Venice ... Dove la terra gira intorno al mare, as they say there — "where the earth revolves around the sea."
En route to Greece, we drove from France in our Peugeot 404, which we had to leave outside the Venetian lagoon before taking a vaporetto, the local waterbus. It's cheaper than renting a gondola anyway, which may explain why business was so slow for this gondolier, catching some shade near the Rialto Bridge.
Ukrainian President Zelensky addressed the G7 leaders via video call at the summit in Kruen, Germany, where he asked to “intensify sanctions” against Russia and warned against the war dragging on.
Zelensky addressed the G7 leaders via video call at the summit in Kruen, Germany, where he asked to “intensify sanctions” against Russia. He also requested more reconstruction aid, aircraft defense systems, further help on exporting grain out of the country as well as security guarantees.
The Ukrainian president is also planning on addressing the NATO summit later this week in Madrid to ask for further help against Russia.
Meanwhile, speaking to reporters, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has warned of growing “fatigue in populations and politicians” as he began talks at the G7 summit. Johnson hopes to push for renewed sanctions and isolate Russia from the international finance system.
World Leaders Target Russia With Fresh Sanctions At G7 Summit
Front cover Die Welt
As the G7 summit continues in Germany, world leaders look set to hit Vladimir Putin’s Russia with a fresh wave of sanctions, including imports of gold.
Gold is one of the country’s top exports after energy and has been particularly valuable to Russian elites looking to circumvent Western sanctions. U.K. prime ministerBoris Johnson said the gold band would “directly hit Russian oligarchs and strike at the heart of Putin's war machine."
G7 leaders will be hoping to pile more pressure on Putin as the country’s economy continues to struggle.Russia defaulted on its foreign-currency sovereign debt for the first time since 1918 as Western sanctions shut down payment routes to foreign creditors. The country missed a deadline of Sunday night to pay interest of $100 million on two Eurobonds originally due on May 27.
However, Moscow rejected the word default, saying it had the means to pay the debt but that sanctions have frozen its foreign currency reserves held abroad.
Kyiv Hit By Missiles For the First Time In Weeks, Lviv Also Targeted
One man was killed and six people were hospitalized when two residential buildings in Kyivwere hit by Russian missiles on Sunday morning, the first attack on the Ukrainian capital in three weeks. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, claimed the attacks were to “intimidate Ukrainians”.
Fighting in recent weeks has mostly been confined to the east of the country. However, explosions were also reported in other areas of Ukraine over the weekend, including Lviv in the west of the country.
Ukraine Accuses Russia Of Mass Forced Adoption Of Ukrainian Kids
Ukraine has accused the Russian army of kidnapping and deporting thousands of unaccompanied minors from occupied parts of the country, including orphans and children who have lost their parents during the invasion.
The accusation came in a report from Daria Gerasymchuk, who heads child safety policy for the office of the Ukrainian presidency, who said that 234,000 children have been forcibly deported to Russia, with 4,795 already identified.
"The Russian side calls what they are doing - in fact abducting Ukrainian children - evacuation," says Gerasymchuk. "The Russian Federation is not going to return Ukrainian children to Ukraine. They communicate this very clearly.”
100 More Bodies Found Of Those Killed In Mariupol Bombings
Bodies continue to be found under the rubble of houses in the southern city of Mariupol, the adviser to the mayor of Mariupol Petro Andryushchenko said on Telegram.
“During the inspection of buildings in the Livoberezhny district … more than 100 bodies of the victims of the bombing were found," writes Andryushchenko. He also added that Russians do not plan to seize and bury the bodies.
According to current estimates, more than 20,000 civilians were killed in Mariupol. Exit from the city is currently blocked by the Russian army, even amid reports that contagious diseases are spreading.
Fresh Evidence Of Russian Stealing Ukrainian Grain
After Russian forces were accused of stealing grain and other property from Ukrainian farmers in occupied areas, a new report by the BBC has analyzed satellite images and followed tracking data to look for evidence of where the stolen grain is being taken.
Documents show that the Russian-installed authorities have told farmers they're seizing their grain to ensure what they call "food security".
But CCTV from one farm captured the moment the Russians arrived and video footage showed looting. Some of the grain trucks that were stolen had GPS trackers on them, and using this data, evidence was found that they had gone into Crimea.
While Moscow denies any theft, U.S. officials have named nine ships believed to have transported the stolen grain from Crimea to other parts of the world.
Ukrainian Tennis Player On A “Mission”
\u201c#united24 welcomes the new Ambassador, @ElinaSvitolina\ud83d\udc99\ud83d\udc9b\n\u201cEvery time I won on the court, I was happy to bring victory to my country. I have always been a proud Ukrainian. Today, when my country is facing a horrific enemy, I will not stand aside\u201d\nJoin Elina \u2014 support\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6!\u201d
Ukrainian tennis player Elina Svitolina has put her tennis career on hold to use her platform and provide as much help as she can to her country. The 27-year-old, who won the bronze medal in the Tokyo Olympics, is focusing on raising funds and awareness for her country. She is in regular contact with her family living in Odessa, her hometown, where she gets daily updates on the situation.
She is dedicating her time to the foundation UNITED24, which was set up by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, with the goal of raising funds for medical supplies, defense and eventually rebuilding the country’s infrastructure.
This comes after the tennis star had said she would donate all the prize money she won at the Monterrey Open to the Ukrainian army back in March.
Ukrainian President Zelensky addressed the G7 leaders via video call at the summit in Kruen, Germany, where he asked to “intensify sanctions” against Russia and warned against the war dragging on.
Among the most immediate effects of the overturning of Roe v. Wade is that women who find themselves in states where abortion is outlawed will travel to where it is legal. But that of course requires the right information and economic means to do so.
Trained practitioners warn that unregulated yoga can be detrimental to people's health. The government in India, where the ancient practice was invented, knows this very well — yet continues to postpone regulation.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
The martyrdom of Mariupol
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
A daughter of Kyiv
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.