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Tag Archives: wartime
Ukraine raids home of billionaire in war-time anti-corruption crackdown
KYIV, Feb 1 (Reuters) – Security services searched the home of one of Ukraine’s most prominent billionaires on Wednesday, moving against a figure once seen as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s sponsor in what the authorities called a war-time anti-corruption purge.
The action, days before a summit with the European Union, appears to reflect determination by Kyiv to demonstrate that it can be a steward of billions of dollars in Western aid and shed a reputation as one of the world’s most corrupt states.
It came as Kyiv has secured huge pledges of weapons from the West in recent weeks offering new capabilities – the latest expected this week to include rockets from the United States that would nearly double the firing range of Ukrainian forces.
Photographs circulating on social media appeared to show Ihor Kolomoiskiy dressed in a sweatsuit and looking on in the presence of an SBU security service officer at his home.
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The SBU said it had uncovered the embezzlement of more than $1 billion at Ukraine’s biggest oil company, Ukrnafta, and its biggest refiner, Ukrtatnafta. Kolomoiskiy, who has long denied wrongdoing, once held stakes in both firms, which Zelenskiy ordered seized by the state in November under martial law.
Separate raids were carried out at the tax office, and the home of Arsen Avakov, who led Ukraine’s police force as interior minister from 2014-2021. The SBU said it was cracking down on “people whose actions harm the security of the state in various spheres” and promised more details in coming days.
“Every criminal who has the audacity to harm Ukraine, especially in the conditions of war, must clearly understand that we will put handcuffs on his hands,” Ukraine’s security service chief Vasyl Malyuk was quoted as saying on the SBU Telegram channel.
The prosecutor general’s office said the top management of Ukrtatnafta had been notified it was under suspicion, as were a former energy minister, a former deputy defence minister and other officials.
Kolomoiskiy, who faces a fraud case in the United States, has been at the centre of corruption allegations and court disputes for years that Western donors have said must be resolved for Kyiv to win aid.
Zelenskiy, who first came to fame as the star of a sitcom on Kolomoiskiy’s TV station, has long promised to rid Ukraine of so-called oligarchs, but had faced accusations that he was unable to move decisively against his former sponsor.
In an address overnight before the raids, he alluded to new anti-corruption measures in time for Friday’s summit, at which Ukraine is expected to seek firm steps towards joining the EU.
“We are preparing new reforms in Ukraine. Reforms that will change the social, legal and political reality in many ways, making it more human, transparent and effective,” he said, promising to reveal the details soon.
LONGER RANGE MISSILES
Ukrainian forces which recaptured swathes of territory from Russian troops in the second half of 2022 have seen their advance stall since November. Kyiv says the key to regaining the initiative is securing advanced Western weaponry.
Two U.S. officials said a new $2 billion package of military aid to be announced as soon as this week would for the first time include Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB), a new weapon designed by Boeing. (BA.N)
The cheap gliding missiles can strike targets more than 150 km (90 miles) away, a dramatic increase over the 80 km range of the rockets fired by HIMARS systems which changed the face of the war when Washington sent them last summer.
That would put all of the Russian-occupied territory on Ukraine’s mainland, as well as parts of the Crimea peninsula seized by Moscow in 2014, within range of Kyiv’s forces.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the arrival of longer range U.S. weapons would escalate the conflict.
Western countries pledged scores of advanced main battle tanks for the first time last week, a breakthrough in support aimed at giving Kyiv the capability to recapture occupied territory this year.
But the arrival of the new weapons is still months away, and in the meantime, Russia has gained momentum on the battlefield, announcing advances north and south of the city of Bakhmut, its main target for months.
Kyiv disputes many of those claims and Reuters could not independently verify the full situation, but the locations of reported fighting clearly indicate incremental Russian advances.
Troops were fighting building to building in Bakhmut for gains of barely 100 metres (yards) a night, and the city was coming under constant Russian shelling, a soldier in a Ukrainian unit of Belarusian volunteers told Reuters from inside the city.
Ukraine’s general staff said late on Tuesday its forces had come under fire in Bakhmut and the villages of Klishchiivka and Kurdyumivka on its southern approaches.
South of Bakhmut, Russia has also launched a major new offensive this week on Vuhledar, a longstanding Ukrainian-held bastion at the junction of the southern and eastern front lines. Kyiv says its forces have so far held there.
PURGE
The infusion of Western military and financial aid creates new pressure on Zelenskiy to demonstrate his government can clean up Ukraine.
Last week, he purged more than a dozen senior officials following a series of scandals and graft allegations in the biggest shakeup of Ukraine’s leadership since the invasion.
Following Wednesday’s raids, the parliamentary leader of Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People party, David Arakhamia, wrote on Telegram: “The country will change during the war. If someone is not ready for change, then the state itself will come and help them change.”
Reporting by Reuters bureaux
Writing by Peter Graff
Editing by Philippa Fletcher
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
‘It’s like a constant gamble:’ Ukrainian couple await birth of twins in wartime Kyiv
CNN
—
Kateryna and her husband Oleg endure what every citizen of Kyiv must – long blackouts, hours without any internet connection and constant apprehension about the next missile barrage.
But as they begin 2023, they are also preparing for the arrival of twin boys. Kateryna, who is 34, is eight months pregnant. CNN agreed to use only first names for her and Oleg as they fear for their privacy.
She’s not getting much rest ahead of the big day. The air-raid sirens blare almost every day, the crump of explosions is all too familiar. Their lives are shaped by the scheduled power cuts, as electricity is shared among the regions to mitigate the impact of Russia’s strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
“On New Year’s Eve, I tried to take a nap,” she told CNN from her house in the Kyiv suburbs. “But I woke to the sound of explosions, and they went on through the night. The sirens were on for much of the night, until 4:30 a.m.,” she said.
It’s difficult for residents to distinguish between the sound of air defenses in operation and the impact of Russian cruise missiles and drones.
“I don’t mind the blackouts,” Kateryna said, “but we worry about the next wave of Russian missiles. Will it be us? It’s like a constant gamble.”
A nearby district – Vyshhorod – was hit a month ago, and the indiscriminate nature of the strikes means that residential districts are as much at risk as power plants and railway lines. Dozens of heath facilities across Ukraine, including maternity and children’s hospitals, have been struck since the beginning of the conflict.
When the sirens aren’t wailing, Kateryna said, there is another noise that is new to her neighborhood: the chattering of generators as homes and businesses try to compensate for being without electricity for as much as 12 hours a day.
“They are the jingle bells of this Christmas,” she said.
Despite the risk and the imminent arrival of the twins, Kateryna still travels into central Kyiv twice a week to use one of the co-working spaces that have popped up across the Ukrainian capital.
These spaces have become quite professional, with furniture, heat, lighting and reliable internet, provided through Starlink terminals, bought from the company owned by Elon Musk.
Kateryna works in logistics, helping to import large containers into Ukraine. It’s more than just a livelihood. It’s also a way to contribute to the war effort.
Kateryna and Oleg are luckier than most Ukrainians in that they have a small generator at home, but they use it sparingly. There is always the risk of running out of diesel to power it – it uses a liter of fuel every hour and needs to cool down every four hours. They have to choose which appliances to run: it’s lights or laundry, they said.
They fully expect to need it long after the twins are born.
Living in Kyiv during Russia’s war on Ukraine is about being prepared. Kateryna and Oleg have cupboards full of batteries, power banks and flashlights. If the Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure continues, as most expect it will, the scheduled power outages may become less predictable, with more emergency cuts.
There is enough food in the stores “but sometimes I have to shop with a flashlight,” Kateryna says. They keep about two months’ worth of food supplies stacked in the house, just in case the situation goes from bad to worse.
Like many people from Kyiv, Kateryna and Oleg moved away from the capital to a safer area in western Ukraine when the invasion began last February. But they never wanted to leave the country. And soon they felt the draw of home pulling them back to the city.
“I have a job here; Oleg has a job here and he cannot work remotely. We have many friends here, our home. For me it’s a nightmare to move somewhere else,” Kateryna said.
Kateryna feels they are both involved in the effort to secure Ukraine’s future. In the early months of her pregnancy, she helped Ukrainian volunteer organizations with fundraising for warm clothes and equipment for the Ukrainian army, she said.
“The company my husband works for has a fund and they help the Ukrainian fighters who are on the front line with equipment like drones and pick-up trucks. We helped collect money for such equipment,” she said.
Like many other Ukrainians, they helped a family that had fled the frontlines earlier in the war. The mother had given birth in the midst of Russian shelling of their hometown of Kreminna in eastern Luhansk region. When the family settled in a Kyiv suburb, Oleg and Kateryna helped them out with warm clothes and food.
Kateryna says she is not afraid of becoming a wartime mother. She and Oleg want their sons to grow up in an environment that would be the polar opposite of what life would be under Russian occupation.
“I really want my children to live in a free Ukraine, I want them to be safe. They have the right to safety and protection just like all other children in the world. I don’t want them to live in fear of dying from a Russian rocket, they should be happy and carefree,” she said.
Her one concern – beyond giving birth to healthy children – is that she might find herself lying in the hospital amid another wave of missile attacks. At that point, she will pray very hard, she said.
Lessons from Ukraine prompt top Taiwan museum to conduct ‘wartime response’ exercises
In March, amid growing fears of a Russian attack on Ukraine’s cultural capital Lviv, staff at the city’s National Museum frantically packed up and hid thousands of its treasures.
Now, more than 5,000 miles away, another globally acclaimed institution is also preparing for the threat of a possible invasion.
Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, which boasts one of the world’s finest collections of Chinese imperial relics, is actively considering how it would protect its treasures if Beijing launched an attack. With China stepping up military pressure on the self-ruled island, the institution last week conducted its first ever “wartime response exercise” centered on evacuating its artifacts.
“The most important goal of this exercise is to let our staff know who is doing what if war breaks out, and how to react,” museum director Wu Mi-cha told CNN prior to the training session, adding that the institution was working with security and law enforcement agencies to refine its plans.
Staff members were walked through various scenarios and protocols during the exercise. Credit: National Palace Museum
The move comes after Wu revealed to lawmakers that he was unable to think of an ideal location to store the museum’s historical relics in the event of war. Pressed on his plans during a parliamentary meeting in mid-March, just weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the director promised to devise an evacuation strategy and hold a drill in July.
China’s ruling Communist Party has long claimed Taiwan as its own territory and, despite having never controlled the island, has not ruled out taking it by force. In recent months, the self-governing democracy of 24 million people has faced growing military posturing from China, which has frequently sent warplanes near the island. In late June, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force flew 29 aircraft into the territory’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ), the third-highest daily number of jets this year, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.
China’s tacit support for Russia’s war on Ukraine has fueled speculation over its intentions with Taiwan, raising questions about how the world might react should it launch an attack. Concerns over a possible invasion have prompted the Taiwanese government to beef up its combat readiness and wartime preparation. Three other institutions in Taiwan — the National Taiwan Museum, the National Museum of Taiwan History, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts — confirmed to CNN that they are also devising evacuation strategies for their collections.
During last week’s exercise, about 180 staff members were taught how to respond to various scenarios, including how to request help from police or the military if security facilities are damaged and artifacts are seized by enemy forces. The special training will be added to existing safety drills (which are currently geared toward terrorist attacks and natural disasters in the earthquake-prone capital, Taipei) to boost staff’s overall ability to protect the collection, according to the museum.
The special training will be added to existing safety drills. Credit: National Palace Museum
In the case of an evacuation, the museum said it would focus on saving around 90,000 relics from its 700,000-strong collection, prioritizing artifacts of higher value and those that take up less space.
“Whether we need to evacuate the artifacts is subject to the commander-in-chief if there is a war. That said, the museum needs to prepare itself now, so that we can act immediately if we receive such orders,” museum officials said.
The museum would not disclose where the evacuated items would be stored, or how they would be transported there.
Surviving two wars
Taiwan’s National Palace Museum is renowned for its vast collection of artifacts once housed at the Palace Museum in Beijing’s Forbidden City — treasures that have already survived two wars.
In the early 1930s, amid the prospect of a Japanese invasion of Beijing, the Chinese government moved parts of the imperial collection south to Shanghai and Nanjing. Later that decade, many of the artifacts were transported further inland to various locations in Sichuan province.
Parts of the imperial collection shown outside the Forbidden City’s Gate of Supreme Harmony in Beijing before they were moved south to Shanghai and Nanjing. Credit: National Palace Museum
Accompanied by a group of dedicated escorts, who faced constant bombing threats, the treasures were taken across the country via trains, trucks, horse carts and boats, being hidden in temples and caves along the way. In 1947, two years after Japan’s surrender to the Allies, the collection was reassembled in Nanjing.
The treasures were accompanied by escorts in their journey across China. Credit: Chuang Ling/National Palace Museum
But by that time, the bloody civil war between the then-ruling Kuomintang (KMT) and the insurgent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had resumed. When defeated KMT forces retreated to Taiwan in 1949, they took with them over 600,000 items from the Palace Museum and other academic institutions — artifacts, artworks, books, maps and government records that would form the backbone of the Taipei museum’s collection.
After storing the items in a former sugar mill and a cave outside the Taiwanese city of Taichung, the KMT dredged tunnels deep into a hill on the outskirts of Taipei for the artifacts’ safekeeping. The National Palace Museum was eventually built at the base of the hill and, after opening in 1965, began exhibiting the collection to the public.
Museum staff at work, as parts of the imperial collection was temporarily
stored in a cave outside of Taichung. Credit: Chuang Ling/National Palace Museum
Museum’s political significance
For decades, the museum and its treasures have been imbued with political and national symbolism.
When the KMT retreated to Taiwan, it took what it considered to be the most valuable parts of the Palace Museum’s collection. Possessing these objects positioned the party as the custodian of Chinese culture and strengthened its claim of being China’s legitimate government, according to Hsu Ya-hwei, an art history professor at National Taiwan University.
One of Taiwan’s National Palace Museum’s most famous artifacts is the Jadeite Cabbage. Credit: Koji Sasahara/AP
Hsu added that this position grew more prominent during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when large swathes of China’s heritage were destroyed in Mao Zedong’s campaign against the “Four Olds”: old customs, culture, habits and ideas.
“It was during this time that the museum’s collection became very important, because it was the embodiment of Chinese culture,” Hsu said.
In recent decades, the National Palace Museum has expanded its scope beyond China, staging different types of exhibitions and opening a new southern branch, in rural Chiayi county, that showcases the interconnectivity of Asian cultures. But its collection of treasures from the mainland is what has “put Taiwan on the map,” Wu, the museum director, said.
“War has brought these artifacts to Taiwan,” he added. “It falls on us to protect these legacies that are invaluable to human civilizations.”
Russia’s Wartime Crackdown Widens as Kremlin Demands Full Loyalty
In late June, Russian security agents took physicist Dmitry Kolker from his hospital bed in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, where he was being treated for stage-four pancreatic cancer, and whisked him on a four-hour flight to a Moscow prison on charges of treason.
Mr. Kolker, who at that point was being fed through a tube, died behind bars three days later.
Russian prosecutors say he was working in the interests of a foreign power. His lawyer, Alexander Fedulov, who said he hadn’t seen the charges before his client’s death, believes Russian authorities sought to demonstrate that no one’s loyalty is beyond suspicion in the Kremlin’s broadening crackdown.
The message, Mr. Fedulov said, is simple. “Wherever you are, whatever condition you may be in, we’ll do with you what we want just to make sure you stay loyal,” he said. “The criminal case against Kolker—it isn’t about Kolker, it’s for everyone else.”
Mr. Kolker’s arrest was part of a flurry of detentions in recent weeks that have targeted a swath of society, including scientists, a top economist and a professional hockey player.
Dozens have been arrested for speaking out against the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, including some of those arrested in recent weeks.
But in the case of others, the Kremlin appears to have targeted figures solely for appearing insufficiently patriotic at a time when the government of President Vladimir Putin is demanding unflinching support, say rights lawyers and political analysts. The harshness of some of the arrests is meant to put people on notice, they say.
Neither the Kremlin, the Prosecutor General’s Office nor the Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes in Russia, responded to requests for comment on the recent wave of arrests.
Dmitry Kolker, a prominent physicist shown at a concert in 2018, died from late-stage cancer after he was jailed on charges of treason.
Photo:
ALEXANDER FEFELOV/REUTERS
Mr. Kolker’s son Maxim said the last time he saw his father, who was a doctor of physics and mathematics at Novosibirsk State University, was when security agents were taking him away from his hospital room. He said it took the family more than two weeks after the scientist died to retrieve his body from a state hospital morgue.
The morgue of Moscow’s City Clinical Hospital No. 29 didn’t respond to a request for comment. Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters earlier this month that the Kremlin couldn’t comment on the case because it was “the prerogative of law enforcement agencies and the court.”
The arrests come months after Mr. Putin gave a speech on state television promising that patriotic Russian society would purify itself of “scum and traitors,” and “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths.” The Kremlin has cast its war in Ukraine as a “special military operation” to free the country from the West’s control and prevent an assault on Russia.
Russian analysts and the country’s dwindling number of human-rights advocates say Moscow’s security services are taking a cue from Mr. Putin to root out anyone deemed disloyal to the Kremlin, and that the arrests suggest Russia is slipping into the kind of paranoia that gripped it during the Cold War, as the government seeks to squelch the smallest hint of resistance to Kremlin policies.
“Russia of course has every opportunity to return to Stalinist hell but it seems that for now Putin is content to tighten the screws just enough to dissuade would-be protesters and dissenters,” said Sergey Radchenko, a historian who specializes in the Cold War and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Russia’s lawmakers, meanwhile, are passing a raft of new wartime bills. On July 14, Mr. Putin signed into law bills that punish people who have access to government secrets and leave the country without permission with up to seven years in prison. Those found guilty of violating a new treason law that punishes Russians who “join the side of the enemy” risk 20 years behind bars.
The same day Mr. Kolker was arrested, police arrested
Vladimir Mau,
a prominent economist and rector of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, a university that produces cadres of officials in the Russian government. He was charged with two counts of fraud, including stealing 21 million rubles, equivalent to about $360,000, from the university, Russian state news agencies reported from the court hearing at the end of June.
Vladimir Mau, an economist shown during an interview with TASS last December, was charged with fraud in June. He denies the charges and is being held under pretrial house arrest.
Photo:
Sergei Karpukhin/Zuma Press
Mr. Mau, according to the news agencies, denied he was guilty. Mr. Mau’s lawyer, Alexei Dudnik, said he couldn’t comment further on the case because he and his client had been asked by the authorities to sign nondisclosure agreements. The website for Moscow’s Tverskoy district court says Mr. Mau is being held under pretrial house arrest.
Mr. Peskov told reporters earlier this month that the Kremlin wouldn’t comment on the case.
Mr. Mau had a stellar career as an economic adviser to the Russian government and was an adviser to former acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar when the latter was leading efforts to privatize Russian state industry following the fall of the Soviet Union.
By most accounts, Mr. Mau was in the Kremlin’s good books. Even on the eve of his detention he had been re-elected to the board of directors at state-owned energy giant Gazprom PJSC. And Mr. Putin in 2020 had personally praised Mr. Mau, who signed an open letter earlier this year from university rectors across the country supporting his invasion of Ukraine.
Critics have widely interpreted his arrest as punishment for less-than-unwavering loyalty to Mr. Putin. They cited reports by independent Russian media that he signed the public letter later than others and that first versions of the letter lacked his name, which appeared later. Those reports couldn’t be confirmed.
Mr. Mau had built a reputation as a so-called systemic liberal, someone who tried to constructively criticize the system from behind closed doors, according to former colleagues.
“The fact that a systemic liberal continued overseeing the country’s most important university for producing government elite was inconsistent with Putin’s regime,” said Dmitry Nekrasov, an economist who worked in the Kremlin until 2010 and with Mr. Mau. He said Mr. Mau’s arrest was inevitable.
Russian opposition figure Ilya Yashin, charged with ‘knowingly spreading false information’ about Russia’s army, flashes the V sign during a hearing on his detention.
Photo:
Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of R. Politik, an independent political consulting firm, said Russia’s siloviki, a collective term for the security services and law-enforcement agencies, are pursuing a clampdown on free thought in academia and education, leaving academics like Mr. Mau especially vulnerable to perceptions of disloyalty and being caught up in the dragnet.
“The time of systemic liberals is over,” she said. “This is the time of the siloviki. Right now everything is founded on the issue of security and the demand for dealing with anyone unfavorable.”
Ivan Fedotov, 25, a goalie on Russia’s silver-medal-winning hockey team at the Beijing Olympics this year, recently fell into that net. He was detained on charges of skipping mandatory military service. His detention came days after he quit his Russian hockey team, CSKA Moscow, and signed a contract with the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League. While Russian men must serve a year in the military by the time they turn 27, according to Russian law, professional athletes are typically allowed to bypass service by getting exemptions or playing for CSKA, the military’s club, according to Russian military analyst Pavel Luzin.
Mr. Fedotov’s whereabouts couldn’t be determined, but his lawyer, Alexei Ponomarev, told Russian state news agency TASS in early July that he was likely being held in Severomorsk, a town in the Arctic that requires official authorization to enter. Several days later, TASS reported that he would likely be sent to serve on the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Mr. Ponomarev didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Ivan Fedotov, shown during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, was detained on charges of failing to undertake his military service.
Photo:
Antonin Thuillier/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Ruslan Shaveddinov, an ally of jailed opposition leader
Alexei Navalny,
was sent to Novaya Zemlya in 2019 on charges of skipping military service and spent a year serving there in what he calls punishment for his political activities. Mr. Shaveddinov said he believes the Russian authorities targeted Mr. Fedotov to send a message.
“It’s a clear signal to a wide audience that in this new confrontation with the West, these kinds of attempts to progress in America are viewed as treason,” Mr. Shaveddinov said.
Kremlin spokesman Mr. Peskov told reporters in early July that the case was about the law. “Our legislation dictates military duty,” he said.
Russia’s crackdown against critics of the war is likewise continuing. According to Damir Gainutdinov, head of the Net Freedoms Project, a Russian rights group, at least 72 people are now facing up to 10 years in prison on charges of disseminating false information about activities of the armed forces.
Pavel Chikov,
head of the
Agora
human-rights group, said that in total more than 200 people are facing prison sentences on various charges related to criticizing the war.
Earlier this month, Moscow city councilor Alexei Gorinov became the first to receive a prison sentence for disseminating false information about the Russian military when a court handed him a seven-year prison sentence. The judge said he committed the offense when he spoke out against a local council’s decision to hold children’s dancing and drawing competitions in Russia while children were dying in Ukraine.
Mr. Chikov said the sentence was so severe because Mr. Gorinov was the first person to plead not guilty to the charges. In three earlier cases, judges had handed out guilty verdicts, but the defendants were given a fine, correctional labor or a suspended sentence, after they had pleaded guilty, according to Mr. Chikov.
“It’s a strong message both to the public and to regional authorities,” said Mr. Chikov. “In Moscow’s view, seven years is the correct punishment.”
Ruslan Shaveddinov, an ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was sent to a remote Arctic Ocean archipelago in 2019 on charges of skipping military service and spent a year there in what he calls punishment for his political activities.
Photo:
Handout/Shutterstock
The latest opposition politician to face the charge of disseminating false information about the activities of Russia’s armed forces is
Ilya Yashin,
one of few anti-Kremlin activists who hadn’t fled Russia. He pleaded not guilty on July 13 to charges of spreading false information about alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces in the town of Bucha outside Kyiv on his YouTube channel in April.
One of his lawyers, Maria Eismont, said she has little hope he will avoid an extended sentence. “A lawyer now can only hold your hand while you are locked up,” she said.
In a handwritten letter passed through Ms. Eismont to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Yashin said he had shown and cited a British Broadcasting Corp. report from Bucha on his YouTube channel and described his indictment as one that would “amaze the imagination of any civilized person.”
“I was locked up for a report by the BBC,” he wrote. “This is the new reality in my country.”
Write to Evan Gershkovich at evan.gershkovich@wsj.com and Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com
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Winston Churchill’s granddaughter discusses her mother’s wartime diary
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Emma Soames, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, joined “Special Report” and talked to anchor Bret Baier about her mother’s wartime diaries.
BRET BAIER: Joining me now is Emma Soames, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, author of the new book ‘Mary Churchill’s War The Wartime Diaries of Churchill’s Youngest Daughter’ … What made you put your mom’s diaries down and reflect on your grandfather’s legacy?
EMMA SOAMES: I and my siblings, we had another look at the diaries and decided they were so interesting and compelling that they should be published in their entirety.
JULIAN ASSANGE’S EXTRADITION TO US APPROVED BY UK GOVERNMENT
I mean, just to give you an idea, on page three, she quotes her father as saying – and this is 1939, at the beginning of the year – ‘Before God Almighty, I say I do not want a war.’ And she says ‘To this, I am a witness.’. [00:01:09][29.4]
…
I have very powerful childhood memories of his goldfish, his swimming pool of him, indeed sitting on the lawn in his Stetson with a large cigar and looking at his favorite view in the world, which was across the valley of Kent.
VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY CALLED ‘THE CHURCHILL OF OUR TIME’
Indeed, it is historical, but it was not written by historian. When war breaks out, she is a 17-year-old girl who has literally just left school. But what it does give is a very intimate view of Churchill during the war and the stresses and strains he was under and of her growing devotion to him that lasted all her life.
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW BELOW:
IDF official: Israel expects Hezbollah to fire 2,000 rockets a day in wartime
Israel does not want war with Hezbollah, but is prepared to face about 2,000 rockets a day from the terror group if conflict breaks out, a senior Israeli military official told AFP.
During the 11-day May conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian terror groups fired around 4,400 projectiles towards the Jewish state. The Iron Dome air defense system intercepted around 90 percent of the rockets headed for populated areas, while just under 300 hit inhabited districts.
Cities like Tel Aviv and Ashdod experienced the “highest number of fire towards them in the history of Israel,” said Uri Gordin, chief of the army’s Home Front Command. “We saw a pace of more than 400 rockets fired towards Israel on a daily basis.”
Gordin said that in the case of a future “conflict or a war with Hezbollah, we expect more than five times the number of rockets fired every day from Lebanon to Israel.”
“Basically, we are looking at between 1,500 and 2,500 rockets fired daily towards Israel,” he told AFP.
The IDF’s Home Front Command is in charge of civil defense, meaning it is responsible for readying the country in case of threat, conflict, or disaster. The unit was criticized for its response to the 2006 war with Hezbollah, which killed more than 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis.
The Iron Dome anti-missile system fires interception missiles at rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel, in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, on May 19, 2021. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
That war was a “wake-up call” for the Home Front Command, Gordin said, adding that it had since beefed up its liaison units, which are now active across 250 Israeli municipalities to provide assistance in case of any attack. The Home Front Command uses computer projections to predict a rocket’s trajectory after it has been launched, and advises the public, within a specific range, to head to bomb shelters.
During the Gaza conflict in May, this allowed emergency services to “go to every incident within less than five minutes,” Gordin said in an interview from the control room of the unit’s headquarters in Ramle. He said preparations had been made for any incidents on the border with Lebanon.
An Israeli security source told AFP that the IDF is hoping for “stability” with its northern neighbor, which is mired in a crippling economic crisis, and on Thursday saw deadly sectarian clashes in the capital Beirut that left seven dead, including Hezbollah members.
The Iranian-backed Hezbollah is “the source of instability in Lebanon,” the security source said, adding that the group “exploits the state’s resources for Iranian interests.”
Iran is “closer to creating fissile material for nuclear weapons than they ever were in the past” but would still need two years to obtain a bomb, the source said, echoing a timeframe cited by other Israeli officials.
“We are preparing for all options and scenarios, including military capabilities,” the security source said.
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