August 23, 2022

Nearly a million people fled to Germany from the Ukraine war

A total of 967,546 war refugees have arrived from Ukraine in Germany, at least temporarily, since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, the German Interior Ministry said in a statement today.

According to data from the Central Registry of Foreigners updated until last Sunday, August 21, around 36% -351,061- are children and adolescents, and of these, the majority are of primary school age.

Among adults, regarding 74% are women and regarding 8% are older than 64.

Of the almost one million refugees from Ukraine and registered in the Central Register of Foreigners since February 24, regarding 97% are Ukrainian citizens.

Of the refugees registered in Germany, a considerable number may have traveled to other European Union countries or also returned to Ukraine, the statement said.

The war in Ukraine left almost a thousand children dead or injured, according to Unicef

At least 972 children have been killed or injured in Ukraine due to the war with Russia in the last six months, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said.

“These are the figures that the UN has been able to verify. We believe that the real number is much higher,” Unicef ​​executive director Catherine Russell was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency Sputnik.

Most of these casualties, Russell said, are due to the use of explosive weapons that “do not discriminate between civilians and combatants, especially when used in populated areas, as has been the case in Ukraine.”

Beyond physical harm, according to Unicef, “nearly all children in Ukraine have been exposed to deeply distressing events, and those fleeing violence are exposed to significant risk of family separation, violence, abuse, sexual exploitation and child trafficking. people”.

Russia classifies Ukrainians entering Zaporizhia as ‘refugees’

The Russian occupation authorities appear to regard Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhia oblast (region) as independent by identifying Ukrainian citizens who enter this region as temporary asylum seekers, The Kyiv Independent reported today.

The Ukrainian media, citing a report by the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), assured that Yevheny Balitsky, the head of the Russian occupation administration of the Zaporizhia oblast, signed a decree that, in accordance with Russian law, states that every Ukrainian citizen arriving in this region must apply for temporary asylum.

This decree contains several implications both internationally and in Russian domestic law regarding what it means to be a refugee and asylum seeker.

In international law, refugees are “people who seek political asylum elsewhere outside their country of origin due to fear of persecution, conflict, generalized violence and, consequently, require international protection”.

For its part, according to Russian legislation and the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is “a person who is outside his country of origin and fears returning to it due to the risk of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”.

Latvia begins demolition of a great Soviet monument

A group of workers, protected by a newly erected fence and police patrols, began the demolition of the controversial Victory Monument on Tuesday that commemorates the Red Army’s triumph over Nazi Germany in 1945.

Local media reported and posted videos of a large bulldozer destroying parts of a plaza in front of the monument.

The monument, built in 1985 under Soviet rule, consists of several separate elements: two groups of statues, a 79-meter-high obelisk, a large plaque bearing the dates 1941-1945, and a reflecting pool.

On Monday night, as additional security fencing was erected around the monument, some 50 people gathered nearby, some to protest the planned demolition, others to celebrate. According to local media, there were shouting matches and five arrests for disobedience.

Zelensky says Ukrainian flag will fly once more in occupied areas like Crimea

The President of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, assured this Tuesday that the Ukrainian flag will fly once more in all the areas taken by Russia, including in the Crimea peninsula, occupied by Moscow since 2014.

In a speech on the occasion of Ukraine’s national flag day, Zelensky assured that the country’s banner “will return to every city and village, which is now temporarily occupied by Russia.”

The Ukrainian president’s statements, collected by local agencies, were made during the raising ceremony of the Ukrainian national flag in the city of kyiv.

“The blue and yellow flag of Ukraine will fly once more where it is home, where it should by right: in all temporarily occupied settlements in Ukraine,” the president reiterated.

He announced that the banner will once once more be visible in occupied cities like Melitopol, “where those who will lose this war cannot be”, or in Kherson, where “there cannot be a flag of those who do not know what freedom is”, and even at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, now in Russian hands.

According to Zelensky, the Ukrainian flag will also fly in the cities of Crimea, which the Russians occupied in 2014, and in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which make up Donbas, self-proclaimed independent republics recognized by Moscow shortly before the invasion of Ukraine.

“No matter how anyone tries to twist history, these colors are historically associated with Crimea,” Zelensky stressed.

Hundreds of people say goodbye to the murdered daughter of the Russian philosopher close to Putin

Hundreds of people gathered today in Moscow for the funeral of Daria Duguina, daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist intellectual, killed last Saturday in a bomb attack that Russia attributes to Ukraine.

Alexander Dugin, a supporter of the Ukraine invasion who says he is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, may have been the intentional target of the attack that killed his 29-year-old daughter.

Those present, many with flowers, paid their respects to Duguina in a hall at Moscow’s Ostankino TV center, where a black-and-white portrait of her was placed over her open coffin, the AFP news agency reported.

Duguin and his wife, both dressed in black, sat by their daughter’s coffin.

“She died for the people, for Russia, on the front. The front is here,” Duguin said at the start of the ceremony.

Duguina died Saturday when a bomb installed in his car exploded while he was driving on a highway outside Moscow.

Ukraine insists Duguina was executed by Russia

Oleksii Danilov, secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, assured on Tuesday that the murder of Daria Dugina, daughter of the Kremlin ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, was an “execution perpetrated by the Russian secret services and Ukraine had nothing to do with it.”

Danilov, in statements on the Ukrainian Channel 24 reproduced by local agencies, denied the accusations of the Russian secret services, which have implicated Ukraine in Dugina’s death.

“We mightn’t care less regarding this person (Duguina), we really didn’t care. The FSB [Servicio Federal de Seguridad de la Federación Rusa] He did it, and now they are going to say that it was someone on our side who perpetrated it,” he said.

The head of Security and Defense of the country added that Ukrainians “do not work like that. Our men and women have more important tasks. We are not at all involved in the explosion that killed this woman, it is the work of the Russian secret services,” he reiterated. .

He further said that Daria Dugina and her father had criticized what Russia calls a military “special operation” in Ukraine, because they felt it was taking too long.

The Security Council convenes a meeting on the Zaporizhia plant

The UN Security Council will meet urgently on Tuesday to discuss the situation at the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia, which is occupied by Russian forces and has recently been the target of several military attacks.

The meeting was convened at the request of Russia, which requested the participation of the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, who last week addressed the issue of the plant during a visit to Ukraine in which he met, among others, with the president of the country, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Moscow already convened the Security Council on this issue on August 11 to denounce alleged Ukrainian attacks once morest the plant, the largest in Europe, attacks for which kyiv blames Russian forces.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been trying for months to send an expert mission to Zaporizhia to assess the state of the plant, something that both Russia and Ukraine support on paper, but that has not yet been carried out while fear of a possible nuclear catastrophe is growing.

In recent days, Guterres has advocated the total demilitarization of the facility and its surroundings, something that Russia has opposed, as it would imply the withdrawal of its forces from this strategic point.

In addition to this new meeting on Zaporizhia, the Security Council was already scheduled to discuss Ukraine this Wednesday, in a meeting in which the head of the organization is expected to offer a balance of his recent visit to the country.

UN says Russia will commit a war crime if it illegally tries Ukrainian prisoners

The UN said Russia will commit a war crime if it illegally prosecutes and publicly mocks Ukrainian prisoners captured following the fall of the city of Mariupol.

The spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office, Ravina Shamdasani, said there are clear signs that Russia and the armed groups operating under its orders in Donetsk (eastern province of Ukraine) are preparing the trial of prisoners of war, those that he would place in cages that he is building in a public building in Mariupol.

“There are videos and photos in the press and on social networks of the construction of huge cages in the Mariupol Philharmonic compound, and the idea would be to place the prisoners in those cages during the hearings and this is not acceptable, it is an act of humiliation,” he explained.

Shamdasani specified that international humanitarian law “prohibits the creation of courts with the sole purpose of judging prisoners of war, which deprives the accused of their right to an ordinary and fair trial, and which amounts to a war crime.”

Without hesitation, he pointed out that “the Russian Federation would be responsible for the war crime” if these trials were carried out in the way feared.