Russian forces fall back in northeast Ukraine, McDonald’s retreats from Moscow

Ukrainian servicemen take rest in a recently retaken village north of Kharkiv, east Ukraine, Sunday, May 15, 2022. (AP)
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Updated 16 May 2022
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Russian forces fall back in northeast Ukraine, McDonald’s retreats from Moscow

  • McDonald’s Corp, the world’s largest fast food chain, said it was pulling out of Russia because of the conflict
  • On battlefields near Kharkiv, an interior ministry adviser said Ukrainian troops were mounting a counter-offensive

RUSKA LOZOVA: Ukrainian troops have pushed Russian forces back from the northeastern city of Kharkiv and some have advanced as far as the border with Russia, Ukrainian officials said on Monday.
The developments, if confirmed, would signal a further shift in momentum in favor of Ukraine nearly three months into a conflict that began when Russia sent tens of thousands of troops over the border into Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Sweden meanwhile was expected to take a formal decision on Monday to apply to join NATO following a similar move by Finland — a change in the Nordic countries’ long-standing policy of neutrality brought on by the Russian invasion and concern about President Vladimir Putin’s wider ambitions.
“Europe, Sweden and the Swedish people are living now in a new and dangerous reality,” Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said during a debate in parliament in Stockholm.
Moscow warned of “far-reaching consequences” should they should go ahead.
And in another setback for Putin, McDonald’s Corp, the world’s largest fast food chain, said it was pulling out of Russia because of the conflict.
In Brussels, the European Union was working on a package of further economic sanctions on Russia to step up international pressure on Putin.
Counter-offensive
On the battlefields near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, interior ministry adviser Vadym Denisenko said Ukrainian troops were mounting a counter-offensive.
“It can no longer be stopped... Thanks to this, we can go to the rear of the Russian group of forces,” he said.
Kharkiv, lying about 30 miles (50 km) from the border with Russia, had endured weeks of heavy Russian bombardments. The Russian retreat from the city follows their failure to capture the capital Kyiv in the early stages of the war.
But thousands of people, including many civilians, have been killed across the country, cities have been blasted into ruins, and more than six million people have fled their homes to seek refuge in neighboring states in scenes not seen in Europe since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Russia denies targeting civilians.
Ukraine’s defense ministry said on Monday the 227th Battalion of the 127th Brigade of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces had reached the border with Russia.
Kharkiv region governor Oleh Sinegubov said the troops had restored a sign on the border.
“We thank everyone who, risking their lives, liberates Ukraine from Russian invaders,” Sinegubov said.
Reuters could not verify Ukraine’s account and it was not clear how many troops had reached the Russian border or where.
If confirmed, it would suggest the northeastern counter-offensive is having increasing success after Western military agencies said Moscow’s offensive in two eastern provinces known as the Donbas had stalled.
Konrad Muzyka, director of the Poland-based Rochan consultancy, said he was not surprised at the Ukrainian gains.
“The Ukrainians have been in the border regions for a few days already,” he told Reuters. “It’s symbolic and it definitely has PR value, but this was to be expected.
“Don’t get me wrong, the Russians still enjoy overall artillery superiority in terms of numbers, but I’m not sure if the same goes for the quality now.”
The governor of the Luhansk region in Donbas, Serhiy Gaidai, said the situation “remains difficult,” with Russian forces trying to capture the town of Sieverodonetsk.
He said leaders of the Lugansk People’s Republic, the territory in Luhansk controlled by Russian-backed separatists, declared a general mobilization, adding it was “either fight or get shot, there is no other choice.”
In the south, fighting was raging around the city of Kherson and Russian missiles struck residential areas of Mykolayiv, the presidential office in Kyiv said. Reuters was unable to verify the reports.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Sunday Ukraine could win the war, an outcome few military analysts predicted when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Expanding NATO
In a blow for Russia, which has long opposed NATO expansion, Finland and Sweden moved ahead with plans to join the alliance.
But Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said on Monday that Finland and Sweden were making a mistake that would have far-reaching consequences.
“They should have no illusions that we will simply put up with it,” Ryabkov said, quoted by the Interfax news agency.
Moscow calls its invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation” to rid the country of fascists, an assertion Kyiv and its Western allies say is a baseless pretext for an unprovoked war.
The most intense fighting appeared to be around the eastern Russian-held city of Izium, where Russia said it had struck Ukrainian positions with missiles.
Russia continued to target civilian areas along the entire frontline in Luhansk and Donetsk, firing at 23 villages and towns, Ukraine’s military task force said.
Ukraine’s military also acknowledged setbacks, saying Russian forces “continue to advance” in several areas in the Donbas region.
There was also no letup on Sunday in Russia’s bombardment of the steelworks in the southern port of Mariupol, where a few hundred Ukrainian fighters are holding out weeks after the city fell into Russian hands, the Ukrainian military said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said “very difficult and delicate negotiations” were going on to save Ukrainians in Mariupol and Azovstal.

Farewell to Big Macs 
McDonald’s said it had started the process of selling its restaurants in Russia, following many other Western companies who are getting rid of their Russian assets to comply with international sanctions.
The decision to close its 847 restaurants in Russia marked the retreat of a Western brand whose presence there had been emblematic of the end of the Cold War.
“The humanitarian crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, and the precipitating unpredictable operating environment, have led McDonald’s to conclude that continued ownership of the business in Russia is no longer tenable,” McDonald’s said.
French car-maker Renault also announced it will sell its majority stake in carmaker Avtovaz to a Russian science institute.


Uganda’s president seeks a seventh term that would bring him closer to 5 decades in power

Updated 57 min 50 sec ago
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Uganda’s president seeks a seventh term that would bring him closer to 5 decades in power

  • Museveni first took power as head of a rebel force in 1986, he has been elected six times, though recent elections have been marred by violence and allegations of vote rigging

KAMPALA: Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Saturday sought nomination for a seventh term, a move that would bring him closer to five decades in power.
Museveni, 80, has defied calls for his retirement, as critics warn that he as veered into authoritarianism with virtually no opposition even within his ruling National Resistance Movement party.
He was welcomed by a large crowd of supporters as he went to collect nomination papers from the offices of the ruling party in Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
Museveni first took power as head of a rebel force in 1986. He has since been elected six times, though recent elections have been marred by violence and allegations of vote rigging. His main opponent in the last election was the popular entertainer known as Bobi Wine, who has also declared his candidacy in the polls set for January 2026.
Wine, whose real name is Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, has seen many associates jailed or go into hiding as security forces cracked down on opposition supporters.
Museveni has dismissed Wine as “an agent of foreign interests” who cannot be trusted with power. Wine has been arrested many times on various charges but has never been convicted. He insists he is running a nonviolent campaign.
Decades ago, Museveni himself had criticized African leaders who overstayed their welcome in office. In Uganda, lawmakers did the same thing for him when they jettisoned the last constitutional obstacle — age limits — for a possible life presidency. His son, army chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has asserted his wish to succeed his father, raising fears of hereditary rule.
A long-time opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, has been jailed since November over alleged treason charges his lawyers say are politically motivated. Besigye, a physician who retired from Uganda’s military at the rank of colonel, is a former president of the Forum for Democratic Change party, for many years Uganda’s most prominent opposition group.
The East African country has never seen a peaceful transfer of power since independence from Britain in 1962.


Belgrade braces for another anti-government protest, calling for an early parliamentary election

Updated 28 June 2025
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Belgrade braces for another anti-government protest, calling for an early parliamentary election

  • Tensions have soared ahead of the protest organized by Serbia’s university students, a key force behind nationwide anti-corruption demonstrations that started after a renovated rail station canopy collapsed

BELGRADE: Belgrade is bracing for yet another student-led protest on Saturday to pressure Serbia’s populist President Aleksandar Vucic to call for a snap parliamentary election after nearly eight months of rallies that have rattled his firm grip on power in the Balkan country.
Tensions have soared ahead of the protest organized by Serbia’s university students, a key force behind nationwide anti-corruption demonstrations that started after a renovated rail station canopy collapsed, killing 16 people on Nov. 1.
Many blamed the concrete roof crash on rampant government corruption and negligence in state infrastructure projects, leading to recurring mass protests.
Vucic and his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party have refused the demand for an early vote and accused protesters of planning to spur violence at orders from abroad, which they didn’t specify.
In a show of business as usual, the Serbian president handed out presidential awards in the capital to people, including artists and journalists, he deemed worthy, as his loyalists, camping in a park in central Belgrade, announced they would hold a “literary evening.”
“People need not worry — the state will be defended and thugs brought to justice,” Vucic told reporters on Saturday.
Serbian presidential and parliamentary elections are due in 2027.
Saturday marks St. Vitus Day, a religious holiday and the date when Serbs mark a 14th-century battle against Ottoman Turks in Kosovo that was the start of hundreds of years of Turkish rule, holding symbolic importance.
Police earlier this week arrested several people accused of allegedly plotting to overthrow the government and banned entry into the country to several people from Croatia and a theater director from Montenegro without explanation. Serbia’s railway company halted train service over an alleged bomb threat in what critics said was an apparent bid to prevent people from traveling to Belgrade for the rally.
Authorities made similar moves back in March, ahead of what was the biggest ever anti-government protest in the Balkan country, which drew hundreds of thousands of people.
Vucic’s loyalists then set up a camp in a park outside his office, which still stands. The otherwise peaceful gathering on March 15 came to an abrupt end when part of the crowd suddenly scattered in panic, triggering allegations that authorities used a sonic weapon against peaceful protesters, which they have denied.
Vucic, a former extreme nationalist, has become increasingly authoritarian since coming to power over a decade ago. Though he formally says he wants Serbia to join the European Union, critics say Vucic has stifled democratic freedoms as he strengthened ties with Russia and China.


What’s next for birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court’s ruling

Updated 28 June 2025
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What’s next for birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court’s ruling

  • US President Trump’s executive order, signed in January, seeks to deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are living in the US illegally or temporarily

WASHINGTON: The legal battle over President Donald Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship is far from over despite the Republican administration’s major victory Friday limiting nationwide injunctions.
Immigrant advocates are vowing to fight to ensure birthright citizenship remains the law as the Republican president tries to do away with more than a century of precedent.
The high court’s ruling sends cases challenging the president’s birthright citizenship executive order back to the lower courts. But the ultimate fate of the president’s policy remains uncertain.
Here’s what to know about birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court’s ruling and what happens next.
What does birthright citizenship mean?
Birthright citizenship makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally.
The practice goes back to soon after the Civil War, when Congress ratified the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, in part to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” the amendment states.
Thirty years later, Wong Kim Ark, a man born in the US to Chinese parents, was refused re-entry into the US after traveling overseas. His suit led to the Supreme Court explicitly ruling that the amendment gives citizenship to anyone born in the US, no matter their parents’ legal status.
It has been seen since then as an intrinsic part of US law, with only a handful of exceptions, such as for children born in the US to foreign diplomats.
Trump has long said he wants to do away with birthright citizenship
Trump’s executive order, signed in January, seeks to deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are living in the US illegally or temporarily. It’s part of the hard-line immigration agenda of the president, who has called birthright citizenship a “magnet for illegal immigration.”
Trump and his supporters focus on one phrase in the amendment — “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” – saying it means the US can deny citizenship to babies born to women in the country illegally.
A series of federal judges have said that’s not true, and issued nationwide injunctions stopping his order from taking effect.
“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” US District Judge John Coughenour said at a hearing earlier this year in his Seattle courtroom.
In Greenbelt, Maryland, a Washington suburb, US District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote that “the Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever endorsed” Trump’s interpretation of birthright citizenship.
Is Trump’s order constitutional? The justices didn’t say
The high court’s ruling was a major victory for the Trump administration in that it limited an individual judge’s authority in granting nationwide injunctions. The administration hailed the ruling as a monumental check on the powers of individual district court judges, whom Trump supporters have argued want to usurp the president’s authority with rulings blocking his priorities around immigration and other matters.
But the Supreme Court did not address the merits of Trump’s bid to enforce his birthright citizenship executive order.
“The Trump administration made a strategic decision, which I think quite clearly paid off, that they were going to challenge not the judges’ decisions on the merits, but on the scope of relief,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters at the White House that the administration is “very confident” that the high court will ultimately side with the administration on the merits of the case.
Questions and uncertainty swirl around next steps
The justices kicked the cases challenging the birthright citizenship policy back down to the lower courts, where judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the new ruling. The executive order remains blocked for at least 30 days, giving lower courts and the parties time to sort out the next steps.
The Supreme Court’s ruling leaves open the possibility that groups challenging the policy could still get nationwide relief through class-action lawsuits and seek certification as a nationwide class. Within hours after the ruling, two class-action suits had been filed in Maryland and New Hampshire seeking to block Trump’s order.
But obtaining nationwide relief through a class action is difficult as courts have put up hurdles to doing so over the years, said Suzette Malveaux, a Washington and Lee University law school professor.
“It’s not the case that a class action is a sort of easy, breezy way of getting around this problem of not having nationwide relief,” said Malveaux, who had urged the high court not to eliminate the nationwide injunctions.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned the court’s dissenting opinion, urged the lower courts to “act swiftly on such requests for relief and to adjudicate the cases as quickly as they can so as to enable this Court’s prompt review” in cases “challenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order.”
Opponents of Trump’s order warned there would be a patchwork of polices across the states, leading to chaos and confusion without nationwide relief.
“Birthright citizenship has been settled constitutional law for more than a century,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, a nonprofit that supports refugees and migrants. “By denying lower courts the ability to enforce that right uniformly, the Court has invited chaos, inequality, and fear.”


A Russian drone strike on Odesa kills a married couple and injures 17 people, Ukraine says

Updated 55 min 19 sec ago
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A Russian drone strike on Odesa kills a married couple and injures 17 people, Ukraine says

  • A drone slammed into a residential tower block in the city, causing damage to three floors and trapping residents, emergency services said
  • The two killed in the attack were a married couple

KYIV: Russian drones struck the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa overnight, killing two people and injuring at least 17, Ukrainian authorities said on Saturday.

A drone slammed into a residential tower block in the city, causing damage to three floors and trapping residents, emergency services said. The two killed in the attack were a married couple, according to regional Gov. Oleh Kiper, who added that three children were among the injured.

There was no immediate comment from Moscow. According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, over 40 Ukrainian drones were shot down overnight and on Saturday morning over western Russia and Kremlin-occupied Crimea.

Long-range drone strikes have been a hallmark of the war, now in its fourth year. The race by both sides to develop increasingly sophisticated and deadlier drones has turned the war into a testing ground for new weaponry.

Ukrainian drones have pulled off some stunning feats. At the start of June, nearly a third of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet was destroyed or damaged in a covert Ukrainian operation using cheaply made drones sneaked into Russian territory.

Smaller, short-range drones are used by both sides on the battlefield and in areas close to the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line.

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a report published Thursday that short-range drone attacks killed at least 395 civilians and injured 2,635 between the start of the war in February 2022 and April 2025. Almost 90 percent of the attacks were by the Russian armed forces, it reported.

More than 13,300 civilians have died and over 34,700 have been injured in the war, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said a June 11 report.


Europe bakes in summer’s first heatwave as continent warms

Updated 28 June 2025
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Europe bakes in summer’s first heatwave as continent warms

  • Scientists have long warned that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is heating up the world with disastrous consequences for the environment

MARSEILLES: Sweating Europeans braced on Saturday for the first heatwave of the northern hemisphere summer, as climate change pushes the world’s fastest-warming continent’s thermometers increasingly into the red.
Temperatures are set to rise to 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit) in Rome, driving the Eternal City’s many tourists and Catholic pilgrims to the Vatican alike toward the Italian capital’s some 2,500 public fountains for refreshment.
With residents of the southern port city of Marseille expected to have to cope with temperatures flirting with 40C (104F), authorities in France’s second-largest city ordered public swimming pools to be made free of charge to help residents beat the Mediterranean heat.
Two-thirds of Portugal will be on high alert on Sunday for extreme heat and forest fires with 42C (108F) expected in the capital Lisbon, while visitors to — and protesters against — Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos’s Friday wedding in Venice likewise sweltered under the summer sun.
“I try not to think about it, but I drink a lot of water and never stay still, because that’s when you get sunstroke,” Sriane Mina, an Italian student, told AFPTV on Friday in Venice.
Meanwhile Spain, which has in past years seen a series of deadly summer blazes ravaging the Iberian peninsula, is expecting peak temperatures in excess of 40C (104F) across most of the country from Sunday.
Scientists have long warned that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is heating up the world with disastrous consequences for the environment, with Europe’s ever-hotter and increasingly common blistering summer heatwaves a direct result of that warming.
With peaks of 39C (102F) expected in Naples and Palermo, Sicily has ordered a ban on outdoor work in the hottest hours of the day, as has the Liguria region in northern Italy.
The country’s trade unions are campaigning to extend the measure to other parts of the country.
The heatwave comes hot on the heels of a series of tumbling records for extreme heat, including Europe’s hottest March ever, according to the EU’s Copernicus climate monitor.
As a result of the planet’s warming, extreme weather events including hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves like this weekend’s have become more frequent and intense, scientists warn.
By some estimates 2024, the hottest year in recorded history so far, saw worldwide disasters which cost more than $300 billion.