The Washington Post

2022-05-03 20:48:20 Coming of age in a war, one Ukrainian teen finds her ‘mission’

LVIV, Ukraine — The adults who approach teenager Anna Melnyk sometimes cry, sometimes yell.

They see “information” on her green vest at the train station in the western city of Lviv and ask questions: How to get to Poland? Where is the bomb shelter? What to do next? Anna’s calm demeanor seems to reassure these new arrivals, displaced by war from besieged cities. They turn to her for a sign that everything is going to be all right.

“Some of them ask my age and when I say, ‘16,’ they’re shocked,” Anna said. “But I don’t feel a difference. I have one mission: to help.”

She looks impossibly small, not just in the cavernous train depot where she volunteers most days, but in all of this — the giant Russian war machine that has swallowed up a generation of young Ukrainians and turned them into grown-ups overnight.

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2022-05-03 17:12:22 Evacuees from Azovstal in Mariupol reach safety

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Evacuees from Mariupol’s besieged and bombarded Azovstal steelworks have arrived to safety, flanked by ambulances and United Nations vehicles.

The initial evacuation of 101 civilians to the eastern town of Zaporizhzhia has taken weeks to negotiate. Even once plans were finalized, the departure of their buses had stalled repeatedly as fighting raged outside.

United Nations officials left Friday for Azovstal to begin the evacuation.

By the time their convoy finally arrived in Zaporizhzhia, the passengers onboard looked shattered with exhaustion. Some waved out the windows to the gathered crowd outside. Others looked bewildered, pulling loved ones close to them as they waited in silence.

As an elderly woman stepped first onto the forecourt, her face froze a moment, and then she started to sob.

Victory in Mariupol would be Russia’s most significant in this war to date.

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2022-05-03 10:17:38 Here’s the latest from Ukraine.

- Civilian evacuations from Mariupol are expected to resume at 7 a.m. local time Tuesday, city officials said. Some 200 civilians, including about 20 children, remain trapped in a steel plant, said a local police chief. There was little detail on when a convoy of civilians that had already left the plant, would make it to Ukrainian-held territory.

- Russian troops suffering from poor morale and “casualty aversion” are making “anemic” advances in their attempt to seize the Donbas region, according to the Pentagon. In the past 24 to 48 hours, Ukrainian forces have pushed back Russian troops and maintained “dominance” of Kharkiv.

- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is set to address Ukraine’s legislature later Tuesday, will tell lawmakers that “this is Ukraine’s finest hour.” A draft of a European Union proposal to phase out oil imports from Russia will be circulated among member states and could be formally agreed this week.

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2022-05-03 08:13:31 Here’s the latest on key battlegrounds in Ukraine.

Mariupol: A convoy of about 100 evacuees from the steel plant in this city is expected to arrive in Zaporizhzhia on Tuesday morning local time.

Odessa: A rocket was fired at one of the city’s “infrastructure facilities,” said regional governor Maksym Marchenko. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “there are dead and wounded.” The city council said on Telegram that a 15-year-old boy was killed and another minor was taken to a hospital with injuries.

Kyiv region: Ukrainian officials said Monday that 148 people have been found in eight mass graves around the region — mostly in Bucha. Well over a thousand Ukrainians have been killed in the area around the capital, according to the Ukrainian government. Officials reiterated Monday that bodies were found with tied hands and feet, and shots to the head.

Kherson: Ukrainian officials said Monday that a man went to the hospital in critical condition after shelling in a village here.

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2022-05-03 03:56:42 Russia planning to annex new areas of Ukraine, U.S. intelligence finds

Moscow is preparing to annex vast new swaths of Ukrainian territory in coming days, the United States said on Monday, potentially moving to cement control of much of the country’s east even as Russian forces struggle to capture key areas on the battlefield.

A move by the Kremlin to formally claim as part of Russia the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, along with the southern city of Kherson, amid an intense ongoing military battle could thrust the conflict into an unpredictable, even more explosive phase.

It is not clear how Ukrainian forces and their allies would respond to such an attempt, which would echo the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 but, in a crucial difference, occur as forces loyal to Ukraine fight to retain control of their territory.

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2022-05-02 23:12:28 Here is the latest from Ukraine.

- A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows a large, bipartisan majority supporting increased sanctions against Russia and most also backing military and humanitarian support for Ukrainians, with almost three-quarters saying the United States is doing the right amount or too little to support Ukraine.

- Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky downplayed attempts to have him assassinated, saying that many fellow Ukrainians have it worse.

- Later this week, first lady Jill Biden will travel to Romania and Slovakia, where she will meet with displaced Ukrainian families.

- In Belgorod, a Russian city near Ukraine’s eastern border, the regional governor said he was awakened early Monday by two explosions, the latest in a series of unexplained fires and blasts at strategic locations in Russia.

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2022-05-02 22:10:05 E.U. close to deal on Russian oil phaseout; Hungary, Slovakia object

The European Union is close to a deal on phasing out Russian oil imports in response to the war in Ukraine — but objections from Hungary and Slovakia are holding up a sanctions agreement, according to two E.U. diplomats and an E.U. official.

To seal the deal, the E.U. may grant the two countries exemptions, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations while details are still being hammered out.

Talks gained momentum last week after a major holdout, Germany, softened its opposition and signaled support for a ban in phases. Over the weekend, officials and diplomats in Brussels discussed the idea of a phaseout by the end of 2022, but Hungary and Slovakia pushed back, according to the diplomats and the official.

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2022-05-02 21:20:07 The ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ was never alive, Ukrainian air force says

The “Ghost of Kyiv.”

That’s what admirers called a Ukrainian fighter pilot who was said to have shot down 40 enemy planes. Over the weekend, Ukrainian officials admitted that the ghost, in fact, never existed.

“Ghost of Kyiv is a superhero-legend whose character was created by Ukrainians,” Ukraine’s air force said Saturday, confirming that it was all a bit of mythmaking.

The news came two days after the Times of London identified the ghost as Maj. Stepan Tarabalka, a pilot who died March 13 in an air battle with Russian forces.

The Ghost of Kyiv is one of the most successful pieces of propaganda promoting the prowess of the nation’s fighting forces and lifting morale. Although Ukrainian officials and former president Petro Poroshenko promoted the myth, the air force warned people to not “neglect the basic rules of information hygiene” and to “check the sources of information, before spreading it.”

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2022-05-02 20:39:59 Israel wants apology after Russia’s Lavrov compares Zelensky to Hitler

Israeli officials reacted with fury Monday after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, of supporting Nazism and asserted that “Hitler also had Jewish blood.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said Russia’s ambassador to Israel would be formally summoned to explain the comments, which Lapid called “both unforgivable and outrageous.” He said Israel would demand an apology from the Russian government for employing a discredited antisemitic trope: that Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis’ Third Reich and the perpetrator of the Holocaust, was of Jewish ancestry.

In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Lavrov’s “words are untrue and their intentions are wrong.”

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2022-05-02 15:30:13 Mass flight of tech workers turns Russian IT into another casualty of war

RIGA, Latvia — In his two-bedroom Moscow apartment, 35-year-old start-up wizard Pavel Telitchenko spent years mulling a move from Russia, fearing the gradual rise of a police state. Then, three days after the Kremlin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, he made the hard choice — packing up his young family, along with his prized vinyl-record collection, and joining a historic exodus that includes a massive outflow of Russia’s best and brightest minds in tech.

“I did not want to make an emotional decision, but I could not raise my son in a country like that,” said Telitchenko, who resettled in neighboring Latvia in March with his wife and 3-year-old son. He spoke in their comfortable Riga two-story walk-up, standing near a high shelf with a white Santa Claus statue from his childhood — a reminder of what he had left behind.

“The war made me realize that Russia will not change,” he said.

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