- Why Egypt and other Arab countries are unwilling to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza ABC News
- Egyptian President Sisi says forced displacement of Palestinians by Israel ‘cannot be implemented’ Al Jazeera English
- Why Egypt and Jordan are unwilling to host Palestinian refugees Firstpost
- How Arab World’s Israel Fear Is Forcing Them To Reject Palestinian Refugees From Gaza | Explained Hindustan Times
- Egyptian president ‘rejects’ effort to push Palestinians to Egypt, warns it could jeopardize peace with Israel Fox News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: refugees
Despite Biden’s Program, Some Ukrainian Refugees Fleeing War End Up Homeless – The New York Times
- Despite Biden’s Program, Some Ukrainian Refugees Fleeing War End Up Homeless The New York Times
- Surrounded and outgunned, Ukraine’s tank crews prepare for battle of Bakhmut The Guardian
- Michigan native serving on front lines of war in Ukraine, telling stories through photography WDIV ClickOnDetroit
- How a Ukrainian Soldier’s Final Act of Defiance Made Him a Hero The Wall Street Journal
- A volunteer soldier on the front line in Ukraine: ‘Fear is the most precious thing I have lost in war’ EL PAÍS USA
- View Full Coverage on Google News
U.S. launches pilot program to allow private sponsorship of refugees from around the world
Washington — The State Department on Thursday announced a pilot program that will allow groups of private American citizens and permanent residents to financially sponsor the resettlement of refugees fleeing war and violence across the world.
The Biden administration initiative, called Welcome Corps, could pave the way for a seismic shift in U.S. refugee policy, as most refugees brought to the U.S. for the past decades have been resettled by nine nonprofit organizations that receive federal funding.
Under the program, modeled after a long-standing system in Canada, groups of at least five U.S.-based individuals could have the opportunity to sponsor refugees if they raise $2,275 per refugee, pass background checks and submit a plan about how they will assist the newcomers.
Approved private sponsors will play the role of traditional resettlement agencies for at least 90 days after a refugee’s arrival, helping the newcomers access housing and other basic necessities, such as food, medical services, education and public benefits for which they qualify.
During the first phase of the program, State Department officials will match approved sponsors with refugees overseas who already have been cleared to come to the U.S. In mid-2023, officials plan to allow prospective sponsors to identify refugees abroad whom they wish to assist.
In a statement Thursday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the Welcome Corps initiative will help the U.S. increase refugee admissions, calling it “the boldest innovation in refugee resettlement in four decades.” CBS News reported on the program’s launch Wednesday.
“It is designed to strengthen and expand the capacity of the [U.S. refugee program] by harnessing the energy and talents of Americans from all walks of life desiring to serve as private sponsors — ranging from members of faith and civic groups, veterans, diaspora communities, businesses, colleges and universities, and more,” Blinken said.
HAZEM BADER/AFP via Getty Images
The State Department said it hopes to recruit 10,000 private sponsors to resettle at least 5,000 refugees during the first year of the Welcome Corps. Organizations with experience resettling refugees will be charged with overseeing the sponsor application process, providing sponsors training and resources and monitoring the progress of groups sponsoring refugees.
The Welcome Corps initiative is the latest Biden administration effort to expand legal immigration channels for refugees and migrants with family members and others in the U.S. willing to financially sponsor them.
In late 2021, the State Department allowed “sponsor circles” of at least five private individuals to sponsor some of the tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees relocated to the U.S. following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
Then, in early 2022, officials launched a program to allow Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion of their homeland to come to the U.S. under the humanitarian parole authority if they had U.S.-based sponsors. More than 100,000 Ukrainians have arrived in the U.S. under the policy, federal statistics show.
Officials have since expanded that approach, allowing U.S.-based individuals to sponsor the entry of citizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela as part of an effort to deter migrants from these countries from crossing the southern border illegally. Like Ukrainians, migrants from these countries will be allowed to live and work legally in the U.S. on a temporary basis through the parole authority.
Unlike those arriving under the parole authority, the refugees who will arrive under the sponsorship initiative announced Thursday will be eligible for permanent legal status and ultimately, U.S. citizenship, since they will be processed through the traditional refugee program.
Formally created in 1980, the U.S. refugee program has granted a safe haven to more than 3 million refugees found to have fled armed conflicts, ethnic persecution and other forms violence. Refugees undergo interviews, security screenings and medical checks as part of a years-long process before coming to the U.S.
While President Biden vowed to rebuild the U.S. refugee system, which was crippled by the COVID-19 pandemic and drastic Trump-era cuts, his administration has struggled to return refugee admissions to pre-pandemic levels and to meet his lofty resettlement goals.
In fiscal year 2022, the U.S. admitted 25,465 refugees, using only 20% of 125,000 refugee spots allocated by Mr. Biden. In the first three months of fiscal year 2023, for which Mr. Biden again set a goal of welcoming up to 125,000 refugees, the U.S. resettled fewer than 7,000 refugees, State Department figures show.
GUERCHOM NDEBO/AFP via Getty Images
While the pandemic temporarily suspended refugee admissions and slowed refuge interviews, the program was scaled back dramatically under policy directives issued by President Trump, who argued that refugees were economic, national security and cultural threats to the U.S.
The Trump administration dramatically slashed refugee admissions, allocating an all-time low of 15,000 spots in fiscal year 2021. It also restricted the categories of those who could be resettled, and tried to give states and cities a veto on refugee resettlement. The restrictions and record-low ceilings led the organizations that resettle refugees to lay off personnel and close offices across the country.
As the Biden administration has struggled to rebuild the U.S. refugee system, the number of people displaced by violence around the globe has surpassed 100 million, more than at any other time in history, according to the United Nations.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of the main U.S. resettlement groups, praised the private sponsorship program for relying on a “forward-thinking approach to leveraging the generosity of the American spirit.” But she urged the Biden administration to also prioritize speeding up refugee processing and increasing admissions.
“At a time of unprecedented global displacement, there are far too many vulnerable children and families depending on the full restoration of our nation’s humanitarian leadership,” Vignarajah said.
Russia strikes Ukraine housing; detains refugees at border
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian missiles hit apartment buildings in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Thursday, killing at least seven people, with at least five others missing, in a region that Moscow has illegally annexed, a local official said.
Two strikes damaged more than 40 buildings hours after Ukraine’s president announced that his military had retaken three more villages in another of the four regions annexed by Russia, Moscow’s latest battlefield reversal.
The Zaporizhzhia regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, who provided the casualty figure, said more than 20 people were rescued from the multistory apartment buildings. Rescuers who earlier took a 3-year-old girl to a hospital continued to search the rubble early Friday. Starukh wrote on Telegram that Russian forces used S-300 missiles in the attacks.
Russia has been reported to have converted the S-300 from its original use as a long-range antiaircraft weapon into a missile for ground attacks because of a shortage of other, more suitable weapons.
“Absolute meanness. Absolute evil,” Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskky said of the attacks, in a video speech to the inaugural summit of the European Political Community in Prague. “There have already been thousands of manifestations of such evil. Unfortunately, there may be thousands more.”
Zaporizhzhia is one of the four regions of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed as Russian territory in violation of international laws. The region is home to a sprawling nuclear power plant under Russian occupation; the city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, announced Thursday after meeting with Zelenskyy in Kyiv that the U.N.’s atomic energy watchdog will increase the number of inspectors at the Zaporizhzhia plant from two to four.
Grossi talked with Ukrainian officials — and later will confer in Moscow with Russian officials — efforts to set up a protection zone around the nuclear power station. Grossi said mines appear to have been planted around the perimeter of the plant, which has been damaged during the war and caused worries of a possible radiation disaster. Zelenskyy said Russia has stationed as many as 500 fighters at the plant.
Putin signed a decree Wednesday declaring that Russia was taking over the six-reactor facility, a move Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry called a criminal act that was “null and void.”
Ukraine’s state nuclear operator, Energoatom, said it would continue to operate the plant, whose last operating reactor was shut down Sept. 11 because of frequent outages of external power needed to run critical safety systems. Transmission lines to the plant have been repeatedly shelled, and Grossi on Thursday reported shelling in an industrial area close to the plant’s access road.
Outside the battlefront, Russian authorities detained several hundred Ukrainians trying to flee Russian-occupied areas Wednesday near the Russian-Estonian border, according to Ukrainian Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets. Citing the Estonian Ministry of Internal Affairs, he wrote on Facebook that Russian forces took the Ukrainians on trucks to an unknown destination.
Most of the detained Ukrainians had fled through Russia and Crimea and were seeking to enter the European Union — Estonia is a member state — or find a way to return home, Lubinets wrote.
Russian has forced thousands of Ukrainians into “filtration camps” to determine their loyalties. Zelenskyy said Thursday more than 1.6 million Ukrainians have been deported to Russia.
The precise borders of the areas in Ukraine that Moscow is claiming remain unclear. Putin has vowed to defend Russia’s territory — including the annexed Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine — with any means at his military’s disposal, including nuclear weapons.
Ukrainian forces are seizing back villages in Kherson in humiliating battlefield defeats for Russian forces that have badly dented the image of a powerful Russian military. Ukrainian officials said Thursday they have retaken 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) of territory, including 29 settlements, in the Kherson region since Oct. 1.
Ukraine also was pressing a counteroffensive in the Donetsk region, which Moscow-backed separatists have partially controlled since 2014 but which remains contested despite Putin’s proclaimed annexation.
In battered Chasiv Yar, a city in the Donetsk region 7 miles (12 kilometers) from heavy fighting, the human impact became clear as retirees waited to collect their pension checks at a post office.
“We are hoping for victory of the Ukrainian army,” Vera Ivanovna, 81, a retired English and German teacher, said as artillery booms echoed. “We lived in independent Ukraine as you are living in America. We also want to live how you are living.”
At least two Russian strikes have hit Chasiv Yar in recent days, with one person reportedly buried under the rubble of a dormitory. More than 40 people were killed in July when Russian rockets struck a residential building.
Russia said it had seized the Donetsk region village of Zaitsevo. The governor of the neighboring Luhansk region said Ukrainian forces had recaptured the village of Hrekivka. Neither battlefield report could be independently confirmed.
The U.S. government, meanwhile, sent its international development chief to Kyiv on Thursday, the highest-ranking American official to visit Ukraine since Russia illegally annexed the four regions. The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, met with government officials and residents and said the U.S. would provide an additional $55 million to repair heating pipes and other equipment.
USAID said the United States had delivered $9.89 billion in aid to Ukraine since February. A spending bill that U.S. President Joe Biden signed last week promises another $12.3 billion for Ukraine’s military and public services needs.
“This war will be won on the battlefield, but it is also being won in Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to strengthen its democracy and its economy,” Power told reporters at Kyiv’s train station.
She said Ukraine’s success as a democratic country with a modern economy tackling corruption incensed Putin.
The European Union on Thursday froze the assets of an additional 37 people and entities tied to Russia’s war in Ukraine, bringing the total of EU blacklist targets to 1,351. The newly sanctioned included officials involved in last week’s illegal Russian annexations and sham referendums. The latest sanctions also widen trade bans against Russia and prepare for a price cap on Russian oil.
At the United Nations in New York, Russia called for a secret ballot next week on a Western-backed resolution that would condemn Russia’s annexation of the four Ukrainian regions and demand that Moscow reverse its actions. Russia apparently hopes to get more support from the 193 nations in the General Assembly if their votes aren’t made public.
Russia vetoed a legally binding Security Council resolution on Sept. 30 to condemn annexation referendums in the four Ukrainian regions as illegal. The General Assembly’s resolutions aren’t legally binding.
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Associated Press writers Hanna Arhirova in Ukraine and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
D.C. lightning strike survivor had been fundraising for refugees
That Thursday happened to be her 28th birthday, her family said. So while Amber waited for her husband to pick her up for a celebratory dinner, she sought shelter once again from the same tree, huddling with three others under its outstretched branches, according to her family and authorities.
One was Brooks Lambertson, a young and rising bank vice president from Los Angeles. There was Donna Mueller, 75, a retired teacher, and her husband James Mueller, 76, who came from Wisconsin to Washington to celebrate their 56th wedding anniversary. And there was Amber, a young woman from California whose travels in the Middle East teaching English had kindled a desire to help those stricken by war and poverty in that region.
They were strangers brought to that precise spot on the east side of Lafayette Square, at that precise moment for different reasons — business, vacation, a passion to help.
Just before 7 p.m., it was at that spot — under a leafy tree about 100 feet from a statue of President Andrew Jackson — that lightning struck.
Experts recorded a lightning flash in the area as six individual surges of electricity that hit the same point in the space of half a second. If the electricity struck the tree first, experts said, it would have sent hundreds of millions of volts coursing through it before passing into and over the bodies of those gathered beneath it.
“It shook the whole area,” an eyewitness later recounted. “Literally like a bomb went off, that’s how it sounded.”
The strike left all four grievously wounded. Secret Service and U.S. Park Police — who keep the park in front of the White House under constant patrol — ran to help.
On Friday morning, police announced the elderly couple from Wisconsin had died. Later that night, the banker from Los Angeles also passed away, police said.
Amber would be the sole survivor.
The lightning strike stopped Amber’s heart, said her brother Robert F. Escudero. Two nurses, who happened to be visiting the White House on vacation and saw the Secret Service running to help, immediately started giving her CPR and managed to restore her pulse, he said.
The lightning caused severe burns along the left side of her body and arm, her family said. That’s the side her bag was on, carrying the iPad she used to sign people up for refugee donations.
Her parents rushed to Washington from California, and her mother has documented her fight to recover on Facebook. The lightning strike left Amber struggling at first to breathe, wrote her mother, Julie Escudero. But by Friday, nurses were able to take her off the ventilator.
The lightning also damaged her short-term memory. She was scared and confused about what happened to her. “We definitely don’t want her to remember the incident right now,” her mother wrote on Facebook. But every time she wakes up, her mother wrote, she asks what happened to her, is she going to die, and will she be able to walk? Her family said one thing she has been particularly worried about is her work fundraising for refugees.
She had majored in international studies in college and traveled to Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, according to her brother and her work profile. She spent a year teaching English in Jordan and soon after began fundraising for nonprofits. She started working in Washington last year for a group called Threshold Giving and focused especially on fundraising for the International Rescue Committee, a global relief agency.
“The first thing she told me when we FaceTimed is, ‘I need to get back to work on Saturday,’” Robert Escudero said. “She’s worried about raising money for the refugee kids. She asked me, ‘Who’s going to get the money for them if I’m not out there?’”
A friend started a GoFundMe page to raise money for her medical bills. So her brother said he promised Amber he’d work with Threshold Giving in the coming days to also create a way for people who learn about her survival story to donate to refugees.
The one thing her family has not yet broached with her is the fate of the others who were with her that night under the tree.
“She is starting to realize there were others and she wants to know how they are doing and what she did wrong,” her mother said in a Facebook post on Sunday. “She cares so much for others, it will be hard for her.”
On Sunday, many signs of the fatal lightning strike were still visible at Lafayette Square.
A tree bore streaks of charred bark, cracks and a large gash in the main trunk where the wood remained warped like a bruise. Folks passing through Lafayette Square paused at the tree to stare at the scars.
One of them was Cal Vargas, a childhood friend of Lambertson, who died. He brought a wreath and bouquet of white flowers to lay at the base of the tree. Vargas and Lambertson had been friends since kindergarten and grew up together in Folsom, Calif., where they shared a passion for sports and the Sacramento Kings.
“He was an amazing individual,” Vargas said quietly. “Always had a smile on his face, always looked at the bright side of things.”
Earlier on the day the lightning struck, Lambertson, 29, had arrived in Washington on a business trip from Los Angeles. He was passing time before a dinner reservation when he got caught in the storm, Vargas said.
In a phone interview, Lambertson’s father, whom The Washington Post is not identifying by name to protect his privacy, said his son was “probably the best human being that I know.” He said his son’s kindness, generosity and humility “showed up in everything he did, in all his interactions with people.”
He worked at City National Bank as a vice president managing sponsorships for the company. He had done marketing for the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, and graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, according to a statement from the bank.
The elderly Wisconsin couple who also died that day were celebrating their 56th wedding anniversary, family members said.
Donna Mueller, 75, and her husband, James Mueller, 76, had been high school sweethearts before marrying. James had owned a drywall business for decades while his wife worked as a teacher, according to one of their daughters-in-law, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her privacy.
The couple lived in Janesville, Wis., about 70 miles west of Milwaukee, and had five grown children, 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. “Both would do anything for their family and friends,” relatives said in a statement.
The odds of someone being killed by lightning are extremely rare. In the past decade, only an average of 23 people in the United States have died each year.
Multiple fatalities are even more rare. Before last week’s strike, the last time three people died in a single incident was more than 18 years ago on June 27, 2004, when three people in Georgia were struck under trees at Bedford Dam State Park, said John Jensenius, a specialist at the National Lightning Safety Council.
Because lightning tends to strike tall objects, experts warn that taking shelter under a tree during a thunderstorm is highly dangerous. When a tree is hit by the electrical charge, moisture and sap in the tree easily conduct the electricity, carrying it to the ground around the tree, experts say.
“When lightning strikes a tree, the charge doesn’t penetrate deep into the ground, but rather spreads out along the ground surface,” Jensenius said. “That makes the entire area around a tree dangerous, and anyone standing under or near a tree is vulnerable.”
For that and other reasons, Amber’s survival has felt miraculous, her family said. If it hadn’t happened in right in front of the White House where Secret Service agents are stationed. If the two nurses who revived her hadn’t been on vacation and seen what happened.
On Saturday night, Amber was finally able to take a few steps on her own, her family said. She was supposed to start a master’s program in international relations this fall at Johns Hopkins University — the latest step in her work trying to help refugees and those suffering abroad.
“She’s an amazing, strong-willed person. And she has such a heart for others,” her brother said. “So the goal now is to get her walking again by the time classes start in a few weeks.”
Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
End ‘double standards’ on refugees, UN expert urges Poland | Migration News
Welcome for Ukrainians fleeing war in stark contrast with Warsaw’s treatment of other migrants and refugees, UN special rapporteur says.
Polish authorities must stop locking up migrants near the Belarus border and put an end to the “very different” treatment of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian refugees, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on migrants’ rights has said.
Felipe Gonzalez Morales on Thursday praised the actions of Polish authorities and citizens who have given protection and assistance to more than two million Ukrainian refugees and lodged them in their homes since the start of Russia’s invasion in February.
But non-Ukrainian nationals fleeing that country have faced difficulties obtaining residence permits and proper shelter and have not enjoyed the same legal protections, he said.
📢@UNSR_Migration 🙏#Poland for warm welcome of #Ukraine #refugees, but access to residence and shelter for #migrants from other countries is starkly different. To avoid loss of life, #EU, #Poland & #Belarus must stop #pushbacks & protect human rights 👉https://t.co/wJ1StvI15W pic.twitter.com/QIuVdq6I1a
— UN Special Procedures (@UN_SPExperts) July 28, 2022
Some people fleeing the war have been from third countries, often in the Middle East, Asia or Africa, who had been studying or working in Ukraine at the time of the invasion.
“I note with concern that this double standard approach has led to feelings of being discriminated among third country nationals,” Morales said in a statement following a trip to Poland and Belarus on July 12-25.
There was no immediate comment on Morales’s statement from Poland’s government or the Polish border guard service.
Belarus border crisis
As well as the fallout from the war in Ukraine, Poland has faced attempts by tens of thousands of migrants and refugees since mid-2021 to cross its border with Belarus and enter the European Union.
The crisis prompted Poland to set up an emergency zone, build a steel border barrier and introduce a campaign of pushbacks. Meanwhile, estimates suggested at least 20 migrants and refugees have died in the area’s freezing forests and bogs.
Morales said these migrants and refugees, many of whom are from the Middle East and Afghanistan, were “routinely” being locked up in de facto detention centres in Poland near the border, including children, in violation of international humanitarian law. He said he had personally visited one of the centres and had seen dozens of family members with children lodged there.
“I also called on Poland to use migratory detention as a measure of last resort to discontinue the practice of migratory detention of children,” he told a virtual news briefing.
“I urge relevant authorities to immediately release unaccompanied children, children with their families, pregnant women and individuals with mental conditions into open facilities,” he said.
Poland and other EU member states have accused Belarus of engineering the crisis by flying people in from the Middle East and pushing them to attempt to illegally cross into the bloc in revenge for Western sanctions imposed on Minsk after a disputed August 2020 election that handed longtime President Alexander Lukashenko a sixth term in office.
Minsk has denied those allegations.
Inside a Russian center for Ukrainian refugees
But with this safe haven being inside Russia, they are hesitant to share those stories.
Alexey Nechipurenko, 45, was maimed as Russian forces entered the southern port city of Mariupol. His foot was shot to pieces and his wife was killed before his eyes, he tells CNN.
But, as a Russian doctor tends his wounds, he insists Ukraine, not Russia, is to blame for his suffering.
“The Russians were just beginning to enter the city. Therefore, they just couldn’t actually have been on the side where we were,” he told CNN.
The basketball court shelter is in Taganrog, southern Russia, just 69 miles from Mariupol where Ukrainian soldiers and civilians held out for weeks in the Azovstal steel plant before Russia took full control of the city.
CNN was given exclusive access to the center set up to process some of the more than 2 million refugees estimated to have poured onto Russian soil since the invasion began on February 24.
Human rights groups say Ukrainians are being “filtered” before being taken to the temporary shelters in Russia and any suspected of posing a threat are not allowed through.
And those who passed Russia’s first test and made it to Taganrog are reluctant to say too much.
“Now I’m here [in Russia] so please don’t press me, said a 30-year-old man from Mariupol who asked not to be identified and only wanted to be recorded talking to CNN with his back to the camera.
“I didn’t see who killed my relatives,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re just a casualty of this conflict,” he added.
Dmitry Vaschenko, an official with Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations in Taganrog, said housing would be given to Ukrainians, who were also free to seek work and send their children to school.
“When hostilities end in the future, all these arrivals can make the decision to return to their homeland. Whoever wishes to remain in Russia, the Russian government takes such an obligation — they will receive a full range of social services and are protected,” he said.
When asked about the process to allow refugees into Russia, he said there were “filtration points” on the border.
“They are checking people who appear aggressively disposed towards the Russian Federation,” he said. “Filtering occurs precisely upon arrival, there are no ‘mass camps.’ They are border-crossing points, nothing more.”
Across the gymnasium sits another refugee from Mariupol — Irina, who fled with her nine-year-old son Rostislav and their cat Bolik. She said their city is in ruins but chooses not to apportion blame.
“I don’t want to get messed up in all of that. This side’s not right, and that side’s not right. Both sides are guilty. Both sides have shelled us. Both have killed us,” she said.
Different country, different story from refugees
The only safe route out of Mariupol for Irina was to Russia, but she hopes to move on to a third country.
Many Ukrainians have made it through Russia to Estonia, once a part of the Soviet Union, now independent and a member country of the European Union.
On board the Isabelle, a giant passenger ferry now offering shelter in Tallinn, refugees talk more freely, and tell CNN how they made it through and out from Russia and its system of filtration camps.
Daniil, 22, who feared being conscripted to fight against Ukraine, said he pretended he wanted to make Russia his permanent home. He said he was stripped and had his tattoos inspected.
“They checked if I was involved in any way with the Ukrainian army and if I know anyone who is serving there,” said Daniil, who also used to live in Mariupol.
“They asked if I know when Vladimir Putin’s birthday is, as ‘He is your president now,’ they said.
“I told them I did not know and they confronted me about my lack of knowledge,” Daniil continued. “They said ‘You must know it.’ I had to tell them that I did not have the opportunity to find that out yet but reassured them that I will learn it. So, they let me through.”
Stanislav and Vitalina, a young married couple, had thought their small city of Rubizhne might escape the worst of the war as they believed it was not strategically important. But as the battle for nearby Severodonetsk intensified in early May, the fighting came to their door and the town was occupied.
“There was no possible option to get to the Ukrainian side from our town. No one would dare to cross through an active battlefield,” Stanislav said.
Vitalina added, “For us the main thing was to save ourselves and our family, that is why, unfortunately, we had to go through Russia.”
The couple decided to pretend they were on their way to visit relatives.
“We had to answer various questions about our political views, if we support our army and why we are not supporting our army,” Vitalina said.
“During the questioning they took my phone and had it in their hands throughout the whole time, they went through my bank accounts, personal photos, and messages. Those are my personal things, and they went through all of it.”
With tears in her eyes, she talks of having to hide her hatred towards Russia while there. Now in Estonia, she reveals her true feelings.
“They tortured our people there. They kicked people out of their homes or simply did not even let us have any water. They told us that was the payback for eight years of their suffering and now it is our turn to suffer,” she said, referring to the long-running and deadly fight in the east of Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces.
It wasn’t just the people who suffered, Vitalina said.
“Russians determined that dogs would bark at them and give away their positions, so they decided to kill all the pets,” she said.
“We would tie up our dog and put a muzzle on it, but still they killed my dog … My father confronted the soldiers who killed our pet and in return they opened fire. My dad luckily managed to get behind the house in time.”
The couple’s parents are still in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Vitalina said her father has been shot and injured and her grandfather is too infirm to leave.
They want to go back to them, to return home, but there is little hope for that right now.
“My soul longs to return home, to my family. But I understand the realities,” Vitalina said. “Everything is destroyed, there is no work, no food. Everything costs five times its original price. People are not able to survive.”
Calls for a probe after 23 people die in attempt to enter Melilla | Refugees News
Human rights groups have called for an investigation after at least 23 people died while attempting to scale a border fence between between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla in northern Africa.
Authorities in Morocco and Spain said the individuals died as a result of a “stampede” with about 2,000 people trying to climb the iron fence on Friday and some falling as they tried to do so.
The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) on Saturday shared videos of the aftermath of the attempted mass crossing, showing dozens of people lying by the border fence, some bleeding and many apparently lifeless as Moroccan security forces stood over them.
In one of the clips, a Moroccan security officer appeared to use a baton to strike a person lying on the ground.
The AMDH called for “comprehensive, quick and serious” investigation into Friday’s events and said many of those wounded “were left there without help for hours, which increased the number of deaths”.
The group also gave a higher death toll than the figure provided by Moroccan Interior Ministry, saying 29 people were killed, but the figure could not be immediately confirmed.
Five rights organisations in Morocco and APDHA, a human rights group based in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia, also backed the call for a probe. They urged authorities not to bury those killed until after formal investigations.
There was no immediate comment from authorities in Morocco on AMDH’s allegations, but a unnamed Moroccan official told the Reuters news agency that security personnel had not used undue force during Friday’s events.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez meanwhile condemned the attempted mass crossing as a “violent assault” and an “attack on the territorial integrity” of Spain.
“If there is anyone responsible for everything that appears to have taken place at that border, it is the mafias that traffic in human beings,” he said.
A Spanish police source told Reuters that the migrants who stormed the fence had used sticks, knives and acid against security forces and had changed tactics to try crossing at one perceived weak spot en masse, rather than in separate attempts along the fence.
Some 133 people made it across the border, while 176 Moroccan security officers and 49 Spanish border guards sustained injuries, authorities say.
‘Profound sadness’
Ousmane Ba, a Senegalese migrant on the Moroccan side who runs a community group to help other migrants, said the violence followed days of rising tension in the area around Melilla.
Ba, who neither took part in Friday’s incident nor witnessed it, said migrants living nearby had clashed several times with Moroccan security forces while trying to cross the fence earlier this week.
Many of them are living rough in countryside nearby and were desperate, he said. “I have never seen migrants attacking this violently. We deplore the deaths near the fence,” he said.
Amnesty International issued a statement saying it was deeply concerned by the events at the border.
“Although the migrants may have acted violently in their attempt to enter Melilla, when it comes to border control, not everything goes,” said Esteban Beltran, the director of Amnesty International Spain. “The human rights of migrants and refugees must be respected and situations like that seen cannot happen again.”
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) also weighed in with a statement that expressed “profound sadness and concern” over what happened at the Morocco-Melilla border.
“IOM and UNHCR urge all authorities to prioritize the safety of migrants and refugees, refrain from the excessive use of force and uphold their human rights,” the organizations said.
The Spanish Commission for Refugees, CEAR, also decried what it described as “the indiscriminate use of violence to manage migration and control borders” and expressed concerns that the violence had prevented people who were eligible for international protection from reaching Spanish soil. The Catholic Church in the southern Spanish city of Malaga meanwhile said “both Morocco and Spain have chosen to eliminate human dignity on our borders, maintaining that the arrival of migrants must be avoided at all costs and forgetting the lives that are torn apart along the way”.
Melilla and Ceuta, Spain’s other North African enclave, have the European Union’s only land borders on the African continent.
The mass crossing attempt on Friday was the first since Spain and Morocco mended relations after a year-long dispute related to Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony annexed by Morocco in 1976. The dispute had begun when Madrid allowed Brahim Ghali, leader of Western Sahara’s pro-independence Polisario Front, to be treated for COVID-19 in a Spanish hospital in April 2021.
Rabat wants Western Sahara to have autonomous status under Moroccan sovereignty, but the Polisario Front insists on a UN-supervised referendum on self-determination as agreed in a 1991 ceasefire deal.
A month after Spain allowed Ghali to be treated in a Spanish hospital, some 10,000 migrants surged across the Moroccan border into Spain’s Ceuta enclave as border guards looked the other way, in what was widely seen as a punitive gesture by Rabat.
UK man leaves girlfriend for Ukrainian refugee he just met
All’s fair in Lviv and war.
A British man in a relationship for 10 years ran off with a Ukrainian refugee who had been living in their home for just 10 days.
Tony Garnett, a 29-year-old security guard and father of two said it was love at first sight after he met Sofiia Karkadym, 22.
“As soon as I saw him I fancied him,” Karkadym told The Sun. “It’s been very quick but this is our love story. I know people will think badly of me but it happens. I could see how unhappy Tony was.”
Karkadym, a native of the eastern Ukrainian city of Lviv, came to live with Garnett and his long term girlfriend Lorna in early May after Garnett met Karkadym on Facebook.
“We’re sorry for the pain we’ve caused but I’ve discovered a connection with Sofiia like I’ve never had before,” Garnett told the tabloid. “We’re planning the rest of our life together.”
The relationship began falling apart from the moment Karkadym came to stay and Lorna began to get “very jealous,” Garnett said.
“The atmosphere was getting really bad and Sofiia told me she didn’t know whether she could continue to live with us under these circumstances.”
Eventually Lorna told her wayward man that he would have to make a choice — and he did.
“We both packed our bags and moved into my mum and dad’s home together,” Garnett said, adding the the new happy couple had already begun apartment hunting.
A person close to Lorna said she was “devastated” by the developments, The Sun reported.
Jill Biden to travel to Romania and Slovakia on mission to support Ukrainian refugees
The first lady will depart Washington for Romania on Thursday, stopping first at Mihail Kogalniceanu Airbase on Friday, where she will meet with service members before heading to the capital city of Bucharest on Saturday. In Bucharest, Biden will hold meetings with members of the Romanian government, as well as humanitarian aid workers. Romania has seen the largest influx of Ukrainian refugees as a result of the crisis (after Poland), with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians crossing the border into the country since the war began three months ago, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Biden, a community college professor, will also spend time in Bucharest with educators who are helping teach displaced Ukrainian children and assist in their schooling as they adjust to their new environment.
On Saturday evening, Biden will travel to Bratislava, Slovakia, where she will meet with United States embassy staff before departing the following day for Kosice and Vysne Nemecke, Slovakia, to meet with Ukrainian refugees. Biden will also greet local Slovaks who have opened their homes to families from Ukraine seeking refuge. More than 350,000 Ukrainians have fled to Slovakia, according to UNHCR.
Biden wraps her trip on Monday, May 9, by meeting with members of the Slovak government before departing for the United States.
The trip will be the first lady’s second solo foreign trip; in July, she went to Japan to attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.