«Приблизно через півтора-два місяці українська сторона розпочне масштабний контрнаступ. Запит на це в суспільстві дуже сильний»
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Питання можливого обміну вивчать «люди в Москві, які мають такі повноваження»
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На думку російського зовнішньополітичного відомства, ці люди «розпалюють русофобію»
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Чингіза Атанаєва впізнали за відео, дослідженим газетою The New York Times. На кадрах російські військові ведуть групу беззбройних людей. Згодом виявили тіла восьми з них
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«Перший транш у розмірі до 100 мільйонів євро Україна має отримати вже цього року»
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«Розблокувати можна різними шляхами. Один зі шляхів – військовий. Тому з такими запитами щодо відповідної зброї ми звертаємося до наших партнерів»
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«Джон Кірбі має унікальну кваліфікацію для цієї посади, і я з нетерпінням чекаю можливості принести його вміння, знання та досвід до Білого дому»
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«Це надзвичайно важливий рубіж не лише на шляху Литви до енергетичної незалежності. Це вираження нашої солідарності з Україною, яка воює, тому що ми не можемо дозволити, щоб на наші гроші фінансувалася російська військова машина»
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«Найближчим часом, не днями навіть, завершиться вивезення всіх»
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Russia on Saturday halted providing natural gas to neighboring Finland, which has angered Moscow by applying for NATO membership, after the Nordic country refused to pay supplier Gazprom in rubles.
Natural gas accounts for about 8% of Finland’s energy consumption and most of it comes from Russia.
Following Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has asked clients from “unfriendly countries” — including EU member states — pay for gas in rubles, a way to sidestep Western financial sanctions against its central bank.
Finnish state-owned energy company Gasum said it would make up for the shortfall from other sources through the Balticconnector pipeline, which connects Finland to Estonia, and assured that filling stations would run normally.
“Natural gas supplies to Finland under Gasum’s supply contract have been cut off,” the company said in a statement.
Gasum said Friday that it had been informed by Gazprom Export, the exporting arm of Russian gas giant Gazprom, that the supply would stop on Saturday morning.
In April, Gazprom Export demanded that future payments in the supply contract be made in rubles instead of euros.
Gasum rejected the demand and announced on Tuesday it was taking the issue to arbitration.
Gazprom Export said it would defend its interests in court by any “means available.”
Gasum said it would be able to secure gas from other sources and that gas filling stations in the network area would continue “normal operation.”
In efforts to mitigate the risks of relying on Russian energy exports, the Finnish government on Friday also announced that the country had signed a 10-year lease agreement for an LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminal ship with US-based Excelerate Energy.
On Sunday, Russia suspended electricity supplies to Finland overnight after its energy firm RAO Nordic claimed payment arrears, although the shortfall was quickly replaced.
Finland, along with neighboring Sweden, this week broke its historical military non-alignment and applied for NATO membership, after public and political support for the alliance soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow has warned Finland that any NATO membership application would be “a grave mistake with far-reaching consequences.
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«Не ми починали цю війну, але нам її закінчувати»
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Representatives of the United States and several other nations walked out of an Asia-Pacific trade ministers meeting in Bangkok on Saturday to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, officials said.
Representatives from Canada, New Zealand, Japan and Australia joined the Americans in walking out of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting, two Thai officials and two international diplomats told Reuters.
The walkout took place while the Russian representative was delivering remarks at the opening of the two-day meeting of the group of 21 economies.
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The Apple Store at Union Square, the heart of San Francisco’s upscale tourist district, had drawn more than 30 customers within a few minutes of opening Friday morning. Visitors, couples and even a preschool-age boy browsed the atrium packed with iPhone 13s and watches to try out. A sign urged people to trade in old phones to save money on the 13s.
But a staff member could not say when the iPhone 14 would come out — presumably sometime this year — or what it would cost. Some shoppers wondered whether it would be delayed or cost more than expected given the months of supply chain disruptions in China, where the phones are made.
“This stuff has got to hit hard at some point,” said Bill Kimberlin, an Apple Store shopper from San Francisco.
Apple, based in the Silicon Valley, just 50 miles south of San Francisco, outsources iPhone parts from around East Asia, and its handsets are assembled in China.
Apple had to delay product rollouts first in 2020, when new gear was held up for a month because of China’s first COVID-19 wave, said Rachel Liao, senior industry analyst with the Taipei-based Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute.
In the first quarter this year, she said, lockdowns in China suspended assembly plants, including at least one operated by Pegatron. Pegatron is the No. 2 iPhone assembler, with 25% of orders, after Foxconn. Both companies are based in Taiwan but manufacture in China.
Since 2020, the costs of making the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 series have increased “slightly” because of a materials shortage in the semiconductor supply chain, Liao said.
“Sharp and protracted lockdowns are causing a lot of short-term havoc on logistics, and it’s obviously affecting delivery times significantly,” said Ivan Lam, senior research analyst with market analysis firm Counterpoint Research.
Apple declined to answer a query from VOA about its China supply chain.
Not just phones
Supply chain upsets set off by China’s lockdowns in the major commercial hubs Shenzhen and Shanghai are slowing exports of products ranging from phones to building materials to motor vehicles. Western nations are experiencing shortages and higher prices imported goods.
Chinese authorities ordered Shenzhen shuttered in March, and Shanghai, with a population of about 26 million, closed weeks later. Those closures have kept workers away from factories, delivery jobs and seaports.
Cities are locking down as part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “zero-COVID” policy, aimed at controlling deaths from the coronavirus.
“The impact of the COVID-19-related restrictions and lockdown there in Shanghai is going to be severe on businesses, not just in China but globally,” said Ker Gibbs, executive in residence at the University of San Francisco and former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.
“Shanghai is so important as a port and as a logistics hub, as a supply chain, so that any business that is touching China is going to be impacted by the lockdown,” Gibbs said.
COVID-19 cases in China, the world’s largest consumer market, “exacerbated” a drop in global mobile phone production in the first three months of 2022, Taipei-based market analysis firm TrendForce said in an emailed statement May 10. It says production volume worldwide was 310 million phones in the same period.
Jayant Menon, a visiting senior fellow with the ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute Regional Economic Studies Program in Singapore, calls demand for China-made goods “uneven” — another cause for supply chain upsets. He anticipates the disruptions will last for two more quarters.
“The quantities involved, I think, will clearly reflect the kind of disruptions still ongoing in China because of their zero-COVID strategy,” he said.
Strategies for smartphones
Smartphone supplies are holding up better than those of many other China-made goods, analysts say.
Phone parts such as chips and screens are sourced from outside China; for example, camera lenses are made in Taiwan, and flash memory is produced in South Korea.
“These things are counted as exports from China, as if 100% of it were made there, and in fact, a much smaller percentage is actually created in China,” said Douglas Barry, vice president of communications at the U.S.-China Business Council, an advocacy group in Washington with over 260 members.
Apple now requires suppliers to increase inventories as it plans further in advance for product launches, Liao said. That’s a hedge against more supply chain problems.
The Silicon Valley icon is now asking its assemblers over the longer term to cut reliance on China and raise orders for factories in India, she added. Its chief assemblers — Foxconn, Pegatron and Wistron — will continue to increase production capacity in India, she predicted. Wistron is also based in Taiwan.
Apple is diversifying further with assembly orders to China-based Luxshare Precision Industry. Liao says that firm handles 3% of iPhone orders, with the prospect of more this year.
Apple was the world’s No. 2-selling brand of smartphone after Samsung in the first three months of this year, with an 18% market share and 56.5 million units shipped, according to market research firm IDC, up slightly from the same period in 2021.
Some smartphone factories are using “closed-loop operations” to keep production going in China, Lam said. Companies such as Foxconn have long housed workers in factory compounds so large that some have compared them to cities.
“At the end of the day, companies will assess their vulnerabilities and adjust their supply chains accordingly,” Barry said. “It won’t be easy, and consumers will feel their pain by having to wait and paying more for products they want.”
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«Озвучена сьогодні нісенітниця – лише для відводу очей росіян, щоб ті не розуміли реального стану справ про те, що їхнє рашистське військо програє»
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Violent storms buffeting western Germany on Friday killed at least one man and injured about 40 people, 10 of them seriously, when an apparent tornado raked several towns, police and local media said.
Images on social media showed an apparent tornado with its distinctive spinning cyclone flinging debris through the air, though the German Weather Service did not immediately confirm a tornado had occurred.
The 38-year-old man in the far-western town of Wittgert died of head injuries sustained when he fell after suffering an electric shock in a flooded cellar, local media quoted police as saying.
Police said up to 40 people had been injured in Paderborn, a town of about 150,000 halfway between Frankfurt and Hamburg. Rail and road transport were disrupted throughout the region.
In nearby Hellinghausen, images shared on social media showed that a steeple had been ripped from the roof of a church tower and its remains scattered around the churchyard.
Police posted images showing trees felled or split in half, as well as roofs that had been swept clean of tiles by the winds in Paderborn.
“Sheeting and insulation were blown kilometers away. Countless roofs are uncovered or damaged. Many trees still lie on destroyed cars,” city police said in a statement.
They asked residents to stay at home. The German Weather Service warned that the stormy weather was set to continue.
Meteorologists said the extreme weather was caused by hot air coming from Africa meeting relatively cooler air moving down from northern Europe.
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Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has again said his country will oppose applications by Finland and Sweden to join NATO unless his security conditions are met. Analysts say Erdogan may be looking for more attention to his concerns from U.S. President Joe Biden. VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports.
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Санкції також включають заборону на експорт предметів розкоші до Росії та їх імпорт
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Кошти включають 7,5 млрд доларів у грантах від США й один мільярд доларів грантів від Німеччини. Ще мільярд доларів нададуть інші країни G7 у вигляді гарантій і позик
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«Російські гроші як компенсація мають дійти до кожної людини, родини, бізнесу, які постраждали»
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The Ukrainian government is using facial recognition software to identify Russian soldiers captured and dead. VOA’s Julie Taboh spoke with one software company CEO and an official with the Ukrainian national police about how the technology is contributing to the war effort
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Before the Russian invasion, Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Replyanchuk spent his days unearthing corruption, often among judges and law enforcement.
Now the Kyiv-based journalist who works for the independent media website Slidstvo.Info uses his investigative reporting skills to expose war crimes and atrocities.
Every crime has a face, Replyanchuk told VOA.
“War criminals who executed civilians in Bucha, pilots who dropped bombs on Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities, artillerymen who shelled Kharkiv: those are specific people,” he said. “And my job is to reveal these people.”
With the first Russian soldier standing trial for war crimes this week, and journalists interviewing residents of cities besieged or occupied for weeks, Ukraine’s media has played an important role in documenting and collecting evidence.
In recognition of their efforts, the U.S. Pulitzer board awarded a special citation in May to Ukrainian journalists for their “courage, endurance, and commitment to truthful reporting” in covering the war.
For the country’s journalists, they have one objective: Ensuring the world knows the names of all those involved in atrocities in Ukraine.
Using open source intelligence or OSINT methods, searching satellite images and social media, and interviewing witnesses, journalists have been able to identify specific soldiers who killed and tortured civilians in Bucha, and shed light on what is happening in Mariupol.
Replyanchuk, whose outlet is part of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Network uses open data to investigate.
Together with his colleagues, the journalist analyzes lists of Russian units published by Ukrainian intelligence and searches Russian social networks Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki for military profiles.
Some of the soldiers, especially those who are younger, are also active on TikTok. In some cases, said Replyanchuk, soldiers brag of torturing civilians.
“There’s no need of interrogating anyone. They publish those things themselves. They boast of this in their social media,” said Replyanchuk.
After analyzing hundreds of such profiles, he came to another conclusion.
“Based on what I see, the vast majority of Russians support the war against Ukraine and call to continue it. This is definitely not only Putin’s war against Ukraine, this is the war of Russia and the Russian people,” he said.
Polls by the independent Russia-based Leveda Center show backing among Russians for their troops in Ukraine, but that support is dropping. Most of those polled believe the U.S and NATO are to blame for civilian casualties.
Valeria Yehoshyna, a journalist at Skhemy—or Schemes, an investigative news project run by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)—says that since the beginning of the invasion, she has mastered new skills for working with data.
RFE/RL and VOA are both independent networks under the Congress-funded U.S. Agency for Global Media.
“We got access to services that help with satellite imagery. This is a fairly new field for us, but I believe that we are working quite successfully,” Yehoshyna said. “For instance, we are able to show the redeployment of Russian equipment.”
The imagery also helped her team find mass graves in the villages of Mangush and Vynohradne near Mariupol.
The grave in Mangush was 300 meters (over 980 feet) long, says Yegoshyna. The one in Bucha was 14 meters (almost 46 feet) long and contained 70 bodies.
But the most startling discovery was an intercepted telephone conversation between two Russians. The recording, a call between a woman and a man, was released by the Security Service of Ukraine.
In it, a woman is heard telling her partner in Russian that he can rape Ukrainian women as long as he doesn’t tell her the details and uses contraceptives.
The recording shocked Yehoshyna.
“The woman on that audio not only allowed her husband to rape Ukrainian women, but she also seemed to encourage him to do so,” she said.
Together with her colleagues, Yehoshyna traced the people on the call.
“From our sources in law enforcement, we were able to obtain two Russian telephone numbers who participated in that conversation,” Yehoshyna said. “Then with the help of our colleagues from the Russian service of Radio Free Europe, we found the accounts on the Russian social network Vkontakte to which those numbers were linked. So we found their pages, their relatives, their friends. Plus, we called them, and the voices on the audio also matched completely.”
Identifying members of the Russian military also helps official investigations, said Yehoshyna. Before the war, Ukrainian law enforcement were sometimes a subject of journalists’ investigations. Today, they find ways to collaborate.
The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine has named suspects believed to have committed crimes in Bucha. Information collected by the Slidstvo.Info team was used to identify one of them.
“We find victims and witnesses, and we work with them to establish the identity and details of specific Russian occupiers who either killed or were involved in torturing or in taking civilians hostage,” said Replyanchuk.
Together with his colleagues, he managed to identify a number of Russian servicemen, collecting evidence like a puzzle, based on testimonies of witnesses.
“Someone remembers the name. Someone remembers the military rank, someone remembers something else,” Replyanchuk said.
From there the team goes to work, recording the evidence and searching open data and social media to identify the people.
For Yehoshyna and many journalists in Ukraine, this war is different from others.
“In this war, we can capture almost everything that happens,” Yehoshyna said.
“Satellite imagery, social media, intercepted calls, all of this helps us. Even people in the temporarily occupied cities take videos and photos and then publish them. There has never been a war with so much [digital] evidence, I’m sure.”
Investigative journalists hope that the testimonies and work will serve two purposes: Evidence for an international tribunal and to act as a record, so that no one can falsify history.
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