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A woman walks in the destroyed Ukrainian eastern city of Druzhkivka, hit by a Russian air strike.
Welcome to Tuesday, where fighting rages on in eastern Ukraine, Boris Johnson survives (though not unscathed) a vote of no-confidence, and KFC is forced to pick a lettuce alternative in Australia. Meanwhile, Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza goes to school with Ukrainian pupils and their teachers in Poland.
[*Salem - Kazakh]
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• Ukrainian forces hold out in key regions:Fighting continues in Severodonetsk as Russia continues its attacks, while President Volodymyr Zelensky says that a plan for Ukrainian forces to retake the city may be too costly. Fighting also continues in the regions of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhya while Russia prepares to celebrate “Russia Day” in the Kherson region of Ukraine on June 12.
• Boris Johnson wins confidence vote: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has won a confidence vote, which could have seen him removed from power. Johnson won the vote by a margin of 211 to 148, with the number of rebel votes coming in higher than expected.
• Gupta brothers arrested in UAE: Indian businessmen Rajesh and Atul Gupta, known for their supposed involvement in South African corruption, have been arrested in the United Arab Emirates, as multiple groups in South Africa call for their speedy extradition. The two fled South Africa in 2016 amid rising pressures calling for their arrest in relation to charges of corruption.
• No more Apple chargers: In a blow to Apple, which is known for its proprietary connectors and accessories, the EU has ruled that all mobile phones, cameras, and tablets must use the same charging port by 2024.
• Tensions rising between West and Pyongyang: The United States and South Korea have responded to a North Korean missile test by firing eight more missiles off the coast of the Korean peninsula. These launches served as a demonstration of South Korea’s ability to respond to North Korean threats. This news comes as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemns the actions of Chinese pilots who are accused of putting Canadian pilots at risk during a UN mission to enforce sanctions on North Korea.
• Dominican Republic government official killed: Dominican Minister of the Environment and Natural Resources Orlando Jorge Mera was shot dead in his office by a close friend on Monday. The killer was caught after confessing to a priest. No motive has been reported.
• KFC forced to swap lettuce for cabbage in Australia: Australian KFC locations are now mixing lettuce with cabbage after floods destroyed lettuce crops, leading to a shortage.
UK daily The Times lends its front page to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a “wounded victor” after his narrower-than-expected survival of a vote of confidence, amid the “Partygate” scandal and Johnson’s general handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Johnson will now have to address the rifts within his party as he completes the rest of his term.
Jordan has announced a ten-year plan to double its economic growth by attracting $41 billion in funds to raise the country’s GDP to $82 bn by 2033. If Jordan fails to meet its economic goals in ten years, a million Jordanians will be without jobs, according to Prime Minister Bisher al-Khasawneh.
After fleeing the war, many Ukrainian teachers have found new jobs in Poland. But their work involves more than just teaching — they're helping Ukrainian children adapt to a whole new life, reports Lena Gontarek in Gazeta Wyborcza.
🔔 The bell rings for Polish lesson in the Primary School 34 in the city of Lublin in southeastern Poland. There are 25 students, five of whom are children from Ukraine who came here after the outbreak of the war with Russia. Olga is in the classroom alongside the teacher. She used to teach English in Ukraine, but she is now employed in Poland as a teacher's assistant.
👩🏫 There are other Ukrainian teachers working at the primary school where Olga is employed. They mainly help in preparatory classes, opened especially for Ukrainian children. In Polish schools, there are about 200,000 students from Ukraine who fled the war with Russia. Some local governments — like Lublin — have therefore decided to employ Ukrainian teachers themselves, mainly as teaching assistants.
🏫 Thanks to the "Cash for Work" program, by mid-May, more than 500 Ukrainian teachers had found work as teacher's assistants in 16 Polish cities, both large and small. The basic contract lasts three months. However, the foundation does its best to extend these contracts for the vacations and next school year.
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
Russia is solely responsible for this food crisis.
— European Council President Charles Michel accused Moscow of using food supplies as a “stealth missile against developing countries” during a UN Security Council, blaming Russia for the food crisis. Russia’s UN diplomat Vassily Nebenzia stormed out of the meeting after Michel’s statement.
✍️ Newsletter by Joel Silvestri, Lisa Berdet and Bertrand Hauger.
Let us know what’s happening in your corner of the world!
Ukrainian officials say a fleet of Russian ships has been forced more than 100 kilometers from the Ukrainian coast, which could be used to alleviate the economic pressure of the Russian blockade.
After fleeing the war, many Ukrainian teachers have found new jobs in Poland. But their work involves more than just teaching — they're helping Ukrainian children adapt to a whole new life.
Polish-born French writer Marek Halter, who fled the Nazis to the USSR, has known Vladimir Putin for 30 years. Halter sent the Russian president a long letter on May 18, and later shared a copy of it with Les Echos. In the letter, he lays out the path for Putin to renounce the war without undermining Russia's standing.
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.
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.
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
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
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.