Category Archives: Ukraine

Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the Ukraine war, from news and features to analysis, visual guides and opinion.

On Monday, Daniel Boffey visited the devastated town of Bucha, speaking to the residents of blighted Vokzalna Street as they emerged from their hideouts after Russian forces retreated.

We were in our cellar the whole time, says Serhiy Savenko, 43, who lives with his mother, Larisa, 72, at No 35. The Russians set up their weapons and a fire in the front garden. One came down to the cellar and saw us. He said to be quiet. He said he was a nice guy but his colleagues would get us on our knees and shoot us. They took our phones and said no fires, as if we could make some sort of signal.

Zinaida, 62, lives at No 31, and has been in her cellar since 5 March. She faces the prospect of telling her daughter that her husband is dead, killed by soldiers after going to pick up some items up from a neighbours house. He walked just 20 metres from the house and the Russians killed him. No warning, no reason How can I tell them?

If you want to read more about Bucha, journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk has written about how the atrocities there have changed the way Ukrainians look at the war.

Shaun Walker visited the spa town of Trostianets on Tuesday, one of the very first places to fall into Russian hands when Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. There he found evidence of summary executions, torture and systematic looting during a month of occupation. Yet residents described an initial sense of guilt among Russian soldiers. We were scared of them, but after a while we started pitying them. They had dirty faces, they stank and they looked completely lost, says Yana Lugovets, who spent a month sleeping in the basement with her husband, daughter and friends. She said a soldier who had come to search the house they were staying in left without completing the task, his eyes filled with shame as her daughter cried out in fear at the intruder.

Daria Sasina said soldiers who had broken into the beauty salon she ran were apologetic, saying: Listen, Im sorry. We didnt know it would be like this. However, after the Ukrainian army called in strikes, the Russians became more and more angry.

Investigators are uncovering the scale of sexual violence committed in Ukraine, including gang-rapes, assaults at gunpoint, and rapes committed in front of children, writes Bethan McKernan in Lviv.

Rape and sexual assault are considered war crimes, and both Ukraines prosecutor general and the international criminal court have said they will open investigations.

Every break between curfew and bombing I was looking for emergency contraception instead of a basic first aid kit, said Antonina Medvedchuk in Kyiv, who woke up to the sound of bombing on the day the war broke out. My mother tried to reassure me: This is not a war like that, they dont exist any more, they are from old movies.

Local authorities and organisations have been distributing medical, legal and psychological support and trying to find safe shelters for women and girls fleeing both the war and domestic violence. But the fighting has hampered the effort. We have had several calls to our emergency hotline from women and girls seeking assistance, but in most cases its been impossible to help them physically. We havent been able to reach them because of the fighting, said Kateryna Cherepakha, the president of charity La Strada Ukraine.

After Joe Biden called for the prosecution of Vladimir Putin for war crimes following the discovery in Bucha of mass graves and bodies of bound civilians shot at close range, David Smith explained that bringing the Russian president to trial would be far from simple.

The US, China, Russia and Ukraine are not members of the international criminal court, but dozens of prominent lawyers and politicians, including the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, and the former British prime minister Gordon Brown, have launched a campaign to create a special tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression in Ukraine.

Models include the tribunals set up to prosecute war crimes committed during the Balkan wars in the early 1990s and during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Even if it does go ahead, prosecution could take many years.

On Thursday, Luke Harding in Lviv reported on the extraordinary story of Dmitry Yurin, a man who witnessed the bombing of the Drama Theatre in Mariupol and decided that he had to escape the city by any means necessary.

It was terrible, a massive blast, an enormous explosion. I heard cries and screams, Yurin said. I saw bodies and bits of bodies. I pulled one woman out, then a girl, and then a boy. All were hurt. The boys legs didnt move. He was screaming. My hands were shaking. I was covered in blood.

Yurins plan involved wading into the frigid sea of Azov with four five-litre plastic bottles, for use as buoyancy aids, and swimming for two-and-a-half hours. His remarkable journey took him to the village of Melekine, where he staggered out of the sea and was rescued by an elderly couple who gave him vodka and borscht.

Dan Sabbagh examines how Nato countries have been gradually stepping up their supply of weapons to Kyiv as the war in Ukraine enters a new phase and asks if the gradual escalation in arms deliveries can avoid a Russian retaliation and turn the tide on the battlefield.

The next phase of the war which could yet be decisive is expected to unfold in the Donbas in the next month as Russian forces seek to capture Mariupol, create a land bridge to Crimea, expand the area of occupation in the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk and perhaps encircle Ukraines main fighting force ranged against it. It is a struggle that will unfold over the course of April, but it is probably not until the end of April that a clearer picture will emerge of the revised military balance.

Meanwhile, the wests aims are becoming less clear. Is the goal to allow Ukraine to force the Kremlin into peace talks or try to inflict a more heavy defeat that would risk provoking an unpredictable Russian president?

Our visual guide to the invasion is updated regularly and can be found here.

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Russia-Ukraine war: catch up on this week's must-read news and analysis - The Guardian

Since the outset of my administration, the United States has placed the highest priority on delivering critical military capabilities to Ukraine so it can defend itself against Russian aggression. The entire world has now witnessed the effectiveness of those weapons, as courageous Ukrainian forces have used them to repel the Russian attack on Kyiv, keep the skies of Ukraine contested, and deliver severe blows to the Russian military.

In addition to U.S.-produced weapons, we have also worked to facilitate the transfer of capabilities from our Allies and partners around the world. I want to thank the Slovakian government for providing an S-300 air defense system to Ukraine, something President Zelenskyy has personally raised with me in our conversations. To enable this transfer and ensure the continued security of Slovakia, the United States will reposition a U.S. Patriot missile system to Slovakia.

Now is no time for complacency. The Russian military may havefailed in its objective of capturing Kyiv, but it continues to inflict horrific acts of brutality on the Ukrainian people. As the Russian military repositions for the next phase of this war, I have directed my Administration to continue to spare no effort to identify and provide to the Ukrainian military the advanced weapons capabilities it needs to defend its country.

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Statement from the President on Delivery of Air Defense Systems to Ukraine - The White House

World food prices hit an all-time high in March following Russias invasion of agricultural powerhouse Ukraine, a United Nations agency said on Friday, adding to concerns about the risk of hunger around the world.

The disruption in export flows resulting from the February 24 invasion and international sanctions against Russia has spurred fears of a global hunger crisis, especially across the Middle East and Africa, where the knock-on effects are already playing out.

Russia and Ukraine, whose vast grain-growing regions are among the worlds main breadbaskets, account for a huge share of the globes exports in several major commodities, including wheat, vegetable oil and corn, their prices reached their highest levels ever last month.

Ukrainian ports have been blocked by a Russian blockade and there is concern about this years harvest as the war rages on during the sowing season.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said its Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in international prices for a basket of commodities, averaged 159.3 points last month, up 12.6 percent from February. As it is, the February index was the highest level since its inception in 1990.

FAO said the war in Ukraine was largely responsible for the 17.1 percent rise in the price of grains, including wheat and others like oats, barley and corn. Together, Russia and Ukraine account for approximately 30 percent and 20 percent of global wheat and corn exports, respectively.

While predictable given Februarys steep rise, This is really remarkable, said Josef Schmidhuber, deputy director of FAOs markets and trade division. Clearly, these very high prices for food require urgent action.

The biggest price increases were for vegetable oils: that price index rose 23.2 percent, driven by higher quotations for sunflower seed oil that is used for cooking. Ukraine is the worlds leading exporter of sunflower oil, and Russia is second.

Prices of sugar and dairy products also rose significantly the FAO said.

There is, of course, a massive supply disruption, and that massive supply disruption from the Black Sea region has fueled prices for vegetable oil, Schmidhuber told reporters in Geneva.

He said he could not calculate how much the war was to blame for the record food prices, noting that poor weather conditions in the United States and China also were blamed for crop concerns. But he said that logistical factors were playing a big role.

Essentially, there are no exports through the Black Sea, and exports through the Baltics is practically also coming to an end, he said.

Soaring food prices and disruption to supplies coming from Russia and Ukraine have threatened food shortages in countries in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia where many people already were not getting enough to eat.

Those nations rely on affordable supplies of wheat and other grains from the Black Sea region to feed millions of people who subsist on subsidised bread and bargain noodles, and they now face the possibility of further political instability.

Other large grain producers like the US, Canada, France, Australia and Argentina are being closely watched to see if they can quickly ramp up production to fill in the gaps, but farmers face issues such as climbing fuel and fertiliser costs exacerbated by the war, drought and supply chain disruptions.

In the Sahel region of Central and West Africa, the disruptions from the war have added to an already precarious food situation caused by COVID-19, conflicts, poor weather and other structural problems, said Sib Ollo, senior researcher for the World Food Program for West and Central Africa in Dakar, Senegal.

There is a sharp deterioration of the food and nutrition security in the region, he told reporters, saying six million children are malnourished and nearly 16 million people in urban areas are at risk of food insecurity.

Farmers, he said, were particularly worried that they would not be able to access fertilisers produced in the Black Sea region. Russia is a leading global exporter.

The cost of fertilisers has increased by almost 30 percent in many places of this region due to the supply disruption that we see provoked by a crisis in Ukraine, he said.

The World Food Program has appealed for $777m to meet the needs of 22 million people in the Sahel region and Nigeria over six months, he said.

To address the needs of food-importing countries, the FAO was developing a proposal for a mechanism to alleviate the import costs for the poorest countries, Schmidhuber said. The proposal calls for eligible countries to commit to added investments in their own agricultural productivity to obtain import credits to help soften the blow.

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Ukraine war disruptions send food prices to their highest ever - Al Jazeera English

A phone camera pans slowly across the portraits of 55 men, each wearing the dress uniform of Russias elite airborne units. Small candles have been placed by the photographs of the men, as have sky blue berets and the blue-and-white striped undershirts worn by the paratrooper units who led Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The video of the memorial for the soldiers of the 247th Guards Air Assault Regiment is unverified it was first published by Russias iStories news outlet, which said it was submitted by a reader.

But the footage adds weight to a growing consensus that the numbers of Russian casualties especially among elite units such as the Russian airborne are far higher than officials have so far admitted.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said on Thursday that the country had significant losses of troops and its a huge tragedy for us during an interview on Sky News.

The frank admission of the scale of Russian losses is rare among government officials, who have consistently assured the public and Vladimir Putin that Russias special operation is going according to plan.

In an attempt at damage control on Friday, Peskov said he was referring to the official defence ministry numbers of 1,351 soldiers killed since Russia launched its invasion on 24 February.

You and I have the same numbers as those published by the defence ministry, Peskov said. This is a substantial number.

Ukraine has estimated that 18,900 Russian soldiers have died since the beginning of the war, citing its own recovery of bodies and intercepted Russian communications. Russia has called the Ukrainian numbers inflated.

But questions about the Russian militarys accounting practices remain, as official statistics may not count soldiers missing in action, and critics have accused the Kremlin of intentionally covering up the high number of war dead to prevent discontent at home.

And growing evidence suggests high numbers of casualties among the units that led Russias invasion in February, including paratrooper units considered to be the tip of the spear.

The video of the memorial for the 247th Guards Air Assault Regiment, which is based in Stavropol, Russia, showed a number of men whose deaths have already been confirmed through public accounts.

Another video from a nearby cemetery that is used by the unit, along with others, showed a long row of funeral wreaths.

The unit was reported to have fought in southern Ukraine near the city of Kherson, which has been held by the Russian army since late February. A Ukrainian counter-attack near Kherson has led to heavy losses for Russian troops there.

Last month, Russia reported the death of the commander of the regiment, Col Konstantin Zizevsky, one of at least eight Russian colonels to have been killed during the war in Ukraine.

BBC Russian, which has kept a confirmed count of the number of Russian losses, has said that 217 of its 1,083 confirmed Russian war dead were officers, from junior lieutenants to generals. Senior Russian officers often fight alongside their units because decisions must be confirmed by higher-ranking personnel.

Of the confirmed deaths in the military, more than 15% come from Russias elite airborne, or VDV, units. The high number of losses among those units has also been accompanied by reports of desertions.

According to the opposition Pskovskaya Guberniya newspaper, about 60 Russian paratroopers are facing disciplinary action after refusing to travel from Belarus, where many had been dispatched for what they believed were exercises, into Ukraine. Those reports have not been confirmed.

But Russian media have also reported on members of two national guards units that have refused to fight in Ukraine. And lawyers say that soldiers from more than 17 cities have requested aid to either avoid being sent to Ukraine or ask for help in returning home.

Theyre all reporting being pressured, facing the threat of criminal charges, being discharged, or having their documents withheld, wrote Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora international human rights group. For protection from a possible criminal investigation, please contact our lawyers.

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Russians start to see evidence of high military casualties in Ukraine - The Guardian

20:23Situation in Borodyanka 'much worse' than Bucha, Zelenskiy says

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday that the situation in the town of Borodyanka was much worse than in nearby Bucha, where Russian forces suspected killings of civilians received global condemnation.

Officials believe more than 300 people were killed by Russian forces in Bucha, 35km northwest of the capital Kyiv, and around 50 of them were executed.

Moscow has denied targeting civilians and says images of bodies in Bucha were staged by the Ukrainian government to justify more sanctions against Moscow and derail peace negotiations.

The work on dismantling the debris in Borodyanka began... Its much worse there, Zelenskiy said in a late-night national address.

The town is about 25 km from Bucha.

Zelenskiy did not provide any further detail or evidence that Russia was responsible for civilian deaths in the town.

Earlier on Thursday, Ukraines prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said 26 bodies had been found under two ruined buildings in Borodyanka.

She did not say if the authorities had established the cause of death, but accused Russian troops of carrying out airstrikes on the town, which is being searched by Ukrainian authorities after Russian troops occupying it withdrew.

Speaking in a televised briefing, Venediktova said:

Borodyanka is the worst in terms of destruction and in terms of the uncertainty about [the number of] victims.

On Tuesday, Venediktova said the number of victims in Borodyanka would be higher than anywhere else, but did not provide further details.

Updated at 20.50EDT

Thank you for following todays coverage of the war in Ukraine.

This liveblog will be closing but you can continue reading the latest developments on our latest liveblog below.

Before we launch our new liveblog, here is a comprehensive rundown of where the situation currently stands:

Russia has imposed sanctions on Australian and New Zealand citizens, including their prime ministers, the Russian foreign ministry announced.

Entry bans have been imposed on 228 Australian government members and lawmakers, including Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in response to sanctions from Canberra.

The ministry published a list of 228 Australian lawmakers and government members who were barred from entering Russia on Thursday.

It said Australia obediently follows the decisions of the West and has decided to sanction Russias top managers and almost all of its deputies.

In the near future, members of the Australian army, businesspeople, experts and members of the media who have contributed to the formation of negative attitudes towards Russia will also be included in the blacklist and announced.

And a total of 130 New Zealand citizens, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Governor-General Cynthia Kiro and members of the government and parliament were also banned from Russia because of their unfriendly actions against Russia as a matter of reciprocity.

The ministry said the sanctions took effect Thursday.

Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall, who was injured in an attack outside Kyiv, has posted on Twitter about his injuries and paid tribute to his colleagues Sasha and Pierre who were killed.

Updated at 22.50EDT

The United States has blacklisted two Russian state-owned enterprises, United Shipbuilding Corp and the Alrosa diamond mining company, denying them access to the US financial system over Russias invasion of Ukraine, the Treasury Department said on Thursday.

Through these designations, Treasury is cutting off additional sources of support and revenue for the Government of the Russian Federation to wage its unprovoked war against Ukraine, the US officials said in a press release.

Australia has sent its first convoy of 20 refitted Bushmaster vehicles to Ukraine on aircraft C-17 Globemasters leaving Brisbane on Friday.

It is part of a $50m support package worth of military vehicles to the country.

The armoured vehicles have been repainted olive green with Ukraines flag stencilled on each side and the words United with Ukraine emblazoned in both English and Ukrainian in a pledge of solidarity.

Australia may be thousands of kilometres away but were standing side by side with Ukraine against this illegal invasion with arms, equipment, aid and even energy sources, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said.

Our Australian-designed and made Bushmasters are known around the world for their usefulness in a combat zone and they will help boost Ukraines defence against Russias unprovoked and illegal violence.

Boris Johnson is set to meet the German Chancellor as they look to discuss how to help European countries wean themselves off Russian gas following the attack on Ukraine.

The prime minister will host Olaf Scholz at Downing Street on Friday, with a press conference planned for the afternoon, PA Media reports.

Johnson is expected to offer assistance to Berlin, which is still heavily reliant on Russian gas, to reduce its dependence on Moscows energy exports in a bid to starve Vladimir Putins war machine of funds.

It comes after UK foreign secretary Liz Truss, following a meeting of Nato counterparts in Brussels on Thursday, said she hoped to see more countries commit to banning Russian energy imports.

The UK has pledged to end all imports of Russian coal and oil by the end of 2022, with gas to follow as soon as possible.

Germany has faced criticism from Ukraine and other European nations, including Poland, with claims it has been too slow to phase out Russian energy.

Robert Habeck, the German economy and energy minister, has announced plans to stop importing oil and coal from Russia this year, and gas by mid-2024.

Kyiv earlier called for more heavy weaponry from its western allies, warning that the battle for Donbas will remind Nato members of the second world war.

Either you help us now and Im speaking about days, not weeks or your help will come too late, and many people will die, Ukraines foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, told a meeting of his counterparts in the alliance in Brussels on Thursday.

Watch Kulebas address in the video below.

Microsoft Corp said it disrupted hacking attempts by Russian military spies aimed at breaking into Ukrainian, European Union, and American targets.

In a blog post, the tech firm said a group it nicknamed Strontium was using seven internet domains as part of an effort to spy on government bodies and think tanks in the EU and the United States, as well as Ukrainian institutions such as media organisations.

Microsoft did not identify any of the targets by name.

Strontium is Microsofts moniker for a group others often call Fancy Bear or APT28 - a hacking squad linked to Russias military intelligence agency.

The United States has sharply increased the number of Ukrainians admitted to the country at the Mexican border as more refugees fleeing the Russian invasion follow the same route.

The number of Ukrainians arriving at the US-Mexico border to seek asylum in the United States since Russias invasion of its neighbour has more than doubled in less than a week, officials said.

A government recreation centre in the Mexican border city of Tijuana grew to about 1,000 refugees on Thursday, according to city officials. A canopy under which children played soccer only two days earlier was packed with people in rows of chairs and lined with bunk beds, the Associated Press reports.

Tijuana has suddenly become a final stop for Ukrainians seeking refuge in the United States, where they are drawn by friends and families ready to host them and are convinced that the US will be a more suitable haven than Europe.

US President Joe Biden said late last month his country would receive up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.

British rock band Pink Floyd has released a new song to raise money for humanitarian relief in Ukraine, featuring the vocals of a Ukrainian singer who quit an international tour to fight for his country and was wounded.

The single Hey Hey, Rise Up - Pink Floyds first original new music in almost 30 years - was recorded last week and highlights singing by Andriy Khlyvnyuk from Ukrainian band Boombox.

Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour said he learned that Khlyvnyuk - with whom he had previously performed - left a US tour with Boombox and returned to Ukraine to join the Territorial Defence Forces.

Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war, Gilmour said on Pink Floyds website.

It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music.

Gilmour said he spoke with Khlyvnyuk while he was in a hospital in Kyiv recovering from a mortar shrapnel injury.

I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing. We both hope to do something together in person in the future, he said.

Gilmour said he had a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren and he was feeling the fury and the frustration of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

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Ukraine braces for a renewed Russian offensive on its eastern front as it happened - The Guardian

Boris Johnson is congratulating himself on doing so much to help Ukraine, but Britain is like a doctor treating a patients symptoms after causing the infection in the first place. The weapons shipments are crucial, as are plasters and painkillers when someones unwell, but there is no sign yet that Downing Street recognises how to treat the underlying condition.

The Kremlin is solely to blame for the horror it is inflicting on the Ukrainians, but its ability to wage war derives from the wealth it has accumulated. And that is something we share responsibility for, and something we should address as urgently as we are providing Kyiv with missiles to destroy Russian armoured vehicles.

For far too long, Britain welcomed the Kremlins companies and oligarchs and allowed them to raise funds on our financial markets. Our lawyers defended their interests, our accountants filed their accounts and our shell companies protected their assets. Our professionals may have dropped their oligarch clients in the past six weeks, but the damage had already been done: the Russian state would have nothing like the wealth it has now, and would thus not be able to wage this war, without the assistance they provided. And does anyone really believe that, once the memories of Bucha, Kramatorsk and Mariupol have faded, the City wont sell its services to the Kremlin elite again?

If we wish to degrade the oligarchs influence and undermine Russias military in the long term, we need to stop them ever doing business in this country again.

There are two reasons why Britain has allowed Russian kleptocratic wealth to flow through the City of London in such vast quantities. The first is that we have cared only about the fees it generates, not about how it was earned.

The second reason is more complex, and lies in the nature of Vladimir Putins regime. The Kremlin controls everything in Russia, and it interchangeably uses whatever tools are available the military, the FSB, the economy, organised crime, embassies, the media either singly or in combination, for whatever task it wishes to address. This is fundamentally different to how the British state operates, and that has allowed the Russians to slip through the cracks in our system with ease: the threat is not purely criminal, so its not the polices responsibility; its not military, so the Ministry of Defence doesnt step up; its not run by spies, so our security services dont step in.

For far too long, the threat posed by Russia has always been for British officials somebody elses problem, and has thus never been adequately addressed. This is a shame, because there is one vulnerability in Putins system that the UK is perfectly placed to address. The Kremlins ability to move illicit wealth seamlessly through the offshore financial system, and therefore through London, underpins every aspect of its behaviour.

When British shell structures were used to hide the ownership of billions of pounds laundered out of Russia, the government did nothing about it, thanks to its failure to appreciate the security threat inherent in anonymous wealth pouring into our country. When Russian state companies raised capital in the City, British politicians did not recognise we were effectively funding the Kremlins war machine, and instead welcomed the business we were generating. When oligarchs bought up swathes of west London, we didnt consider that we were providing them with a stable home for their wealth, so they could build a looting machine at home, and instead welcomed all the stamp duty they were paying.

The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has this week been lecturing the Europeans about buying so much oil and gas from the Russians. But by protecting and managing the Kremlin elites money, Britain has been at least as complicit as Germany in helping Putin build his aggressive regime.

To expose, investigate and block the Kremlins money, we need three things, all of which are easily achievable if the political will can be found: proper transparency of shell companies, so we know who owns what; robust regulation of professional enablers, so crooked lawyers and accountants can be prosecuted; generous funding of law enforcement, so we can confiscate suspicious wealth.

And those three policies should be coordinated by a fourth: a single individual who is responsible for tackling illicit finance, who can force agencies to take action and can confront politicians who drag their feet, and who can stop the Kremlins infiltration of our economy being somebody elses problem. We must take kleptocracy as seriously as we take terrorism, and that requires more than just an MP being named anti-corruption champion.

So far the government has relied on sanctions to block the oligarchs wealth, but sanctions do nothing to destroy the networks that moved that wealth in the first place. Taking more substantive action will mean enforcing greater regulation, which will undeniably cost us money, just like stopping any of the oligarchs companies from listing on the London Stock Exchange would have cost us money. But it will help protect our society from infiltration by kleptocratic wealth, undermine the Kremlins ability to threaten others and in the long term weaken Putins hold on power.

In the past, such policies have been blocked by the Treasury, which has prioritised maintaining the underregulation that it considers crucial to the competitiveness of the City over defending the integrity of our financial system. And new regulations will undoubtedly be unpopular with wealthy people who have for decades been using exactly the same tricks as the oligarchs to minimise their taxes and disguise their wealth.

The question now for government ministers is this: are they prepared to put their support for the Ukrainians ahead of the tax breaks and loopholes enjoyed by their friends, donors and in the case of Rishi Sunak wives? Because until they are, they wont really be helping the Ukrainians at all.

Oliver Bullough is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals

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Russia can only afford its war in Ukraine because Britain helped raise the cash - The Guardian

Aleksandra Makoviy said she isn't the only Ukrainian mother to write emergency contact info on their children since the war began. Aleksandra Makoviy hide caption

Aleksandra Makoviy said she isn't the only Ukrainian mother to write emergency contact info on their children since the war began.

Aleksandra Makoviy couldn't stop the violent trembling of her hands.

The sound of bombs raining down on nearby streets of Kyiv, on the first day of the war in Ukraine, made it almost impossible to steady a pen on her daughter's tiny, naked back and it was imperative to get the information down.

In the end, it was a messy scrawl: Vira Makovii, 10-11-19 her child's name and birthdate.

It was followed by two phone numbers, one belonging to "Mama," the other to "Papa."

"My hands were deeply shaking and that's why it's so horribly written," Makoviy told NPR in a phone interview.

Still, the message was clear enough that if the unthinkable happened, if somehow the petite 2 1/2-year-old were separated from Makoviy and her husband as the family tried to flee the capital city, the child could be reunited with them.

The photo of Vira's back was a haunting image that Makoviy eventually shared on Instagram, where nearly 29,000 people responded with messages of support.

Among them were people thanking her for the idea to do the same with their own children as the war has ravaged their country. Others were moved by what the photo offered a glimpse into what life is like for so many parents in Ukraine.

Makoviy said the idea came to her as she and her husband realized the roads out of Kyiv were too congested and they'd be better off remaining in their own apartment until the shelling subsided. Before that, she said she prepared note cards with the same sorts of details that she planned to pin to Vira's clothing or slip them in her pockets.

But then, Makoviy said, "I realized that if we get into danger, or she gets injured, it could be taken off of her. So that's why I decided to write the information about her on her skin."

Makoviy also wrote out this card with her and her husband's contact information and planned to pin to Vira's clothing. Aleksandra Makoviy hide caption

Makoviy also wrote out this card with her and her husband's contact information and planned to pin to Vira's clothing.

"We are a family of artists and she is used to playing with paint and markers ...so she thought we were playing," Makoviy explained.

Vira often asks Makoviy to draw on her hands and arms, and the 33-year-old mom happily complies with the girl's requests for bright suns and stars to be drawn on her bare skin.

So, when on the morning of Feb. 24, Makoviy stripped the girl down to her diapers and began scribbling on her back, it seemed like fun.

When it was over, Vira asked for a peek and Makoviy showed the toddler a photo she'd taken on her phone.

"And when she saw it, she said, ah, ABC!," Makoviy said.

In the end, the family sequestered themselves in the apartment for five days. That's how long it took for the roads to clear, according to Makoviy. During that time, she was a ball of nerves. The constant explosions and images of violence on television and social media, coupled with the uncertainty of what could happen next, were almost too much to bear.

"I couldn't sleep or even drink water ... I suffered no physical injuries but mentally, I think I have post traumatic disorder," she revealed.

Through it all, though, Vira remained unaware of the horrific situation, Makoviy said.

"I am glad she doesn't understand because she is so young," she noted, adding that if the child were a year or two older, she'd likely be scarred for life. "She feels the excitement, and that adults are sad and nervous, but she can't really understand why."

"I just want to let everyone know Vira and I are safe. We managed to cross the border, and now we're in the South of France," Makoviy wrote on Instagram April 5 along with this photo. Aleksandra Makoviy hide caption

"I just want to let everyone know Vira and I are safe. We managed to cross the border, and now we're in the South of France," Makoviy wrote on Instagram April 5 along with this photo.

Volunteers in Poland and Moldova helped the family get to the south of France, where they're currently living.

Touching on the public response to the Instagram posts, Makoviy said, "It is really painful that Ukrainian parents have to go through this."

Earlier this week, Makoviy posted another, much different picture of her daughter on Instagram.

In this image, Vira is wearing a pink "pre-owned dress" with a matching pink tutu and pink sneakers, Makoviy wrote. The girl is crouched down, a look of concentration on her face as she reaches out for a vase of bright yellow flowers.

Excerpt from:

A Ukrainian mom scribbled her contact info on her daughter's back as the war erupted - NPR

In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine and images of the devastation wrought there flooded the news, Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive of the facial recognition company Clearview AI, began thinking about how he could get involved.

He believed his companys technology could offer clarity in complex situations in the war.

I remember seeing videos of captured Russian soldiers and Russia claiming they were actors, Mr. Ton-That said. I thought if Ukrainians could use Clearview, they could get more information to verify their identities.

In early March, he reached out to people who might help him contact the Ukrainian government. One of Clearviews advisory board members, Lee Wolosky, a lawyer who has worked for the Biden administration, was meeting with Ukrainian officials and offered to deliver a message.

Mr. Ton-That drafted a letter explaining that his app can instantly identify someone just from a photo and that the police and federal agencies in the United States used it to solve crimes. That feature has brought Clearview scrutiny over concerns about privacy and questions about racism and other biases within artificial-intelligence systems.

The tool, which can identify a suspect caught on surveillance video, could be valuable to a country under attack, Mr. Ton-That wrote. He said the tool could identify people who might be spies, as well as deceased people, by comparing their faces against Clearviews database of 20 billion faces from the public web, including from Russian social sites such as VKontakte.

Mr. Ton-That decided to offer Clearviews services to Ukraine for free, as reported earlier by Reuters. Now, less than a month later, the New York-based Clearview has created more than 200 accounts for users at five Ukrainian government agencies, which have conducted more than 5,000 searches. Clearview has also translated its app into Ukrainian.

Its been an honor to help Ukraine, said Mr. Ton-That, who provided emails from officials from three agencies in Ukraine, confirming that they had used the tool. It has identified dead soldiers and prisoners of war, as well as travelers in the country, confirming the names on their official IDs. The fear of spies and saboteurs in the country has led to heightened paranoia.

According to one email, Ukraines national police obtained two photos of dead Russian soldiers, which have been viewed by The New York Times, on March 21. One dead man had identifying patches on his uniform, but the other did not, so the ministry ran his face through Clearviews app.

The app surfaced photos of a similar-looking man, a 33-year-old from Ulyanovsk who wore a paratrooper uniform and held a gun in his profile photos on Odnoklassniki, a Russian social media site. According to an official from the national police, attempts were made to contact the mans relatives in Russia to inform them of his death, but there was no response.

Identifying dead soldiers and notifying their families is part of a campaign, according to a Telegram post by the Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov, to break through to the Russian public the cost of the conflict and to dispel the myth of a special operation in which there are no conscripts and no one dies, he wrote.

Images from conflict zones, of slaughtered civilians and soldiers left behind on city streets turned battlefields, have become more widely and instantaneously available in the social media era. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has shown graphic images of attacks on his country to world leaders in making his case for more international aid. But beyond conveying a visceral sense of war, those kinds of images can now offer something else: a chance for facial recognition technology to play a significant role.

Critics warn, however, that the tech companies could be taking advantage of a crisis to expand with little privacy oversight, and that any mistakes made by the software or those using it could have dire consequences in a war zone.

Evan Greer, a deputy director for the digital rights group Fight for the Future, is opposed to any use of facial recognition technology, and said she believed that it should be banned worldwide because governments had used it to persecute minority groups and suppress dissent. Russia and China, among others, have deployed advanced facial recognition in cameras in cities.

War zones are often used as testing grounds not just for weapons but surveillance tools that are later deployed on civilian populations or used for law enforcement or crowd control purposes, Ms. Greer said. Companies like Clearview are eager to exploit the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine to normalize the use of their harmful and invasive software.

Clearview is facing several lawsuits in the United States, and its use of peoples photos without their consent has been declared illegal in Canada, Britain, France, Australia and Italy. It faces fines in Britain and Italy.

April 9, 2022, 2:20 a.m. ET

Ms. Greer added: We already know that authoritarian states like Russia use facial recognition surveillance to crack down on protests and dissent. Expanding the use of facial recognition doesnt hurt authoritarians like Putin it helps them.

Facial recognition has advanced in power and accuracy in recent years, and is becoming more accessible to the public.

While Clearview AI says it makes its database available only to law enforcement, other facial recognition services that search the web for matches, including PimEyes and FindClone, are available to anyone willing to pay for them. PimEyes will surface public photos on the internet, while FindClone searches photos scraped from the Russian social media site VKontakte.

Facial recognition vendors are choosing sides in the conflict. Giorgi Gobronidze, a professor in Tbilisi, Georgia, who bought PimEyes in December, said he had barred Russia from using the site after the invasion started, citing concerns it would be used to identify Ukrainians.

No Russian customers are allowed to use the service now, Mr. Gobronidze said. We dont want our service to be used for war crimes.

Groups like Bellingcat, the Dutch investigative site, have used facial recognition sites for reports on the conflict and on Russias military operations.

Missile attack. A missile strike at a crowded train station in eastern Ukraine killed at least 50 and wounded nearly 100, according to Ukrainian officials, who blamed Russia for hitting a major evacuation point for those trying to flee before an expected stepped-up offensive.

In the city of Mariupol. More than 5,000 people have died in the southeastern citysince the start of the war, according to the citys mayor. President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russia could try to stage scenes to make it look as though Ukrainian forces had killed civilians.

Aric Toler, research director at Bellingcat, said his preferred face search engine was FindClone. He described a three-hour surveillance video that surfaced this week, said to be from a courier service in Belarus, showing men in military uniforms packing up materials, including TVs, car batteries and an electric scooter, for shipping.

Mr. Toler said FindClone allowed him to identify several of the men as Russian soldiers sending loot to their homes from Ukraine.

As Ukraine and Russia fight an information war over what motivated the invasion and how it is going, journalists like Mr. Toler sometimes play the role of arbiter for their audiences.

Mr. Federov, Ukraines deputy prime minister, tweeted a still from the same surveillance tape, of one of the soldiers at the courier service counter. Mr. Federov claimed the man had been identified as an officer of Russian special forces who had committed atrocities in Bucha and was sending all the stolen items to his family.

Mr. Federov added, We will find every killer.

The technology has potential beyond identifying casualties or tracking certain units. Peter Singer, a security scholar at New America, a think tank in Washington, said the increasing availability of data about people and their movements would make it easier to track down individuals responsible for war crimes. But it could also make it hard for civilians to lie low in tense environments.

Ukraine is the first major conflict that weve seen the use of facial recognition technology in such scale, but it is far from the last, Mr. Singer said. It will be increasingly hard for future warriors to keep their identity secret, just as for regular civilians walking down your own city streets.

In a world of more and more data being gathered, everyone leaves a trail of dots that can be connected, he added.

That trail is not just online. Drone footage, satellite images, and photos and videos captured by people in Ukraine are all playing a role in discerning what is happening there.

Mr. Toler of Bellingcat said the technology was not perfect. Its easy to misfire that goes without saying, he said. But people are more right than wrong with this. They have figured out how to corroborate identifications.

Faces can look similar, so secondary information, in the form of an identifying mark, a tattoo or clothing, is important to confirm a match. Whether that will happen in a tense, wartime situation is an open question.

Mr. Toler is not sure how much longer he will have access to his preferred facial recognition tool. Because FindClone is based in Russia, it has been subject to sanctions, he said.

I still have about 30 days left on my service, so Im desperately trying to add more juice to my account, Mr. Toler said. I have a friend in Kyrgyzstan. Im trying to use her bank card to re-up my account.

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How Facial Recognition Is Being Used in the Ukraine War - The New York Times

Today, were sharing more about cyberattacks weve seen from a Russian nation-state actor targeting Ukraine and steps weve taken to disrupt it.

We recently observed attacks targeting Ukrainian entities from Strontium, a Russian GRU-connected actor we have tracked for years. This week, we were able to disrupt some of Strontiums attacks on targets in Ukraine. On Wednesday April 6th, we obtained a court order authorizing us to take control of seven internet domains Strontium was using to conduct these attacks. We have since re-directed these domains to a sinkhole controlled by Microsoft, enabling us to mitigate Strontiums current use of these domains and enable victim notifications.

Strontium was using this infrastructure to target Ukrainian institutions including media organizations. It was also targeting government institutions and think tanks in the United States and the European Union involved in foreign policy. We believe Strontium was attempting to establish long-term access to the systems of its targets, provide tactical support for the physical invasion and exfiltrate sensitive information. We have notified Ukraines government about the activity we detected and the action weve taken.

This disruption is part of an ongoing long-term investment, started in 2016, to take legal and technical action to seize infrastructure being used by Strontium. We have established a legal process that enables us to obtain rapid court decisions for this work. Prior to this week, we had taken action through this process 15 times to seize control of more than 100 Strontium controlled domains.

The Strontium attacks are just a small part of the activity we have seen in Ukraine. Before the Russian invasion, our teams began working around the clock to help organizations in Ukraine, including government agencies, defend against an onslaught of cyberwarfare that has escalated since the invasion began and has continued relentlessly. Since then, we have observed nearly all of Russias nation-state actors engaged in the ongoing full-scale offensive against Ukraines government and critical infrastructure, and we continue to work closely with government and organizations of all kinds in Ukraine to help them defend against this onslaught. In the coming weeks we expect to provide a more comprehensive look at the scope of the cyberwar in Ukraine.

Tags: cyberattacks, cybersecurity, cyberwar, Russia, strontium, Ukraine

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Disrupting cyberattacks targeting Ukraine - Microsoft On the Issues - Microsoft

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While a steady stream of disturbing news continues to come from Ukraine, new works of fiction highlight the ways in which lives there have been transformed by conflict. On this weeks podcast, the critic Jennifer Wilson talks about two books, including the story collection Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky.

Belorusets has been compared to Gogol in these stories, Wilson says. Theres a certain kind of supernatural quality to them. I think anyone looking to these books for a play-by-play of the conflict is going to be disappointed for that reason, but I think delighted in other ways.

Ben McGrath visits the podcast to talk about his new book, Riverman: An American Odyssey, which tells the story of Dick Conant, a troubled and charismatic man who disappeared while on a canoe trip from New York to Florida. Conant was in his 60s when McGrath met him, and had spent many years questing on various waterways.

What he learned was that there wasnt really anything he was going to find out about himself that was going to improve things, and that the secret to finding happiness was to turn his lens outward, McGrath says. Rather than, in the Thoreauvian model, retreating to Walden Pond and staring into his reflection, he decided to go out into the world and to keep seeing new places and meeting new people; and by doing that, keep himself sufficiently occupied that he didnt have to struggle too much with worrying about who he was and what his own problems were.

Also on this weeks episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the literary world; and Lauren Christensen and MJ Franklin talk about what theyve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this weeks What Were Reading:

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Reviews podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Fiction About Lives in Ukraine - The New York Times