.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Mariupol strike trapped children and others under debris.
“A children’s hospital. A maternity hospital,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, switching to Russian to express horror at the strike. “What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, afraid of maternity hospitals, and destroys them?”
Sharing video that showed cheerfully painted hallways strewn with twisted metal, Zelenskyy urged the West to impose even tougher sanctions than the ones that have already plunged its economy into severe isolation, so Russia “no longer has any possibility to continue this genocide.”
Britain’s Armed Forces minister, James Heappey, said that whether hitting the hospital was “indiscriminate” fire into a built-up area or a deliberate targeting, “it is a war crime.”
In Zhytomyr, a city of 260,000 to the west of Kyiv, bombs fell on two hospitals, one of them a children’s hospital, Mayor Serhii Sukhomlyn said on Facebook. He said there were no injuries.
The World Health Organization said it had confirmed 10 people died and 16 were injured in attacks on health facilities and ambulances since the fighting began. It was not clear if its numbers included the assault on the hospital in Mariupol.
Two weeks into Russia’s assault on Ukraine, its military is struggling more than expected, but Putin’s invading force of more than 150,000 troops retains possibly insurmountable advantages in firepower as it bears down on key cities.
Despite often heavy shelling on populated areas, American military officials reported little change on the ground over the previous 24 hours, other than Russian progress against the cities of Kharkiv and Mykolaiv, in heavy fighting. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to assess the military situation.
Authorities announced new cease-fires to allow thousands of civilians to escape bombarded towns. Zelenskyy said three humanitarian corridors operated on Wednesday, from Sumy in the northeast near the Russian border, from suburbs of Kyiv and from Enerhodar, the southern town where Russian forces took over a large nuclear plant.
In all, he said, about 35,000 people got out. More evacuations were planned for Thursday from towns and cities under bombardment in eastern and southern Ukraine — including Mariupol — as well as the Kyiv suburbs.
People streamed out of Kyiv’s suburbs a day earlier, many headed for the city center, as explosions were heard in the capital and air raid sirens sounded repeatedly. From there, the evacuees planned to board trains bound for western Ukrainian regions not under attack.
Read:United on Ukraine, EU tackles the devil in details at summit
Civilians leaving the Kyiv suburb of Irpin were forced to make their way across the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge, because the Ukrainians blew up the concrete span leading to Kyiv days ago to slow the Russian advance.
With sporadic gunfire echoing behind them, firefighters dragged an elderly man to safety in a wheelbarrow, a child gripped the hand of a helping soldier, and a woman inched her way along, cradling a fluffy cat inside her winter coat. They trudged past a crashed van with the words “Our Ukraine” written in the dust coating its windows.
“We have a short window of time at the moment,’’ said Yevhen Nyshchuk, a member of Ukraine’s territorial defense forces. “Even if there is a cease-fire right now, there is a high risk of shells falling at any moment.”
Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors over the past few days largely failed because of what the Ukrainians said were Russian attacks. But Putin, in a telephone call with Germany’s chancellor, accused militant Ukrainian nationalists of hampering the evacuations.
International Red Cross spokesman Jason Straziuso said safe passage corridors were welcome but have to be well planned, with details agreed on by all sides including the right to bring in food, clean water, medical supplies and other necessities.
Such guarantees are vital for places like Mariupol, a city of 430,000 on the Sea of Azov, where Zelenskyy's office said about 1,200 people have died during the nine-day siege.
“We haven’t been able to resupply our teams in recent days in Mariupol, for example," Straziuso said.
Local authorities hurried to bury the dead from the past two weeks of fighting in a mass grave in the city. Workers dug a trench some 25 meters (yards) long at one of the city’s old cemeteries and made the sign of the cross as they pushed in bodies wrapped in carpets or bags.
Nationwide, thousands are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, since Putin’s forces invaded. The U.N. estimates more than 2 million people have fled the country, the biggest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of World War II.
The fighting knocked out power to the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant on Wednesday, raising fears about the spent radioactive fuel stored there that must be kept cool. But the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said it saw “no critical impact on safety” from the loss of power.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk pleaded Thursday with the Russian military to allow access for repair crews to restore electricity to the plant, and to fix a damaged gas pipeline in the south that has left Mariupol and other towns without heat for days.
The crisis is deteriorating as Moscow’s forces intensify their bombardment of cities in response to what appears to be stronger Ukrainian resistance and heavier Russian losses than anticipated.
The Biden administration warned Russia might seek to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine and rejected Russian claims of illegal chemical weapons development there.
This week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova — without evidence — accused Ukraine of running chemical and biological weapons labs with U.S. support. White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the claim “preposterous” and said Russia might be trying to lay the groundwork for its own use of such weapons against Ukraine.
Russia, Ukraine officials open talks in Turkey
The foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine have begun meeting at a Turkish Mediterranean resort for the first high-level talks between the two countries since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The meeting between Russia’s Sergey Lavrov and Dmotry Kuleba of Ukraine is taking place on the sidelines of a diplomacy forum near the city of Antalya on Thursday. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu is also participating in the meeting.
Cavusoglu has said the aim of the meeting is to pave the way for a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents that would be facilitated by Turkey’s president. Kuleba has also said that he would propose direct talks between the Ukrainian and Russian presidents when he meets Lavrov.
Also read: Maternity hospital among 18 Ukraine medical centers hit: WHO
NATO-member Turkey, which has cultivated close ties with both Russia and Ukraine, is trying to balance relations with both nations. It has positioned itself as a neutral party, seeking to facilitate negotiations between the warring sides.
Turkey has criticized Russia’s military actions in Ukraine as “unlawful” and “unacceptable” but it has also said Ankara would not give up on either Russia or Ukraine.
Also read: Ukraine war at 2-week mark: Russians slowed but not stopped
How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed after two years?
How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed after two years?
More countries are shifting toward a return to normal and learning to live with the virus. Safe, effective vaccines have been developed and there's better understanding of how to treat people sickened by the virus.
Read: Global Covid death toll crosses 6 million
Two years after the pandemic began, questions remain about the coronavirus. But experts know a lot more about how to keep it under control.
The virus mainly spreads through the air when an infected person exhales, talks, coughs or sneezes. It's why health officials have encouraged the use of masks and ventilating spaces, instead of focusing on advice to wipe down surfaces as they did early on.
Treatment has also evolved for people who get sick or need to be hospitalized. Among the options are antivirals, such as the drug remdesivir, or newer pills from Pfizer and Merck; anti-inflammatory drugs including steroids; and depending on what variant is circulating, lab-made antibodies to attack the virus.
“The world has watched us learn in real-time how to treat COVID-19,” says Neil J. Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
COVID-19 vaccines were also developed in record time. As of early March, 10 vaccines have been cleared for emergency use by the World Health Organization.
Still, distribution of vaccines has been unequal despite an international effort to deliver shots more fairly and misinformation has fueled hesitancy about the shots.
Read: Living with Covid a privilege that many can't enjoy: IFRC chief
And there’s still much left to learn. Studies are underway to better understand long COVID-19, which can persist for months after an initial infection. And scientists are on the lookout for the next fast-spreading variant.
“Eventually every country will have to learn to live with COVID,” says Sehgal.