When she heard her front door open almost two years ago, Kostiantyn Zinovkin’s mother thought her son had returned home because he forgot something. Instead, men in balaclavas burst into the apartment in Melitopol, a southern Ukrainian city occupied by Russian forces.
They said Zinovkin was detained for a minor infraction and would be released soon. They used his key to enter, said his wife, Liusiena, and searched the flat so thoroughly that they tore it apart “into molecules.”
But Zinovkin wasn’t released. Weeks after his May 2023 arrest, the Russians told his mother he was plotting a terrorist attack. He’s now standing trial on charges his family calls absurd.
Zinovkin is one of thousands of civilians in Russian captivity. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insists their release, along with prisoners of war, will be an important step toward ending the 3-year-old war.
So far, it hasn’t appeared high on the agenda in US talks with Moscow and Kyiv.
“While politicians discuss natural resources, possible territorial concessions, geopolitical interests and even Zelensky’s suit in the Oval Office, they’re not talking about people,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
Thousands held
In January, the center and other Ukrainian and Russian rights groups launched “People First,” a campaign that says any peace settlement must prioritize the release of everyone they say are captives, including Russians jailed for protesting the war, as well as Ukrainian children who were illegally deported.
“You can’t achieve sustainable peace without taking into account the human dimension,” Matviichuk told The Associated Press.
It’s unknown how many Ukrainian civilians are in custody, both in occupied regions and in Russia. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets has estimated over 20,000.
Matviichuk says her group received over 4,000 requests to help civilian detainees. She notes it’s against international law to detain noncombatants in war.
Oleg Orlov, co-founder of the Russian rights group Memorial, says advocates know at least 1,672 Ukrainian civilians are in Moscow’s custody.
“There’s a larger number of them that we don’t know about,” added Orlov, whose organization won the Nobel alongside Matviichuk’s group and is involved in People First.
Detained without charges
Many are detained for months without charges and don’t know why they’re being held, Orlov said.
Russian soldiers detained Mykyta Shkriabin, then 19, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in March 2022. He left the basement where his family was sheltering from fighting to get supplies and never returned.
Shkriabin was detained even though he wasn’t charged with a crime, said his lawyer, Leonid Solovyov. In 2023, the authorities began referring to him as a POW, a status Solovyov seeks to contest since the student wasn’t a combatant.
Shkriabin’s mother, Tetiana, told AP last month she still doesn’t know where her son is held. In three years, she’s received two letters from him saying he’s doing well and that she shouldn’t worry.
She’s hoping for “a prisoner exchange, a repatriation, or something,” Shkriabina said. Without hope, “how does one hang in there?”
Terrorism, treason and espionage
Others face charges that their relatives say are fabricated.
After being seized in Melitopol, Zinovkin was jailed for over two years and charged with seven offenses, including plotting a terrorist attack, assembling weapons and high treason, his wife Liusiena Zinovkina told AP, describing the charges as “absurd.”
While vocally pro-Ukrainian and against Russia’s occupation, her husband couldn’t plot to bomb anyone and had no weapons skills, she said.
Especially nonsensical is the treason charge, she said, because Russian law stipulates that only its citizens can be charged with that crime, and Zinovkin has never held Russian citizenship, unless it was forced upon him in jail. A conviction could bring life in prison.
Ukrainian civilian Serhii Tsyhipa, 63, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 13 years in a maximum-security prison after he disappeared in March 2022 while walking his dog in Nova Kakhovka, in the partially occupied Kherson region, said his wife, Olena. The dog also vanished.
Tsyhipa, a journalist, was wearing a jacket with a large red cross sewn on it. Both he and his wife, Olena, had those jackets, she told AP, because they volunteered to distribute food and other essentials when Russian troops invaded.
Serhii Tsyhipa protested the occupation, and Olena believes that led to his arrest.
He was held for months in Crimea and finally charged with espionage in December 2022. Almost a year later, in October 2023, Tsyhipa was convicted and sentenced in a trial that lasted only three hearings.
He appealed, but his sentence was upheld. “But the Russian authorities must understand that we are fighting — that we are doing everything possible to bring him home,” she said.
Mykhailo Savva of the Expert Council of the Center for Civil Liberties said rights advocates know of 307 Ukrainian civilians convicted in Russia on criminal charges — usually espionage or treason, if the person held a Russian passport, but also terrorism and extremism.
He said that in Ukraine’s occupied territories, Russians see activists, community leaders and journalists as “the greatest threat.”
Winning release for those already serving sentences would be an uphill battle, advocates say.
Held in harsh conditions
Relatives must piece together scraps of information about prison conditions.
Zinovkina said she has received letters from her husband who told her of problems with his sight, teeth and back. Former prisoners also told her of cramped, cold basement cells in a jail in Rostov, where he’s being held.
She believes her husband was pressured to sign a confession. A man who met him in jail told her Kostiantyn “confessed to everything they wanted him to, so the worst is over” for him.
Orlov said Ukrainian POWs and civilians are known to be held in harsh conditions, where allegations of abuse and torture are common.
The Kremlin tested those methods during the two wars it waged in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s, well before invading Ukraine, said Orlov, who recently went to Ukraine to document Russia’s human rights violations and saw the pattern repeated from the North Caucasus conflicts.
“Essentially, a misanthropic system has been created, and everyone who falls into it ends up in hell,” added Matviichuk, the Ukrainian human rights worker.
A recent report by the UN Human Rights Council said Russia “committed enforced disappearances and torture as crimes against humanity,” part of a “systematic attack against the civilian population and pursuant to a coordinated state policy.”
It said Russia “detained large numbers of civilians,” jailed them in occupied Ukraine or deported them to Russia, and “systematically used torture against certain categories of detainees to extract information, coerce, and intimidate.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry, the Federal Penitentiary Service and the Federal Security Service did not respond to requests for comment.
Tempering hope with patience
As the US talks about a ceasefire, relatives continue to press for the captives’ release.
Liusiena Zinovkina says she hasn’t abandoned hope as her husband, now 35, stands trial but is tempering her expectations.
“I see that it’s not as simple as the American president thought. It’s not that easy to come to an agreement with Russia,” she said, reminding herself “to be patient. It will happen, but not tomorrow.”
Olena Tsyhipa said every minute counts for her husband, whose health has deteriorated.
“My belief in his return is unwavering,” she said. “We just have to wait.”
Thousands of Ukrainian civilians are still held by Russia with uncertain hope of release
https://arab.news/vbtwv
Thousands of Ukrainian civilians are still held by Russia with uncertain hope of release
- One human rights activist says that while politicians discuss rare-earth minerals, territorial concessions and geopolitical interests, they’re not talking about people
- It’s unknown how many Ukrainian civilians are in custody, both in occupied regions and inside Russia. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets estimates it at over 20,000
US plans to use tariff negotiations to isolate China, WSJ reports
- US officials plan to use negotiations with more than 70 nations to ask them to disallow China to ship goods through their countries and prevent Chinese firms from being located in their territories to avoid US tariffs
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump administration plans to use ongoing tariff negotiations to pressure US trading partners to limit their dealings with China, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday citing people with knowledge of the conversations.
US officials plan to use negotiations with more than 70 nations to ask them to disallow China to ship goods through their countries and prevent Chinese firms from being located in their territories to avoid US tariffs, the report added.
UNICEF projects 20 percent drop in 2026 funding after US cuts
UNITED NATIONS: UNICEF has projected that its 2026 budget will shrink by at least 20 percent compared to 2024, a spokesperson for the UN children’s agency said on Tuesday, after US President Donald Trump slashed global humanitarian aid.
In 2024, UNICEF had a budget of $8.9 billion and this year it has an estimated budget of $8.5 billion. The funding for 2025 is “evolving,” the UNICEF spokesperson said.
“The last few weeks have made clear that humanitarian and development organizations around the world, including many UN organizations, are in the midst of a global funding crisis. UNICEF has not been spared,” said the spokesperson.
UNICEF did not specifically name the US, but Washington has long been the agency’s largest donor, contributing more than $800 million in 2024. Since UNICEF was established in 1946, all its executive directors have been American.
“At the moment, we are working off preliminary projections that our financial resources will be, at a minimum, 20 percent less, organization wide, in 2026 compared to 2024,” said the UNICEF spokesperson.
Since returning to office in January for a second term, Trump’s administration has cut billions of dollars in foreign assistance in a review that aimed to ensure programs align with his “America First” foreign policy.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said last week that it will cut 20 percent of its staff as it faces a shortfall of $58 million, after its largest donor, the United States, cut funding.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also last month said he is seeking ways to improve efficiency and cut costs as the world body turns 80 this year amid a cash crisis.
UNICEF has implemented some efficiency measures but “more cost-cutting steps will be required,” said the spokesperson.
“We are looking at every aspect of our operation, including staffing, with the goal of focusing on what truly matters for children: that children survive and thrive,” the spokesperson said. “But no final decisions have been taken.”
Justice Department can cut funding for legal guidance for people facing deportation, US judge says
- The main reason for falling prey to immigration scams is the lack of legitimate legal help, said immigrants at the hearing
A federal judge has allowed the US Department of Justice to temporarily stop funding legal education programs for people facing deportation or immigration court while a lawsuit brought by the organizations that provide the service moves forward in court.
The decision from US District Judge Randolph D. Moss in Washington, D.C., means a coalition of nonprofit groups that offer the education programs will lose their federal funding on Wednesday – and possibly, some access to potential clients inside detention centers.
Unlike criminal cases, people in immigration courts and detention centers don’t have a right to an attorney if they can’t afford one themselves. Proponents of the legal education programs say they ease the burden on immigration judges and help immigrants navigate the complicated court system more efficiently.
Congress allocates $29 million a year for four programs — the Legal Orientation Program, the Immigration Court Helpdesk, the Family Group Legal Orientation and the Counsel for Children Initiative — and those groups spread the funding to subcontractors nationwide.
The Justice Department first instructed the nonprofit groups to “stop work immediately” on the programs on Jan. 22, citing an executive order from President Donald Trump targeting illegal immigration.
The nonprofit groups about a week later, and the Justice Department then rescinded the stop-work order. But on April 11, the agency said it was terminating its contracts with the groups nationwide, effective at 12:01 a.m. on April 16.
During a hearing Tuesday afternoon, Moss told attorneys on both sides that he wanted more information about exactly how the Department of Justice came to its decision to end the contracts, any plans for spending the earmarked money in the future, as well as any problems the nonprofit groups run into as they try to provide legal information to detained non-citizens in the coming weeks.
The judge also said he wanted to issue a final decision in the case quickly, and set a hearing for a preliminary injunction and possible final decision for May 14.
A few blocks away from the federal immigration courts in New York City, a leader of the one affected program testified at a city council hearing on immigration fraud.
“We’re often the first attorneys people are able to speak to about their immigration cases,” said Hannah Strauss, an immigration lawyer who supervises a team triaging cases Supervising Attorney of the Immigration Court Helpdesk run by Catholic Charities.
New York state is one of only six states in the US where more than half of immigrants are represented by an attorney in pending immigration cases, according to government data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That’s thanks in part to state and city grants, as well as a large pool of lawyers who volunteer. But federal funding forms an important part of the system.
Strauss said the $1.2 million federal grant covering New York covered the helpdesk, a skeleton crew relied upon by other NGOs to screen immigration referrals and by immigration judges to explain the basics on laws regarding asylum and other forms of legal immigration.
“Unfortunately today marks the final day of both ICH and FGLOP, as the federal government has chosen to terminate our contracts as of midnight tonight,” Strauss, referring to her organization and the Family Group Legal Orientation Program, run by Acacia Center for Justice.
The main reason for falling prey to immigration scams is the lack of legitimate legal help, said immigrants at the hearing. The immigrants testified without using their names, citing fear they could become targets of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for speaking out, but details they shared were representative of cases that have been investigated by federal prosecutors, costing immigrants thousands of dollars and sometimes ruining their cases.In the hearing, the city council discussed ways to crack down on immigration service providers advertising exaggerated or outright fraudulent services.
For example, it’s considering increasing funding for civil enforcement of business laws through the city’s consumer protection department. The agency uses investigators, sometimes undercover, to investigate violations that can lead to civil penalties, or referrals to criminal prosecutors.
DOGE trumpets unemployment fraud that the government already found years ago
- Though DOGE ostensibly looked at longer timeframe than federal investigators previously had, it tallied just $382 million in fake unemployment claims
NEW YORK: The latest government waste touted by billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency is hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims it purportedly uncovered.
One problem: Federal investigators already found what appears to be the same fraud, years earlier and on a far greater scale.
In a post last week on X, the social media site Musk owns, DOGE announced “an initial survey of unemployment insurance claims since 2020” found 24,500 people over the age of 115 had claimed $59 million in benefits; 28,000 people between the ages of 1 and 5 collected $254 million; and 9,700 people with birthdates more than 15 years in the future garnered $69 million from the government.
The tweet drew a predictable party-line reaction of either skepticism or cheers, including from Musk himself, who said what his team found was “so crazy” he re-read it several times before it sank in.
“Another incredible discovery,” marveled Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who repeated DOGE’s findings to President Donald Trump in a Cabinet meeting last week.
Chavez-DeRemer’s recounting of the alleged fraud, including claims of benefits filed by unborn children, drew laughter in the Cabinet room and a reaction from Trump himself.
“Those numbers are really bad,” he said.
But Chavez-DeRemer needn’t look further than her own department’s Office of the Inspector General to find such fraud had already been reported by the type of federal workers DOGE has demonized.
“They’re trying to spin this narrative of, ‘Oh, government is inefficient and government is stupid and they’re catching these things that the government didn’t catch,’” says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues at the US Department of Labor during the administration of former President Joe Biden. “They’re finding fraud that was marked as fraud and saying they found out it was fraud.”
The Social Security Act of 1935 enshrined unemployment benefits in federal law but left it to individual states to set up systems to collect unemployment taxes, process applications and mete out support.
Though states have almost complete control over their own unemployment systems, special relief programs — most notably widely expanded benefits enacted by the first Trump administration at the outset of the COVID pandemic — inject more direct federal involvement and a flood of new beneficiaries into the system.
In regular times, state unemployment systems perform “very well, not so well and terribly,” according to Stephen Wandner, an economist at the National Academy of Social Insurance who authored the book “Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System.” With COVID slamming the economy and creating a flood of new claims that states couldn’t handle, Wandner says many more were “quite terrible.”
Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law on March 27, 2020, and from the very start it became a magnet for fraud. In a memo to state officials about two weeks later, the Department of Labor warned that the expanded benefits had made unemployment programs “a target for fraud with significant numbers of imposter claims being filed with stolen or synthetic identities.”
That same memo offered an option for states trying to protect a person whose identity was stolen to fraudulently collect unemployment benefits. To preserve a record of the fraud but keep innocent people from being linked to it, states could create a “pseudo claim,” the memo advises.
Those “pseudo claims” led to records of toddlers and centenarians getting checks. The Labor Department’s inspector general tallied some 4,895 unemployment claims from people over the age of 100 between March 2020 and April 2022, but another departmental memo explained that the filings stemmed from states changing dates of birth to protect people whose identities were used.
“Many of the claims identified ... were not payments to individuals over 100 years of age, but rather ‘pseudo records’ of previously identified fraudulent claims,” the 2023 memo says.
A Labor Department spokeswoman did not respond to questions about Musk’s findings and DOGE gave no details on how it came to find the supposed fraud or whether it duplicates what was already found.
Though DOGE ostensibly looked at longer timeframe than federal investigators previously had, it tallied just $382 million in fake unemployment claims, a tiny fraction of what investigators were already aware.
In 2022, the Labor Department said suspected COVID-era unemployment fraud totaled more than $45 billion. The Government Accountability Office later said it was far worse, likely $100 billion to $135 billion.
“I don’t think it’s news to anyone,” says Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. “It’s been widely reported. There’ve been multiple congressional hearings.”
If DOGE’s newest allegations have an air of familiarity, it’s because they echo its prior findings of about Social Security payments to the dead and the unbelievably old. Those were false claims.
That makes DOGE an imperfect messenger even when fraud has occurred, as with unemployment claims.
Jessica Reidl, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute, is a fiscal conservative who so champions rooting out federal waste she has written 600 articles on the subject. Though she believes unemployment insurance fraud is rife, she has trouble accepting any findings from DOGE, which she says has acted ineffectively and possibly illegally.
“When DOGE says impossibly old dead people are collecting unemployment in huge numbers, I become skeptical,” Reidl says. “DOGE does not have a good track record in that area.”
Traub said the burst of pandemic-era unemployment fraud led states to implement new security measures. She questioned why Musk’s team was trumpeting old fraud as if it’s new.
“Business leaders and economists are warning about a national recession, so it’s natural to think about unemployment,” says Traub. “It’s an attack on the image of a critically important program and perhaps an attempt to undermine public support on unemployment insurance when it couldn’t be more important.”
Visa cancelations sow panic for international students, with hundreds fearing deportation
- Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department was revoking visas held by visitors who were acting counter to national interests, including some who protested Israel’s war in Gaza and those who face criminal charges
- Many of the students losing their legal status are from India and China, which together account for more than half the international students at American colleges
WASHINGTON: At first, the bar association for immigration attorneys began receiving inquiries from a couple students a day. These were foreigners studying in the US, and they’d discovered in early April their legal status had been terminated with little notice. To their knowledge, none of the students had committed a deportable offense.
In recent days, the calls have begun flooding in. Hundreds of students have been calling to say they have lost legal status, seeking advice on what to do next.
“We thought it was going to be something that was unusual,” said Matthew Maiona, a Boston-based immigration attorney who is getting about six calls a day from panicked international students. “But it seems now like it’s coming pretty fast and furious.”
The speed and scope of the federal government’s efforts to terminate the legal status of international students have stunned colleges across the country. Few corners of higher education have been untouched, as schools ranging from prestigious private universities, large public research institutions and tiny liberal arts colleges discover status terminations one after another among their students.
At least 790 students at more than 120 colleges and universities have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated in recent weeks, according to an Associated Press review of university statements and correspondence with school officials. Advocacy groups collecting reports from colleges say hundreds more students could be caught up in the crackdown.
Students apparently targeted over minor infractions
Around 1.1 million international students were in the United States last year — a source of essential revenue for tuition-driven colleges. International students are not eligible for federal financial aid, and their ability to pay tuition often factors into whether they will be admitted to American schools. Often, they pay full price.
Many of the students losing their legal status are from India and China, which together account for more than half the international students at American colleges. But the terminations have not been limited to those from any one part of the world, lawyers said.
Four students from two Michigan universities are suing Trump administration officials after their F-1 student status was terminated last week. Their attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, Ramis Wadood, said the students never received a clear reason why.
“We don’t know, and that’s the scary part,” he said.
The students were informed of the status terminations by their universities via email, which came as a shock, Wadood said. The reason given was that there was a “criminal records check and/or that their visa was revoked,” Wadood said, but none of them were charged or convicted of crimes. Some had either speeding or parking tickets, but one didn’t have any, he said. Only one of the students had known their entry visa was revoked, Wadood said.
Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department was revoking visas held by visitors who were acting counter to national interests, including some who protested Israel’s war in Gaza and those who face criminal charges.
But many students say they don’t fall under those categories. Students have filed lawsuits in several states, arguing they were denied due process.
In New Hampshire, a federal judge last week granted a temporary restraining order to restore the status of a Ph.D. student at Dartmouth College, Xiaotian Liu. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Wisconsin issued a similar order, ruling the government could not take steps to detain or revoke the visa of a University of Wisconsin-Madison gradate student.
In a break from past, feds cancel students’ status directly
At many colleges, officials learned the legal immigration status of some international students had been terminated when staff checked a database managed by the Department of Homeland Security. In the past, college officials say, legal statuses typically were updated after colleges told the government the students were no longer studying at the school.
The system to track enrollment and movements of international students came under the control of Immigration and Customs Enforcement after 9/11, said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, an association of international educators. She said recent developments have left students fearful of how quickly they can be on the wrong side of enforcement.
“You don’t need more than a small number to create fear,” Aw said. “There’s no clarity of what are the reasons and how far the reach of this is.”
Her group says as many as 1,300 students have lost visas or had their status terminated, based on reports from colleges.
The Department of Homeland Security and State Department did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Foreigners who are subject to removal proceedings are usually sent a notice to appear in immigration court on a certain date, but lawyers say affected students have not received any notices, leaving them unsure of next steps to take.
Some schools have told students to leave the country to avoid the risk of being detained or deported. But some students have appealed the terminations and stayed in the United States while those are processed.
Still others caught in legal limbo aren’t students at all. They had remained in the US post-graduation on “optional practical training,” a one-year period — or up to three for science and technology graduates — that allows employment in the US after completing an academic degree. During that time, a graduate works in their field and waits to receive their H-1B or other employment visas if they wish to keep working in the US
Around 242,000 foreigners in the US are employed through this “optional practical training.” About 500,000 are pursuing graduate degrees, and another 342,000 are undergraduate students.
Among the students who have filed lawsuits is a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who is supposed to graduate on May 5, with a job offer to join the faculty. His attorney Charles Kuck said the student was likely targeted for termination because of an unpaid traffic fine from when the student lent his car to a friend. Ultimately, the violation was dismissed.
“We have case after case after case exactly like that, where there is no underlying crime,” said Kuck, who is representing 17 students in the federal lawsuit. He said his law firm has heard from hundreds of students.
“These are kids who now, under the Trump administration, realize their position is fragile,” he said. “They’ve preyed on a very vulnerable population. These kids aren’t hiding. They’re in school.”
Some international students have been adapting their daily routines.
A Ph.D. student from China at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said she has begun carrying around her passport and immigration paperwork at the advice of the university’s international student office. The student, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted by authorities, said she has been distressed to see the terminations even for students like her without criminal records.
“That is the most scary part because you don’t know whether you’re going to be the next person,” she said. ___
Seminera reported from Raleigh, N.C., and Keller reported from Albuquerque, N.M.
