KYIV: Ukraine braced Monday for what could be the imminent fall of Mariupol to Russia as President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believed “tens of thousands” of people had died in Moscow’s assault on the strategic port.
With the war grinding toward its seventh week, Ukrainian forces said they were also bolstering their positions in the east ahead of an anticipated massive Russian onslaught.
Austria’s chancellor meanwhile became the first European leader to visit Moscow since the Russian invasion, saying he raised alleged war crimes in devastated areas around Kyiv that had been under Russian occupation.
Ukrainian authorities say over 1,200 bodies have been found in the area so far and that they are weighing cases against “500 suspects,” including President Vladimir Putin and other top Russian officials.
Seven bodies were found Monday under the rubble of two multi-story buildings in Borodianka, Kyiv region, the state emergency service said in Telegram, bringing the total to 19.
French investigators arrived in Ukraine to help probe suspected Russian atrocities in the area, as the European Union earmarked 2.5 million euros ($2.7 million) to the International Criminal Court for future Ukraine cases.
Russia is believed to be trying to connect occupied Crimea and Moscow-backed separatist territories Donetsk and Lugansk in Donbas and has laid siege to Mariupol, once a city of more than 400,000 people.
“Today will probably be the last battle, as the ammunition is running out,” the 36th marine brigade of the Ukrainian armed forces said on Facebook.
“It’s death for some of us, and captivity for the rest,” it added, saying it had been “pushed back” and “surrounded” by the Russian army.
A pro-Russia rebel leader, Denis Pushilin, said separatist forces had already taken control of the city’s port, in comments reported by the RIA Novosti news agency.
Speaking to South Korea’s National Assembly by video link in an appeal for military assistance, Zelensky said Russia had “completely destroyed” the city and “burned it to ashes.”
“At least tens of thousands of Mariupol citizens must have been killed,” he said.
Russian forces are also turning their focus to the Donbas region in the east, where Zelensky said Russian troops were preparing “even larger operations.”
“They can use even more missiles against us... But we are preparing for their actions. We will answer,” Zelensky said.
Lugansk governor Sergiy Gaiday warned that the region could suffer as badly as Mariupol.
Over the weekend, further strikes hampered evacuations in and around Kharkiv in the northeast, killing 11 people including a seven-year-old child, regional governor Oleg Synegubov said.
“The Russian army continues to wage war on civilians due to a lack of victories at the front,” he said on Telegram.
In Dnipro, an industrial city of around one million inhabitants, Russian missiles rained down on the local airport, nearly obliterating the facility, local authorities said.
Gaiday said a missile strike on a railway station in the city of Kramatorsk on Friday, which killed 57 people, had left many afraid to flee.
He again urged people to leave the region, with five humanitarian corridors agreed for Monday.
“You are alive because a Russian shell has not yet hit your house or basement — evacuate, buses are waiting, our military routes are as secure as possible,” he wrote on Telegram.
Russia has denied carrying out the strike.
Over the weekend, nearly 50 wounded and elderly patients were transported from the east in a hospital train by medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the first such evacuation since the Kramatorsk attack.
Electrician Evhen Perepelytsia was rescued after he lost his leg in shelling in his hometown of Hirske.
“We hope that the worst is over — that after what I’ve been through, it will be better,” said the 30-year-old after arriving in the western city of Lviv.
On the diplomatic front, EU foreign ministers were meeting Monday to discuss a sixth round of sanctions, with concerns that divisions over a ban on Russian gas and oil imports could blunt their impact.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said his meeting with Putin was not “a visit of friendship,” adding that he “mentioned the serious war crimes in Bucha and other locations.”
US President Joe Biden meanwhile will hold virtual talks on Monday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, just weeks after saying New Delhi had been “shaky” in its response to the invasion.
A US spokeswoman said the two leaders would consult on ways to offset the “destabilising impact (of the war) on global food supply and commodity markets.”
Russia was responsible for an escalating global food crisis because of its bombing of wheat stocks and preventing ships from carrying grain abroad, the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said Monday.
The World Bank warned Sunday that Ukraine’s economy would collapse by 45 percent this year — far worse than it predicted even a month ago — while Russia would see an 11-percent decline in GDP.
The World Trade Organization meanwhile cautioned that the war could almost halve global trade growth this year.
Despite Kyiv’s allegations of Russian atrocities, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Sunday told NBC’s “Meet the Press” he was still open to negotiating with Moscow.
“If sitting down with the Russians will help me to prevent at least one massacre like in Bucha, or at least another attack like in Kramatorsk, I have to take that opportunity,” he said.
Bucha — where authorities say hundreds were killed, some with their hands bound — has become a byword for the brutality allegedly inflicted under Russian occupation.
More than 4.5 million Ukrainian refugees have now fled their country, the United Nations refugee agency said — 90 percent of them women and children.
At least 183 children have died and 342 were injured in Ukraine in 46 days of the Russian invasion, the prosecutor general’s office said on Telegram.
Ukraine braces for fall of Mariupol, Russian assault on east
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Ukraine braces for fall of Mariupol, Russian assault on east
- Austrian leader Karl Nehammer planned to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday
- Russian forces have abandoned their attempt to capture the capital Kyiv, for now at least, but are redoubling their efforts in Ukraine’s east
Legendary drug lord Fabio Ochoa is deported to Colombia after spending two decades in US prisons
- Ochoa’s name has faded from popular memory as Mexican drug traffickers take center stage in the global drug trade
BOGOTÁ, Colombia: One of Colombia’s legendary drug lords and a key operator of the Medellin cartel has been deported back to the South American country, after serving 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence in the United States.
Fabio Ochoa arrived in Bogota’s El Dorado airport on a deportation flight on Monday, wearing a grey sweatshirt and carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag.
After stepping out of the plane, the former cartel boss was met by immigration officials in bullet proof vests. There were no police on site to detain him — an indication he may not have any pending cases in Colombian courts.
In a brief statement, Colombia’s national immigration agency said Ochoa should be able to enter Colombia “without any problems,” once he is cleared by immigration officers who will check for any outstanding cases against the former drug trafficker.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine started flooding the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to US authorities, to the point that in 1987 they were included in the Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires.
Living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel once headed by Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellin in 1993.
Ochoa was first indicted in the US for his alleged role in the 1986 killing of Barry Seal, an American pilot who flew cocaine flights for the Medellin cartel, but became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Along with his two older brothers, Juan David and Jorge Luis, Ochoa turned himself in to Colombian authorities in the early 1990s under a deal in which they avoided being extradited to the US
The three brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was arrested again three years later for drug trafficking and was extradited to the US in 2001 in response to an indictment in Miami naming him and more than 40 people as part of a drug smuggling conspiracy.
He was the only suspect in that group who opted to go to trial, resulting in his conviction and a 30-year sentence. The other defendants got much lighter prison terms because most of them cooperated with the government.
Ochoa’s name has faded from popular memory as Mexican drug traffickers take center stage in the global drug trade.
But the former member of the Medellin cartel was recently depicted in the Netflix series Griselda, where he first fights the plucky businesswoman Griselda Blanco for control of Miami’s cocaine market, and then makes an alliance with the drug trafficker, played by Sofia Vergara.
Ochoa is also depicted in the Netflix series Narcos, as the youngest son of an elite Medellin family that is into ranching and horse breeding and cuts a sharp contrast with Escobar, who came from more humble roots.
Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant US attorney who was on the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities were never able to seize all of the Ochoa family’s illicit drug proceeds and he expects that the former mafia boss will have a welcome return home.
“He won’t be retiring a poor man, that’s for sure,” Gregorie told The Associated Press earlier this month.
Bill Clinton is hospitalized with a fever but in good spirits, spokesperson says
- “He remains in good spirits and deeply appreciates the excellent care he is receiving,” Urena said
WASHINGTON: Former President Bill Clinton was admitted Monday to Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington after developing a fever.
The 78-year-old was admitted in the “afternoon for testing and observation,” Angel Urena, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, said in a statement.
“He remains in good spirits and deeply appreciates the excellent care he is receiving,” Urena said.
Clinton, a Democrat who served two terms as president from January 1993 until January 2001, addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer and campaigned ahead of November’s election for the unsuccessful White House bid of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Greek lawyers call for further investigation into 2023 deadly shipwreck
- “The case file contains serious gaps and omissions,” they said in a statement, adding that the captain and the crew of the coast guard vessel monitoring the migrant ship had been summoned by the court, but not the coast guard officials supervising them
ATHENS: Greek lawyers representing the survivors and victims of a deadly 2023 shipwreck said on Monday a naval court needed to examine more evidence after a preliminary investigation failed to shed light on the case.
Hundreds died on June 14, 2023, when an overcrowded fishing trawler, monitored by the Greek coast guard for several hours, capsized and sank in international waters off the southwestern Greek coastal town of Pylos.
A local naval court, which opened a criminal investigation last year, has concluded a preliminary investigation and referred the case to a chief prosecutor, the lawyers said on Monday, adding they had reviewed the evidence examined by the court so far.
“The case file contains serious gaps and omissions,” they said in a statement, adding that the captain and the crew of the coast guard vessel monitoring the migrant ship had been summoned by the court, but not the coast guard officials supervising them.
Evidence, including the record of communications between the officials involved in the operation, was not included in the case file, they added.
“The absence of any investigation into the responsibilities of the competent search and rescue bodies and the leadership of the Greek coast guard is deafening,” they said.
The chief prosecutor will decide if and how the probe will progress.
Under Greek law, prosecutors are not allowed to comment on ongoing investigations.
The vessel, which had set off from Libya, was carrying up to 700 Pakistani, Syrian and Egyptian migrants bound for Italy. Only 104 people were rescued and 82 bodies found.
Greece’s coast guard has denied any role in the sinking, which was one of the deadliest boat disasters in the Mediterranean Sea.
Mozambique death toll from Cyclone Chido rises to 120
- The cyclone not only ravaged Mayotte’s fragile infrastructure but also laid bare deep-seated tensions between the island’s residents and its large migrant population
MUPATO: The death toll from Cyclone Chido in Mozambique rose by 26 to at least 120, the southern African country’s disaster risk body said on Monday.
The number of those injured also rose to nearly 900 after the cyclone hit the country on December 15, a day after it had devastated the French Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte.
The cyclone not only ravaged Mayotte’s fragile infrastructure but also laid bare deep-seated tensions between the island’s residents and its large migrant population.
Thousands of people who have entered the island illegally bore the brunt of the storm that tore through the Indian Ocean archipelago. Authorities in Mayotte, France’s poorest territory, said many avoided emergency shelters out of fear of deportation, leaving them, and the shantytowns they live in, even more vulnerable to the cyclone’s devastation.
Still, some frustrated legal residents have accused the government of channeling scarce resources to migrants at their expense.
“I can’t take it anymore. Just to have water is complicated,” said Fatima on Saturday, a 46-year-old mother of five whose family has struggled to find clean water since the storm.
Fatima, who only gave her first name because her family is known locally, added that “the island can’t support the people living in it, let alone allow more to come.”
Mayotte, a French department located between Madagascar and mainland Africa, has a population of 320,000, including an estimated 100,000 migrants, most of whom have arrived from the nearby Comoros Islands, just 70 kilometers away.
The archipelago’s fragile public services, designed for a much smaller population, have been overwhelmed.
“The problems of Mayotte cannot be solved without addressing illegal immigration,” French President Emmanuel Macron said during his visit this week, acknowledging the challenges posed by the island’s rapid population growth,
“Despite the state’s investments, migratory pressure has made everything explode,” he added.
The cyclone further exacerbated the island’s issues after destroying homes, schools, and infrastructure.
Though the official death toll remains 35, authorities say that any estimates are likely major undercounts, with hundreds and possibly thousands feared dead. Meanwhile, the number of seriously injured has risen to 78.
Zelensky says North Korea could send more troops, military equipment to Russia
- More than 3,000 North Koreans killed and wounded, Kyiv says
- North Korean soldiers fighting in Russia’s Kursk region
- Zelensky warns of more N.Korean troops, weapons supplies to Russia
KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday that more than 3,000 North Korean soldiers have been killed and wounded in Russia’s Kursk region and warned that Pyongyang could send more personnel and equipment for Moscow’s army.
“There are risks of North Korea sending additional troops and military equipment to the Russian army,” Zelensky said on X after receiving a report from his top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi.
“We will have tangible responses to this,” he added.
The estimate of North Korean losses is higher than that provided by Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which said on Monday at least 1,100 North Korean troops had been killed or wounded.
The assessment was in line with a briefing last week by South Korea’s spy agency, which reported some 100 deaths with another 1,000 wounded in the region.
Zelensky said he cited preliminary data. Reuters could not independently verify reports on combat losses.
Russia has neither confirmed nor denied the presence of North Koreans on its side. Pyongyang initially dismissed reports about the troop deployment as “fake news,” but a North Korean official has said any such deployment would be lawful.
According to Ukrainian and allied assessments, North Korea has sent around 12,000 troops to Russia.
Some of them have been deployed for combat in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukraine still holds a chunk of land after a major cross-border incursion in August.
JCS added that it has
detected signs
of Pyongyang planning to produce suicide drones to be shipped to Russia, in addition to the already supplied 240mm multiple rocket launchers and 170mm self-propelled howitzers.
Kyiv continues to press allies for a tougher response as it says Moscow’s and Pyongyang’s transfer of warfare experience and military technologies constitute a global threat.
“For the world, the cost of restoring stability is always much higher than the cost of effectively pressuring those who destabilize the situation and destroy lives,” Zelensky said.
