9 killed in Russian aerial attacks on Ukraine ahead of G7 summit aimed at slowing Moscow’s offensive

This handout photograph taken and released by the Ukrainian Emergency Service on Jun. 12, 2024, shows rescuers working at the site following a missile attack in Kryvyi Rig, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (AFP)
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Updated 12 June 2024
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9 killed in Russian aerial attacks on Ukraine ahead of G7 summit aimed at slowing Moscow’s offensive

  • Zelensky said the strike has again proven that “Ukraine, together with its partners, must strengthen its air defenses”
  • “Modern air defense systems are capable of providing maximum protection of people, our cities, and our positions“

KYIV: Russian forces launched new deadly attacks on Ukraine, killing at least nine people on Wednesday, a day before the leaders of countries that are some of Ukraine’s biggest backers were to discuss how to slow Moscow’s offensive.
Ukrainian authorities said that along with the nine killed, 29 others, including five children, were wounded when Russian missiles hit an apartment block in Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown.
Zelensky said the strike has again proven that “Ukraine, together with its partners, must strengthen its air defenses” — something that he has repeatedly appealed for with Ukraine’s Western partners. The United States has agreed to send another Patriot missile system, two US officials said late Tuesday.
“Modern air defense systems are capable of providing maximum protection of people, our cities, and our positions,” Zelensky said. “And we need as many of them as possible.”
Earlier Wednesday, Ukraine’s air force said it shot down more than two dozen air targets, including cruise missiles, a Kinzhal ballistic missile and Shahed drones. Several people were wounded, authorities said.
Kyiv’s outgunned and outnumbered forces are battling to hold back the bigger Russian army, which is trying to exploit Ukrainian vulnerabilities. Ukraine has been short of troops, ammunition and air defenses in recent months as the Kremlin’s forces try to cripple the national power supply and punch through the front line in eastern parts of the country.
Ukraine will need to weather the Russian onslaught through the summer, military analysts say, and in the meantime train more soldiers, build fortifications and hope that the provision of Western military aid picks up speed so that in 2025 Kyiv may be able to mount its own offensive.
Several diplomatic events over the next few days are aimed at how to help Ukraine fend off the Russian invasion or how to bring about an end to the war.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden and the other Group of Seven leaders will gather in Italy for their annual summit to discuss ways to help Ukraine, including how to divert more frozen Russian assets to Kyiv’s defense.
Separately, the Biden administration on Wednesday said it had broadened sanctions against Russia by targeting companies that help Moscow’s war effort and raising the stakes for foreign financial institutions that work with sanctioned Russian entities.
The more than 300 new sanctions are largely aimed at deterring individuals and companies in countries such as China, the United Arab Emirates and Türkiye from helping Moscow circumvent Western blocks on obtaining key technology. They also threaten foreign financial institutions with sanctions if they do business with almost any sanctioned Russian entity, underscoring the US view that the Kremlin has pivoted the Russian economy on to a war footing.
Biden and Zelensky will also sign a bilateral security agreement between the US and Ukraine on Thursday, when they meet on the G7 summit’s sidelines, the White House said.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the agreement would not commit US troops directly to Ukraine’s defense, but that it would demonstrate the US supports the people of Ukraine and serve as a “bridge” to when Ukraine is invited to join the NATO alliance — a long-term priority of Zelensky’s that alliance members have said will first require an end to the war.
While the G7 meets in Italy, defense chiefs from the US, Europe and other nations will meet Thursday in Brussels for their monthly meeting on Ukraine’s security needs. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will host the event.
And this weekend, representatives of nearly 90 countries and organizations, half from Europe, are expected to attend a summit in Switzerland aimed at charting a path to peace between Russia and Ukraine, though Russia won’t be attending.
Both sides in Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II have been reaching out to friendly nations to help keep their armed forces supplied. The war has cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides, including more than 11,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the United Nations.
While Ukraine has looked to Western countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned to nations such as Iran and North Korea for help. Unconfirmed reports suggested Putin may soon make a third visit to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Moscow showed no signs of relenting in the war. The Kremlin said Wednesday that Putin met with Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, the chief of the military’s General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, and the commanders of Russia’s five military districts.
A readout of the Tuesday night meeting said the officials presented Putin with “plans to continue the hostilities.”
Fighting along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line has in recent months focused on the partly occupied Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces are trying to reach the key hilltop city of Chasiv Yar and other strategic hubs.
Last month, Russian forces also launched an offensive in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, which borders Russia. Putin said he wanted to establish a buffer zone there to prevent Ukrainian cross-border attacks. The offensive drew some Ukrainian fighters away from Donetsk.
However, Russia’s gains have been incremental and costly.
In the Kharkiv region, Russian units have become bogged down in Vovchansk, Ukraine Commander in Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said Wednesday on the Telegram messaging app.


The USAID shutdown is upending livelihoods for nonprofit workers, farmers and other Americans

Updated 19 February 2025
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The USAID shutdown is upending livelihoods for nonprofit workers, farmers and other Americans

  • More than 80 percent of companies that have contracts with USAID are American, according to aid data company DevelopmentAid

WASHINGTON: There’s the executive in a US supply-chain company whose voice breaks while facing the next round of calls telling employees they no longer have jobs.
And a farmer in Missouri who grew up knowing that a world with more hungry people is a world that’s more dangerous.
And a Maryland-based philanthropy, founded by Jews who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe, is shutting down much of its more than 120-year-old mission.
Beyond the impact of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, some 14,000 agency employees and foreign contractors as well as hundreds of thousands of people receiving aid abroad — many American businesses, farms and nonprofits— say the cutoff of US money they are owed has left them struggling to pay workers and cover bills. Some face financial collapse.
US organizations do billions of dollars of business with USAID and the State Department, which oversee more than $60 billion in foreign assistance. More than 80 percent of companies that have contracts with USAID are American, according to aid data company DevelopmentAid.
President Donald Trump stopped payment nearly overnight in a Jan. 20 executive order freezing foreign assistance. The Trump administration accused USAID’s programs of being wasteful and promoting a liberal agenda.
USAID Stop-Work, a group tracking the impact, says USAID contractors have reported that they laid off nearly 13,000 American workers. The group estimates that the actual total is more than four times that.
Here are stories of some Americans whose livelihoods have been upended:
Crop innovation work facing closures
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — a lab that works with processers, food manufacturers and seed and fertilizer companies to expand soybean usage in 31 countries — is set to close in April unless it gets a last-minute reprieve.
Peter Goldsmith, director and principal investigator at the Soybean Innovation Lab, said the group has helped open international markets to US farmers and made the crop more prevalent in Africa.
For Goldsmith, that kind of steady partnership built on trade and US foreign aid offers the best way to wield US influence, he said.
Goldsmith said innovation labs at other land grant universities also are closing. Without them, Goldsmith worries about what will happen in the countries where they worked — what other actors may step in, or whether conflict will result.
“It’s a vacuum,” he said. “And what will fill that vacuum? It will be filled. There’s no doubt about it.”
A refugee mission is imperiled
For nonprofits working to stabilize populations and economies abroad, the United States was not only the biggest humanitarian donor but an inextricable part of the whole machinery of development and humanitarian work.
Among them, HIAS, a Jewish group aiding refugees and potential refugees, is having to shut down “almost all” of its more than 120-year-old mission.
The Maryland-based philanthropy was founded by Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Its mission in recent decades has broadened to include keeping vulnerable people safe in their home country so they don’t have to flee, said HIAS President Mark Hetfield.
Hetfield said the first Trump administration saw the wisdom of that effort. Hias experienced some of its biggest growth during Trump’s first term as a result.
But now, Trump’s shutdown of foreign assistance severed 60 percent of HIAS’s funding, overnight. The group immediately started furloughs among its 2,000 direct employees, operating in 17 states and 20 countries.
The administration calls it a “suspension,” rather than a termination, Hetfield said. “But we have to stop paying our leases, stop paying our employees.”
“It’s not a suspension,” Hetfield said. “That’s a lie.”
Tracking USAID’s effectiveness may fall by the wayside
Keith Ives, a Marine veteran who fell in love with data, has a small Denver-area nonprofit that brought a numbers-crunching relentlessness to his USAID-funded mission of testing the effectiveness of the agency’s programs.
For Ives’ teams, that’s included weighing and measuring children in Ethiopia who are getting USAID support, testing whether they’re chunkier and taller than kids who aren’t. (On average they are.)
Last week, Ives was planning to tell half his full-time staff of 28 that they would be out of a job at the end of the month. Ives’ Causal Design nonprofit gets 70 percent of its work from USAID.
At first, “it was an obsession over how can I fix this,” said Ives, who described his anxiety in the first days of the cutoff as almost paralyzing. “There must be a magic formula. ... I’m just not thinking hard enough, right?“
Now, Ives goes through all-staff call after call, breaking bad news on the impact of USAID’s shutdown. Being transparent with them, it turned out, was the best he could do.
He looks at the US breaking partnerships and contracts in what had been USAID’s six-decade aim of boosting national security by building alliances and crowding out adversaries.
For the US now, “I think for years to come, when we try to flex, I think people are going to go, ‘Yeah, but like, remember 2025?’” Ives said. “’You could just be gone tomorrow.’”
A supplier faces ruin
It takes expertise, cash flow and hundreds of staff to get USAID-funded food and goods to remote and often ill-regulated places around the globe.
For US companies doing that, the administration’s only follow-up to the stop-work orders it sent out after the money freeze have been termination notices — telling them some contracts are not only paused, but ended.
Almost all of those companies have been kept silent publicly, for fear of drawing the wrath of the Trump administration or endangering any court challenges.
Speaking anonymously for those reasons, an executive of one supply-chain business that delivers everything from hulking equipment to food describes the financial ruin facing those companies.
While describing the next round of layoff calls to be made, the executive, who is letting hundreds of workers go in total, sobs.
Farmers may lose market share
Tom Waters, a seventh-generation farmer who grows corn, soybean and wheat near Orrick, Missouri, thinks about his grandfather when he reads about what is happening with USAID.
“I’ve heard him say a hundred times, ‘People get hungry, they’ll fight,’” Waters said.
Feeding people abroad is how the American farmer stabilizes things across the world, he says. “Because we’re helping them keep people’s bellies full.”
USAID-run food programs have been a dependable customer for US farmers since the Kennedy administration. Legislation mandates US shippers get a share of the business as well.
Even so, American farm sales for USAID humanitarian programs are a fraction of overall US farm exports. And politically, US farmers know that Trump has always taken care to buffer the impact when his tariffs or other moves threaten demand for US farm goods.
US commodity farmers generally sell their harvests to grain silos and co-ops, at a per bushel rate. While the impact on Waters’ farm is not yet clear, farmers worry any time something could hit demand and prices for their crops or give a foreign competitor an opening to snatch away a share of their market permanently.
Still, Waters doesn’t think the uncertainty is eroding support for Trump.
“I really think people, the Trump supporters are really going to have patience with him, and feel like this is what he’s got to do,” he said.


Russian freedom depends on Ukraine winning war: Kasparov

Updated 19 February 2025
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Russian freedom depends on Ukraine winning war: Kasparov

  • “There is no freedom of Russia, no end of the Putin regime, without Ukrainian victory,” the chess grandmaster told a press conference

GENEVA: Freedom in Russia and the end of President Vladimir Putin’s rule depends on Ukraine winning the war, Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov said Tuesday as Moscow and Washington held talks.
As US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks in Saudi Arabia, former chess world champion Kasparov said any outcome that Putin could present as a victory would only extend his grip on power.
“There is no freedom of Russia, no end of the Putin regime, without Ukrainian victory,” the chess grandmaster told a press conference after addressing the annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy conference.
“Even a partial victory; inflicting defeat on Putin will lead to a change in Russia.
“If Putin wins, or presents the outcome as victory,” which could involve “keeping territories and lifting sanctions... he’ll stay there. A dictator is never in danger if he is still on the rise.”
Kasparov, 61, retired from chess in 2005 to focus on political activism and has lived in exile in New York for the past decade. The longtime Putin opponent was added to Russia’s list of “extremists” in March 2024.
Kasparov spoke as many in Europe fear that US President Donald Trump’s overhaul of US policy on Russia will upend Europe’s decades-long security structure.
Kasparov said Trump did “absolutely not” understand the complexity of the conflict, and those around him were too scared to tell him that his geopolitical knowledge was insufficient.
He expected Trump would have to make “massive concessions” to secure his objective of ending the war.
Kasparov said Rubio was “not an idiot — he’s spineless, but he still has brains,” and therefore understands that he can’t deliver “unless they have to give up everything to Putin.”
He said Putin was pretending he was in a strong position but the Russian economy “will probably collapse within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Meanwhile Ukraine could keep fighting if Europe provided the money to buy US weaponry — and “as long as money is being paid, I don’t think he (Trump) cares.”
“If Trump wants to end the war, it’s not difficult: just cut Russian oil exports,” Kasparov added.
The chess great said the West had sorely lacked a collective strategy since Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Meanwhile “Putin has a very simple idea: stay in power. That’s it. There’s no other idea,” said Kasparov.
“The cause of the war is Putin and his imperial ambitions that will never disappear, because there’s nothing else that can justify him staying in power for life.”
Kasparov said Russia’s biggest problem was not what happens in Putin’s inner circle but that many average citizens still “live in imperial dreams.”
“The Russian empire must go, and the future of Russia may not be in the current borders of Russia. The way I see the future, Russia must return all the occupied territories — Crimea included.”


Florida man charged with attempted murder after shooting two men he thought were ‘Palestinians’

Updated 18 February 2025
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Florida man charged with attempted murder after shooting two men he thought were ‘Palestinians’

  • Brafman, 27, is being held without bond on second-degree murder charges at a county jail in Miami, records show

TALLAHASSEE, Florida: A Florida man has been charged with two counts of attempted murder after opening fire on two men in Miami Beach who he thought were Palestinians.
According to an arrest report, Mordechai Brafman shot at the men 17 times in the “unprovoked” attack, telling officers that while driving his truck, he “saw two Palestinians” and opened fire on their car, thinking he had killed the pair. But the men survived, one suffering a shot to the shoulder and the other grazed by a bullet.
Brafman, 27, is being held without bond on second-degree murder charges at a county jail in Miami, records show. He’s also been ordered to stay away from the victims, an Israeli father and son who were vacationing in South Florida, according to the Miami Herald.
Brafman’s attorney Dustin Tischler has said his client was experiencing a “severe mental health crisis” at the time of the shooting, which caused him to “fear for his life.”
“It is believed that his ability to make sound judgments was significantly compromised,” Tischler said in a statement to The Associated Press, adding that Brafman is seeking “necessary treatment” while cooperating with law enforcement.
The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, has called for federal hate crime charges against Brafman, saying his alleged bias against Palestinians should warrant the charges regardless of the victims’ ethnicity.
___ Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

 


White House says Elon Musk is not in charge at DOGE, but is advising the president

Updated 18 February 2025
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White House says Elon Musk is not in charge at DOGE, but is advising the president

  • Musk’s exact role could be key in the legal fight over DOGE’s access to government data
  • The Trump administration, on the other hand, says Musk is not a DOGE employee

WASHINGTON: The White House says billionaire Elon Musk is not technically part of the Department of Government Efficiency team that is sweeping through federal agencies, but is rather a senior adviser to President Donald Trump.
Musk’s exact role could be key in the legal fight over DOGE’s access to government data as the Trump administration moves to lay off thousands of federal workers. Defining him as an adviser rather than the administrator in charge of day-to-day operations at DOGE could help the administration push back against a lawsuit arguing Musk has too much power for someone who isn’t elected or Senate-confirmed.
The declaration was filed Monday as the Trump administration fends off the lawsuit from several Democratic states that want to block Musk and the DOGE team from accessing government systems. The litigants say Musk is wielding “virtually unchecked power” in violation of the Constitution.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, says Musk is not a DOGE employee and has “no actual authority to make government decisions himself,” Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration, said in court papers. The documents do not name the administrator of DOGE, whose work Musk has championed in posts on his social-media platform X and in a public appearance at the White House.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined Tuesday to say who is leading DOGE. Layoffs are up to individual agency heads rather than DOGE, she said.
The DOGE team has roamed from agency to agency, tapping into computer systems, digging into budgets and searching for waste, fraud and abuse, while lawsuits pile up claiming Trump and DOGE are violating the law. At least two are targeting Musk himself.
Last week, Musk called for the US to “delete entire agencies” from the federal government as part of the push to radically cut spending and restructure its priorities.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan seemed skeptical in a hearing Monday when Justice Department lawyers asserted that Musk has no formal authority.
“I think you stretch too far. I disagree with you there,” Chutkan said.


Ethiopia and Somalia hold a first round of technical talks in Turkiye toward resolving their dispute

Updated 18 February 2025
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Ethiopia and Somalia hold a first round of technical talks in Turkiye toward resolving their dispute

  • Tensions have simmered since landlocked Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland last year to lease land along its coastline
  • Somaliland seceded from Somalia over 30 years ago but is not recognized by the African Union or the United Nations as an independent state

ANKARA, Turkiye: Top diplomats from Ethiopia and Somalia on Tuesday held a first round of technical talks aimed at resolving a dispute sparked by a deal between Ethiopia and Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland, Turkiye’s Foreign Ministry said.
Turkiye has been mediating between the Horn of Africa countries after concerns about potential conflict in an already volatile region. Tensions have simmered since landlocked Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland last year to lease land along its coastline to establish a marine force base.
In return, Ethiopia would become the first country to formally recognize Somaliland’s independence. Somalia says the deal infringes on its sovereignty and territory.
In December, the leaders of Somalia and Ethiopia met in Turkiye and agreed to initiate technical talks aimed at reaching a potential agreement that upholds Somalia’s territorial integrity while allowing Ethiopia access to the sea.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry said delegations led by Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedion Timothewos and Somalia’s state minister for foreign affairs, Ali Mohamed Omar, held a first round of technical negotiations in the Turkish capital, Ankara.
“Both delegations demonstrated their commitment to the letter and spirit of the Ankara Declaration,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in reference to their statement issued in December. “The delegations began the concrete work to transform this vision into reality.”
The next round of talks is in March, the ministry statement said.
Turkiye has significant investment in Somalia, including its largest overseas military base.
Somaliland seceded from Somalia over 30 years ago but is not recognized by the African Union or the United Nations as an independent state. Somalia considers Somaliland part of its territory.
With a population estimated at over 120 million, Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country in the world.