Ukraine apartment residents suffer war in different ways

Alla, 52, takes care of her mother Lydia at their apartment in Slatyne village, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine on Thursday. (Reuters)
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Updated 20 May 2022
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Ukraine apartment residents suffer war in different ways

  • The inhabitants of two of the blocks, which sit barely 100 metres apart across an overgrown lot, could be living in different worlds
  • Across the lot, where abandoned cats nose through the long grass and children once played around a set of rusting swings, the contrast in the conditions could not be more stark

SLATYNE, Ukraine: The only 10 residents left in the Commune, an apartment complex in the eastern Ukraine town of Slatyne, share the hardships of Russia’s invasion, from relentless shellfire and exploding rounds to a lack of power and running water.
But the inhabitants of two of the blocks, which sit barely 100 meters apart across an overgrown lot, could be living in different worlds.
Inside Vera Filipova’s gloomy, grimy home, blackened pots litter the messy kitchen and rumpled comforters sit on unkempt beds.
“It’s like hell,” the 65-year-old retired shop clerk told Reuters. She lives with her friend Nataliya Parkamento, a former shoe factory worker who moved in after her own home was destroyed.
This block is largely intact — unlike many buildings in Slatyne, the Commune has escaped a direct hit from the nearby fighting of a Ukrainian counter-offensive that has driven Russian troops away from the city of Kharkiv over the last two weeks.
But Filipova and Parkamento only have enough humanitarian aid to eat once a day. They cook outside on an open fire of shattered wood they pull from other destroyed homes, shielding the flames from rain with corrugated cement sheeting blown off a roof.
“I have nowhere to go and nobody to take me out of here,” said Parkamento, who fetches drinking water in a plastic bottle from a nearby well.
Across the lot, where abandoned cats nose through the long grass and children once played around a set of rusting swings, the contrast in the conditions could not be more stark.

’WINDOWS ARE BEING SMASHED’
There, Larissa and the six other residents tend neat gardens of roses, peonies, carrots and spring onions. They wash with buckets of water drawn from Slatyne’s many wells. Laundry dries on lines outside their tidy apartments, beds draped with colorful covers, house plants growing in glassed-in balconies.
The conditions are just as challenging. “Windows are being smashed, walls are being destroyed and there is nothing we can do about it,” Larissa, 46, said. But she and the others in her block have tried to make the best of it.
The seven residents — none would give their last names – said they share the humanitarian aid delivered to the complex by volunteers from the nearby town of Dergachi, supplementing it with pickled vegetables stocked in a basement.
Alla, 52, who managed a subway station in Kharkiv, 28 km (17 miles) to the south down a remote, shell-blasted road, cooks for everyone in her kitchen on a stove powered by a gas bottle. When shellfire eases, she ventures out with her husband, Volodymyr, 57, a railway worker who acts as the block’s handyman, to an abandoned home to make meals on a brick grill.
No one in either of the blocks could say why their experiences were so different. “I don’t know,” Filipova responded when asked why she and Parkamento put up with their bleak living conditions.
When the war came, some just found the energy to organize and surmount the hardships together while others languished in despair.
“We’ve tried helping them,” said Anna, 66, a tenant of the second block who has lived for 19 years in the complex built in the early 1970s. “When the humanitarian aid deliveries arrive, we visit Vera and Nataliya to bring them their aid.”
She and some of the other residents said a key to their resilience was maintaining a strict routine, cooking enough food for two days of breakfasts and dinners, eating the former at noon and the latter at 4 pm.

’WE CARE FOR EACH OTHER’
In between, they said, they haul water, read, and tend their gardens and chat, sitting on sunny days at a makeshift table in the shadow of their block, trying to ignore frequent blasts and occasional far-off small arms fire.
“All of the people who have stayed here for the last three months are like family,” Anna said of her companions. “We have got close to each other. We care for each other.”
Gardening is especially calming.
“I love the soil,” said Alla, whose family hails from a farming village in a Russian-controlled area north of Slatyne. “My soul would ache if I could not plant anything in that earth. It distracts you. How is it not possible not to love your soil?”
For all the differences in how they cope, the war is ever present for the seven friends, Filipova and Parkamento, and Volodiya Stachuk, a 34-year-old tractor driver who lives in the basement of another block next to that of the two women.
None can forget being jarred awake the night that a Russian missile plunged into an adjacent house earlier this month.
The explosion blew out that building’s walls and roof, shattered many of the Commune’s windows and shredded Stachuk’s apartment with shrapnel, forcing him to move to his basement.
The blast also killed Filipova’s cat, Gina, she said, and left Alla with a memento of the exact moment of her brush with death.
“The explosion knocked a clock off my wall and broke it,” she recalled. “It stopped at 12:05 am.”


Freed Palestinian student accuses Columbia University of inciting violence

Updated 53 min 36 sec ago
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Freed Palestinian student accuses Columbia University of inciting violence

  • Mahdawi said instead of being a “beacon of hope,” the university is inciting violence against students
  • “Columbia University is participating in the destruction of the democratic system,”

NEW YORK: A Palestinian student arrested as he was about to finalize his US citizenship accused Columbia University on Thursday of eroding democracy with its handling of campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, who led anti-war protests at the Ivy League school in New York in 2023 and 2024, spent 16 days in a Vermont prison before a judge ordered him released on April 30.

On Friday, an appeals court in New York denied the government’s request to halt that order, saying the Trump administration’s jurisdictional arguments were unlikely to succeed and that it hadn’t shown that Mahdawi’s release has caused irreparable harm.

“Individual liberty substantially outweighs the government’s weak assertions of administrative and logistical costs,” wrote the three-judge panel at the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Trump administration has said Mahdawi should be deported because his activism threatens its foreign policy goals, but the judge who released him on bail ruled that he has raised a “substantial claim” that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees.

Mahdawi spoke to The Associated Press on Thursday, a day after pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with campus security guards inside the university’s main library. At least 80 people were taken into custody, police said.

Mahdawi said instead of being a “beacon of hope,” the university is inciting violence against students.

“Columbia University is participating in the destruction of the democratic system,” Mahdawi said in the interview. “They are supporting the initiatives and the agenda of the Trump administration, and they are punishing and torturing their students.”

A spokesperson for Columbia University, which in March announced sweeping policy changes related to protests following Trump administration threats to revoke its federal funding, declined to comment Thursday beyond the response of the school’s acting president to Wednesday’s protests.

The acting president, Claire Shipman, said the protesters who had holed up inside a library reading room were asked repeatedly to show identification and to leave, but they refused. The school then asked police in “to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community,” she said in a statement Wednesday evening, calling the protest actions “outrageous” and a disruption to students for final exams.

Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, was born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and moved to the United States in 2014.

At Columbia, he organized campus protests and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union with Mahmoud Khalil, another Palestinian permanent resident of the US and graduate student who was arrested in March.

On April 14, Mahdawi had taken a written citizenship test, answered verbal questions and signed a document about the pledge of allegiance at an immigration office in Colchester when his interviewer left the room. Masked and armed agents then entered and arrested him, he said. Though he had suspected a trap, the moment was still shocking, he said, triggering a cascade of contrasting emotions.

“Light and darkness, cold and hot. Having rights or not having rights at all,” he said.

Immigration authorities have detained college students from around the country since the first days of the Trump administration, many of whom participated in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. Mahdawi was among the first to win release from custody after challenging his arrest.

In another case, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday in favor of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, upholding an order to transfer her from a Louisiana detention center back to New England to determine whether her rights were violated and if she should be released.

Mahdawi said his message to the Turkish student and others was “stay positive and don’t let this injustice shake your belief in the inevitability of justice.”
“People are working hard. Communities are mobilizing,” he said. “The justice system has signaled to America with my case, and with Rumeysa’s yesterday with the Second Circuit, that justice is functioning and checks and balances is still in function.”

Mahdawi’s release, which is being challenged by the government, allows him to travel outside of his home state of Vermont and attend his graduation from Columbia in New York later this month. He said he plans to do so, though he believes the administration has turned its back on him and rejected the work of a student diplomacy council he served on alongside Jewish, Israeli and Lebanese students.

“I plan to attend the graduation because it is a message,” he said. “This is a message that education is hope, education is light, and there is no power in the world that should take that away from us.”


Migrants told of Libya deportation waited hours on tarmac, attorney says

Updated 09 May 2025
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Migrants told of Libya deportation waited hours on tarmac, attorney says

  • A Vietnamese worker was among the migrants woken in the early morning hours and bused from an immigration detention center
  • He was told on Monday to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya

WASHINGTON: Migrants in Texas who were told they would be deported to Libya sat on a military airfield tarmac for hours on Wednesday, unsure of what would happen next, an attorney for one of the men told Reuters.

The attorney, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said his client, a Vietnamese construction worker from Los Angeles, was among the migrants woken in the early morning hours and bused from an immigration detention center in Pearsall, Texas, to an airfield where a military aircraft awaited them.

After several hours, they were bused back to the detention center around noon, the attorney said on Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Reuters was first to report that US President Donald Trump’s administration was poised to deport migrants to Libya, a move that would escalate his immigration crackdown which has already drawn legal backlash.

Officials earlier this week told Reuters the US military could fly the migrants to the North African country as soon as Wednesday, but stressed that plans could change.

A US official told Reuters the flight never departed. As of Friday, it was unclear if the administration was still planning to proceed with the deportations.

A federal judge in Boston ruled on Wednesday that any effort by the Trump administration to deport non-Libyan migrants to Libya without adequate screenings for possible persecution or torture would clearly violate a prior court order.

Lawyers for a group of migrants pursuing a class action lawsuit had made an emergency request to the court hours after the news broke of the potential flight to Libya.

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
Nguyen, who declined to name his client, said the man was told on Monday to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya. The man, who does not read English well, declined to sign it and was placed in solitary confinement and shackled along with four or five other men, the attorney said.

The man was never provided an opportunity to express a fear of being deported to Libya as required under federal immigration law and the recent judicial order, Nguyen said.

“They said, ‘We’re deporting you to Libya,’ even though he hadn’t signed the form, he didn’t know what the form was,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen said his client, originally from Vietnam, has lived in the US since the 1990s but was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year during a regular check-in.

Vietnam declines to accept some deportees and processes deportation paperwork slowly, Nguyen said, making it harder for the US to send deportees there.


Activists hold ‘die-in’ protest at Soviet monument in Warsaw

Updated 09 May 2025
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Activists hold ‘die-in’ protest at Soviet monument in Warsaw

  • They chanted “terrorists” as Russia’s ambassador to Poland made his way to the monument
  • A handful of people also showed up to lay flowers at the cemetery away from the protests

WARSAW: Pro-Ukrainian activists held a protest at a Soviet memorial in Warsaw where Moscow’s ambassador placed a wreath on Friday, as Russia celebrates World War II Victory Day.

Some two dozen protesters wrapped in white sheets, their clothes and faces splattered with a red substance imitating blood, lay at the foot of a monument at the cemetery for Soviet soldiers in Poland’s capital.

They chanted “terrorists” as Russia’s ambassador to Poland, Sergei Andreyev, made his way to the monument with a wreath to commemorate the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany.

“The idea was that the path the ambassador would take to reach the monument would be lined with the graves of people who died innocently during the war” in Ukraine, Miroslaw Petryga, 70, who participated in the lie-in, told AFP.

Poland is a staunch ally of Kyiv, supporting Ukraine with military and political aid as it fends off a Russian invasion that is grinding through its fourth year.

“It was the gait of a man pretending not to see anything, with tunnel vision,” Petryga, a Ukrainian engineer who has lived in Poland for decades, said of Andreyev.

The ambassador walked past the protesters amid a heavy police presence and with a handful of supporters and security guards around him.

The activists also scattered children’s toys at the entrance to the cemetery. The teddy bears, balls and other items were also splattered with a blood-like liquid to symbolize child victims of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Some were wearing t-shirts with the slogan “Make Russia small again” and were collecting signatures under a petition to expel the Russian ambassador from Poland.

At the site, around a dozen people also gathered at a counter protest, wearing the St. George ribbon, a historical symbol of Russian and Soviet military successes.

Minor scuffles and verbal altercations broke out between the groups.

A handful of people also showed up to lay flowers at the cemetery away from the protests.

“We should honor the memory of those soldiers who died in the World War,” said Natalia, a 67-year-old who held a black-and-white photo that she said showed her father who had fought in the war.

The Russian citizen and longtime Polish resident declined to give her full name.

In 2022, the year Russia launched the full-scale war, protesters at the Soviet mausoleum threw a red substance at Moscow’s envoy.
A year later Andreyev was blocked by activists from laying flowers at the monument.

The Kremlin is using its annual Victory Day parade in Moscow — marking 80 years since the end of World War II — to whip up patriotism at home and project strength abroad as its troops fight in Ukraine.

But for Natalia Panchenko from the pro-Ukrainian organization Euromaidan, the day should serve as a reminder of Russia’s ongoing war.

“It is important to us that today, when people remember that there is a country called Russia, they do not remember Russia through Russian propaganda, but remember the real Russia,” Panchenko told AFP.

“And Russia is a terrorist state,” she said.


Cyprus court jails Hungarians brokering property sales in Turkish-held north

Updated 09 May 2025
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Cyprus court jails Hungarians brokering property sales in Turkish-held north

  • The two women were convicted of advertising and finding buyers for coastal properties
  • Friday’s verdict highlights the complexity and sensitivity over territory in Cyprus

NICOSIA: A court in Cyprus sentenced two Hungarian nationals to prison on Friday for brokering sales of properties in the Turkish-held north of the island seized from fleeing Greek Cypriots in a 1974 war.

The two women were convicted of advertising and finding buyers for coastal properties without the consent of the registered owners in the territory, which is a Turkish Cypriot state recognized only by Turkiye.

Friday’s verdict, likely to draw the ire of Turkish Cypriots, highlights the complexity and sensitivity over territory in Cyprus, where thousands of people lost property and homes from internal displacement and a 1974 Turkish invasion triggered by a brief Greek-inspired coup.

Those properties have since been re-distributed, and bought and sold many times. The territory has recently seen a surge in high-end investment.

Cyprus’s Criminal Court passed down sentencing of 2.5 years and 15 months jail to the two women, the semi-official Cyprus News Agency (CNA) reported. They had pleaded guilty to a number of charges, and prosecutors suspended others.

The court is based in the southern part of Cyprus run by its internationally recognized Greek Cypriot government. The women were arrested late last year after arriving in the south.

Greek Cypriot authorities have increasingly pursued legal action against foreign nationals investing in disputed properties in north Cyprus in recent years, and the issue is known to have caused friction in attempts to relaunch peace talks.

Two other cases are pending before the courts.


Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister highlights importance of ties with Japan

Updated 09 May 2025
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Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister highlights importance of ties with Japan

  • Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi stated that Japan is committed to continuing its efforts toward a two-state solution for Palestine
  • Iwaya stated that Jordan is playing an important role amid the fluid international situation

TOKYO: Jordanian Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Ayman Al Safadi met with Japanese Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi and Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi Yoshimasa in Tokyo on Friday and highlighted the importance of the partnership between Jordan and Japan, Japan’s Foreign Ministry reported.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi stated that Japan is committed to continuing its efforts toward a two-state solution for Palestine and establishing peace and prosperity in the region in coordination with Jordan, which, he said, was a vital part of stability in the region.

Iwaya welcomed his Jordanian counterpart and appreciated the visit to Japan and the Osaka-Kansai Expo of Crown Prince Hussein, who had “fruitful discussions” with Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru on Thursday.

Iwaya stated that Jordan is playing an important role amid the fluid international situation and added that he hopes to work closely with Jordan toward achieving a “two-state solution” for Palestine and establishing long-term peace and stability in the region.

The two foreign ministers met previously in Munich and Iwaya said the high-level visits and meetings “symbolize the strategic partnership between our two countries.”
He also offered condolences for those affected by the flooding in Petra.
Foreign Minister Safadi said he appreciated support from Japan in various fields, including economic reforms. He also congratulated Japan on the success of the Osaka-Kansai Expo.

He explained the latest regional situation and Jordan’s diplomatic efforts and stated that Jordan attaches great importance to cooperation with “close partner” Japan. He also expressed his gratitude for the assistance Japan has extended to Jordan thus far.

He added that he was looking forward to “in-depth discussions about the challenges we face in the region, particularly efforts to stop the Israeli aggression in Gaza and to confront the massive humanitarian disaster it is suffering, in addition to discussing the situation in Syria and the situation in the region in general.”

“We emphasize the importance of Japan’s role,” he said. “Japan is highly respected in our region, and Japan’s policies are aimed at achieving security, stability, peace and development. These are also the goals of our policies in Jordan.”

Discussions centered on bilateral cooperation and various issues in the Middle East.