Заохочена значними знижками після західних санкцій проти російських компаній, Індія купила щонайменше 13 мільйонів барелів російської сирої нафти з моменту вторгнення Москви в Україну наприкінці лютого
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Ukraine’s president says Russia’s ongoing and unprovoked war on his country is a “catastrophe” that endangers all of Europe. The Kremlin seems to have abandoned plans to topple the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, amid the war, now in its second month. Western powers describe retreating Russian soldiers as war criminals for alleged atrocities ranging from rape to execution-style murders of civilians. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has more. WARNING: Some viewers may find images in this story disturbing.
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Конгресмени зустрічаються з американськими військовими та представниками польської влади на тлі російського вторгнення в Україну
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Раніше кілька західних ЗМІ повідомили, що президент Росії Володимир Путін призначив нового генерала, який керуватиме війною в Україні
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For many in the U.K., the pandemic may as well be over.
Mask requirements have been dropped. Free mass testing is a thing of the past. And for the first time since spring 2020, people can go abroad for holidays without ordering tests or filling out lengthy forms.
That sense of freedom is widespread even as infections soared in Britain in March, driven by the milder but more transmissible omicron BA.2 variant that’s rapidly spreading around Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere.
The situation in the U.K. may portend what lies ahead for other countries as they ease coronavirus restrictions.
France and Germany have seen similar spikes in infections in recent weeks, and the number of hospitalizations in the U.K. and France has again climbed — though the number of deaths per day remains well below levels seen earlier in the pandemic.
In the U.S., more and more Americans are testing at home, so official case numbers are likely a vast undercount. The roster of those newly infected includes actors and politicians, who are tested regularly. Cabinet members, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Broadway actors and the governors of New Jersey and Connecticut have all tested positive.
Britain stands out in Europe because it ditched all mitigation policies in February, including mandatory self-isolation for those infected. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s conservative government is determined to stick to its “living with COVID” plan, but experts disagree on whether the country is coping well.
Some scientists argue it’s the right time to accept that “living with COVID” means tolerating a certain level of disruption and deaths, much like we do for seasonal flu.
Others believe that Britain’s government lifted restrictions too quickly and too soon.
They warned that deaths and hospital admissions could keep rising because more people over 55 — those who are most likely to get seriously ill from COVID-19 — are now getting infected despite high levels of vaccination.
Hospitals are again under strain, both from patients with the virus and huge numbers of staff off sick, said National Health Service medical director Stephen Powis.
“Blinding ourselves to this level of harm does not constitute living with a virus infection — quite the opposite,” said Stephen Griffin, a professor in medicine at the University of Leeds. “Without sufficient vaccination, ventilation, masking, isolation and testing, we will continue to ‘live with’ disruption, disease and sadly, death, as a result.”
Others, like Paul Hunter, a medicine professor at the University of East Anglia, are more supportive of the government’s policies.
“We’re still not at the point where (COVID-19) is going to be least harmful … but we’re over the worst,” he said. Once a high vaccination rate is achieved there is little value in maintaining restrictions such as social distancing because “they never ultimately prevent infections, only delay them,” he argued.
Britain’s official statistics agency estimated that almost 5 million U.K. residents, or 1 in 13, had the virus in late March, the most it had reported. Separately, the REACT study from London’s Imperial College said its data showed that the country’s infection levels in March were 40% higher than the first omicron peak in January.
Infection rates are so high that airlines had to cancel flights during the busy two-week Easter break because too many workers were calling in sick.
France and Germany have seen similar surges as restrictions eased in most European countries. More than 100,000 people in France were testing positive every day despite a sharp dropoff in testing, and the number of virus patients in intensive care rose 22% over the past week.
President Emmanuel Macron’s government, keen to encourage voter turnout in April elections, is not talking about any new restrictions.
In Germany, infection levels have drifted down from a recent peak. But Health Minister Karl Lauterbach backed off a decision to end mandatory self-isolation for infected people just two days after it was announced. He said the plan would send a “completely wrong” signal that “either the pandemic is over or the virus has become significantly more harmless than was assumed in the past.”
In the U.S., outbreaks at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University are bringing back mask requirements to those campuses as officials seek out quarantine space.
Across Europe, only Spain and Switzerland have joined the U.K. in lifting self-isolation requirements for at least some infected people.
But many European countries have eased mass testing, which will make it much harder to know how prevalent the virus is. Britain stopped distributing free rapid home tests this month.
Julian Tang, a flu virologist at the University of Leicester, said that while it’s important to have a surveillance program to monitor for new variants and update the vaccine, countries cope with flu without mandatory restrictions or mass testing.
“Eventually, COVID-19 will settle down to become more endemic and seasonal, like flu,” Tang said. “Living with COVID, to me, should mimic living with flu.”
Cambridge University virologist Ravindra Gupta is more cautious. Mortality rates for COVID-19 are still far higher than seasonal flu and the virus causes more severe disease, he warned. He would have preferred “more gentle easing of restrictions.”
“There’s no reason to believe that a new variant would not be more transmissible or severe,” he added.
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«Якби ми були членом НАТО, цієї війни не було б», – сказав міністр закордонних справ України в шоу американського телеканалу NBC Meet the Press
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Polls opened across France on Sunday for the first round of the country’s presidential election, where up to 48 million eligible voters will be choosing between 12 candidates.
President Emmanuel Macron is seeking a second five-year term, with a strong challenge from the far right.
Polls opened at 8 a.m. Sunday and close at 7 p.m. (1700 GMT) in most places and an hour later in some larger cities.
Unless someone gets more than half of the nationwide vote, there will be a second and decisive round between the top two candidates on April 24.
Aside from Macron, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon are among the prominent figures vying to take the presidential Elysee.
Macron, a political centrist, for months looked like a shoo-in to become France’s first president in 20 years to win a second term. But that scenario blurred in the campaign’s closing stages as the pain of inflation and of pump, food and energy prices roared back as dominant election themes for many low-income households. They could drive many voters Sunday into the arms of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Macron’s political nemesis.
Macron trounced Le Pen by a landslide to become France’s youngest president in 2017. The win for the former banker — now 44 — was seen as a victory against populist, nationalist politics, coming in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the White House and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, both in 2016.
With populist Viktor Orban winning a fourth consecutive term as Hungary’s prime minister days ago, eyes have now turned to France’s resurgent far right candidates — especially National Rally leader Le Pen, who wants to ban Muslim headscarves in streets and halal and kosher butchers, and drastically reduce immigration from outside Europe. This election has the potential to reshape France’s post-war identity and indicate whether European populism is ascendant or in decline.
Meanwhile, if Macron wins, it will be seen as a victory for the European Union.
Observers say a Macron re-election would spell real likelihood for increased cooperation and investment in European security and defense — especially with a new pro-EU German government.
With war singeing the EU’s eastern edge, French voters will be casting ballots in a presidential election whose outcome will have international implications. France is the 27-member bloc’s second economy, the only one with a U.N. Security Council veto, and its sole nuclear power. And as Russian President Vladimir Putin carries on with the war in Ukraine, French power will help shape Europe’s response.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has afforded Macron the chance to demonstrate his influence on the international stage and burnish his pro-NATO credentials in election debates.
Macron is the only front-runner who supports the alliance while other candidates hold differing views on France’s role within it. Melenchon is among those who want to abandon it altogether, saying it produces nothing but squabbles and instability.
Such a development would deal a huge blow to an alliance built to protect its members in the emerging Cold War 73 years ago.
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Евакуація планується в трьох областях
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NATO is working on plans for a permanent military presence on its border in an effort to battle future Russian aggression, Britain’s The Telegraph newspaper reported, citing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
NATO was “in the midst of a very fundamental transformation” that will reflect “the long-term consequences” of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions, Stoltenberg said in an interview with the newspaper.
“What we see now is a new reality, a new normal for European security. Therefore, we have now asked our military commanders to provide options for what we call a reset, a longer-term adaptation of NATO,” it cited Stoltenberg as saying.
Stoltenberg, who recently said he would extend his term as head of the alliance by a year, also said in the interview that decisions on the reset would be made at a NATO summit to be held in Madrid in June.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II and led Western nations to rethink their defense policies.
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From the market stall outside Paris that she’s run for 40 years, Yvette Robert can see firsthand how soaring prices are weighing on France’s presidential election and turning the first round of voting Sunday into a nail-biter for incumbent President Emmanuel Macron.
Shoppers, increasingly worried about how to make ends meet, are buying ever-smaller quantities of Robert’s neatly stacked fruits and vegetables, she says. And some of her clients no longer come at all to the market for its baguettes, cheeses and other tasty offerings. Robert suspects that with fuel prices so high, some can no longer afford to take their vehicles to shop.
“People are scared — with everything that’s going up, with prices for fuel going up,” she said Friday as campaigning concluded for act one of the two-part French election drama, held against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Macron, a political centrist, for months looked like a shoo-in to become France’s first president in 20 years to win a second term. But that scenario blurred in the campaign’s closing stages. The pain of inflation and of pump, food and energy prices that are hitting low-income households particularly hard subsequently roared back as dominant election themes. They could drive many voters Sunday into the arms of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Macron’s political nemesis.
Macron, now 44, trounced Le Pen by a landslide to become France’s youngest president in 2017. The win for the former banker who, unlike Le Pen, is a fervent proponent of European collaboration was seen as a victory against populist, nationalist politics, coming in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the White House and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, both in 2016.
In courting voters, Macron has economic successes to point to: The French economy is rebounding faster than expected from the battering of COVID-19, with a 2021 growth rate of 7%, the highest since 1969. Unemployment is down to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, sparking Europe’s worst security crisis since World War II, Macron also got a polling bump, with people rallying around the wartime leader.
But the 53-year-old Le Pen is a now a more polished, formidable and savvy political foe as she makes her third attempt to become France’s first woman president. And she has campaigned particularly hard and for months on cost-of-living concerns, capitalizing on the issue that pollsters say is foremost on voters’ minds.
Le Pen also pulled off two remarkable feats. Despite her plans to sharply curtail immigration and dial back some rights for Muslims in France, she nevertheless appears to have convinced growing numbers of voters that she is no longer the dangerous, racist nationalist extremist that critics, including Macron, accuse her of being.
She’s done that partly by diluting some of her rhetoric and fieriness. She also had outside help: A presidential run by Eric Zemmour, an even more extreme far-right rabble-rouser with repeated convictions for hate speech, has had the knock-on benefit for Le Pen of making her look almost mainstream by comparison.
Secondly, and also stunning: Le Pen has adroitly sidestepped any significant blowback for her previous perceived closeness with Russian President Vladimir Putin. She went to the Kremlin to meet him during her last presidential campaign in 2017. But in the wake of the war in Ukraine, that potential embarrassment doesn’t appear to have turned Le Pen’s supporters against her. She has called the invasion “absolutely indefensible” and said Putin’s behavior cannot be excused “in any way.”
At her market stall, Robert says she plans to vote Macron, partly because of the billions of euros (dollars) that his government doled out at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to keep people, businesses and France’s economy afloat. When food markets closed, Robert got 1,500 euros ($1,600) a month to tide her over.
“He didn’t leave anyone by the side of the road,” she says of Macron.
But she thinks that this time, Le Pen has a chance, too.
“She has changed the way she speaks,” Robert said. “She has learned to moderate herself.”
Barring a monumental surprise, both Macron and Le Pen are expected to advance again from the first-round field of 12 candidates, to set up a winner-takes-all rematch in the second-round vote April 24. Polls suggest that far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon is likely to finish out of the running in third place. Some of France’s overseas territories in the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America vote Saturday, before Sunday voting on the French mainland.
When Macron made a campaign stop in Poissy, the town west of Paris where Robert has her stall, in early March, pollsters had him leading Le Pen by double digits. Although a Le Pen victory still appears improbable, much of Macron’s advantage has subsequently evaporated. Kept busy by the war in Ukraine, Macron may be paying a price for his somewhat subdued campaign, which made him look aloof to some voters.
Marketgoer Marie-Helene Hirel, a 64-year-old retired tax collector, voted for Macron in 2017 but said she’s too angry with him to do so again. Struggling on her pension with rising prices, Hirel said she is thinking of switching her vote to Le Pen, who has promised fuel and energy tax cuts that Macron says would be ruinous.
Although Le Pen’s “relations with Putin worry me,” Hirel said that voting for her would be a way of protesting against Macron and what she perceives as his failure to better protect people from the sting of inflation.
“Now I’m also part of the ‘all against Macron’ camp,” she said. “He is making fools of us all.”
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There is a body in the basement of the abandoned yellow home at the end of the street near the railroad tracks. The man is young, pale, a dried trickle of blood by his mouth, shot to death and left in the dark, and no one knows why the Russians brought him there, to a home that wasn’t his.
There is a pile of toys near the stairs to the basement. Plastic clothespins sway on an empty line under a cold, gray sky. They are all that’s left of normal on this blackened end of the street in Bucha, where tank treads lay stripped from charred vehicles, civilian cars are crushed, and ammunition boxes are stacked beside empty Russian military rations and liquor bottles.
The man in the basement is almost an afterthought, one more body in a town where death is abundant, but satisfactory explanations for it are not.
A resident, Mykola Babak, points out the man after pondering the scene in a small courtyard nearby. Three men lay there. One is missing an eye. On an old carpet near one body, someone has placed a handful of yellow flowers.
At the beginning
Babak stands, a cigarette in one hand, a plastic bag of cat food in the other.
“I’m very calm today,” he said. “I shaved for the first time.”
At the beginning of their monthlong occupation of Bucha, he said, the Russians kept pretty much to themselves, focused on forward progress. When that stalled, they went house to house looking for young men, sometimes taking documents and phones. Ukrainian resistance seemed to wear on them. The Russians seemed angrier, more impulsive. Sometimes they seemed drunk.
The first time they visited Babak, they were polite. But when they returned on his birthday, March 28, they screamed at him and his brother-in-law. They put a grenade to the brother-in-law’s armpit and threatened to pull the pin. They took an AK-47 and fired near Babak’s feet. “Let’s kill him,” one of them said, but another Russian told them to leave it and go.
Before they left, the Russians asked him: “Why are you still here?”
Like many who stayed in Bucha, Babak is older, 61. It was not as easy to leave. He thought he would be spared. And yet, in the end, the Russians accused him of being a saboteur. He spent a month under occupation without electricity, without running water, cooking over a fire. He was not prepared for this war.
Maybe the Russians weren’t either.
Around 6 p.m. on March 31, and Babak remembers this clearly, the Russians jumped into their vehicles and left, so quickly that they abandoned the bodies of their companions.
“On this street we were fine,” Mykola said. In Bucha, everything is relative. “They weren’t shooting anyone who stepped out of their house. On the next street, they did.”
Witnesses to the occupation
Walking through Bucha, The Associated Press met two dozen witnesses of the Russian occupation. Almost everyone said they saw a body, sometimes several more. Civilians were killed, mostly men, sometimes picked off at random. Many, including the elderly, say they themselves were threatened.
The question that survivors, investigators and the world would like to answer is why. Ukraine has seen the horrors of Mariupol, Kharkiv, Chernihiv and nearby Irpin. But the images from this town an hour’s drive from Kyiv have seared themselves into global consciousness like no other. Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said the count of dead civilians was 320 as of Wednesday.
Vladyslav Minchenko is an artist who helps to collect the bodies.
“It certainly appears to be very, very deliberate. But it’s difficult to know what more motivation was behind this,” a senior U.S. defense official said this week, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the military assessment.
The residents of Bucha, as they venture out of cold homes and basements, offer theories. Some believe the Russians weren’t ready for an extended fight or had especially undisciplined fighters. Some believe the house-to-house targeting of younger men was a hunt for those who had fought the Russians in recent years in separatist-held eastern Ukraine and had been given housing in the town.
By the end, discipline broke down.
Threats and worse
Grenades were tossed into basements, bodies thrown into wells. Women in their 70s were told not to stick their heads out of their houses or they’d be killed.
“If you leave home, I’ll obey the order, and you know what the order is. I’ll burn your house,” Tetyana Petrovskaya recalls one soldier telling her.
At first, the Russians behaved, said Nataliya Aleksandrova, 63. “They said they had come for three days.” Then they got hungry. They got cold. They started to loot. They shot TV screens for no reason.
They feared there were spies among the Ukrainians. Aleksandrova says her nephew was detained on March 7 after being spotted filming destroyed tanks with his phone. Four days later, he was found in a basement, shot in the ear.
Days later, thinking the Russians were gone, Aleksandrova and a neighbor slipped out to shutter nearby homes and protect them from looting. The Russians caught them and took them to a basement.
“They asked us, ‘Which type of death do you prefer, slow or fast?'” Grenade or gun? They were given 30 seconds to decide. Suddenly the soldiers were called away, leaving Aleksandrova and her neighbor shaken but alive.
The Russians became desperate when it became clear they wouldn’t be able to move on Kyiv, said Sergei Radetskiy. The soldiers were just thinking about how to loot and get out.
“They needed to kill someone,” he said. “And killing civilians is very easy.”
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Раніше президент України Володимир Зеленський заявив, що лідер однієї з країн Євросоюзу зажадав доказів, що вбивства мирних жителів у Бучі – це не інсценування
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