Russia’s foreign ministry said Saturday it had barred entry to the country for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace and 10 other British government members and politicians.

The move was taken “in view of the unprecedented hostile action by the British Government, in particular the imposition of sanctions against senior Russian officials,” the ministry said in a statement, adding that it would expand the list soon.

The Kremlin has described Johnson, who has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest backers, as “the most active participant in the race to be anti-Russian.”

A week ago, Johnson visited Kyiv where he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised each other for their cooperation since the Russian invasion, which Moscow calls a “special operation.”

“The UK and our international partners stand united in condemning the Russian government’s reprehensible actions in Ukraine and calling for the Kremlin to stop the war,” a British government spokesperson said in response to Moscow’s decision to bar Johnson and other British politicians.

“We remain resolute in our support for Ukraine,” the spokesperson added.
…

Explosions were heard in Kyiv and the western city of Lviv early on Saturday and the mayor of the Ukrainian capital said rescuers and medics were working at the site of a blast on the outskirts of the city.

There were no immediate details of casualties or damage.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said about 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in seven weeks of war with Russia and about 10,000 injured, but there was no count of civilian casualties.

He told CNN on Friday 19,000 to 20,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in the war. Moscow said last month that 1,351 Russian soldiers had been killed and 3,825 wounded.

Reuters could not independently verify either side’s numbers.

Russia pledged on Friday to launch more strikes on Kyiv and said it had used cruise missiles to strike the Vizar factory on the edge of Kyiv, which it said made and repaired missiles, including anti-ship missiles.

The attack followed Thursday’s sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Moscow’s Black Sea fleet.

Ukraine said one of its missiles had caused the Moskva to sink, a powerful symbol of its resistance to a better-armed foe. Moscow said the ship sank while being towed in stormy seas after a fire caused by an explosion of ammunition and that more than 500 sailors were evacuated.

The United States believes the Moskva was hit by two Ukrainian missiles and that there were Russian casualties, although numbers were unclear, a senior U.S. official said.

None of the assessments could be independently verified.

Ukraine’s military said on Saturday the presence of Russian warships in the Black Sea, armed with sea-launched missiles, suggests that an increased possibility that Russia would use them to strike Ukraine’s defense industry and logistics infrastructure.

It said also that Russia’s navy was active in the Sea of Azov to block the port of Mariupol, where ground fighting has intensified as Ukraine said it was trying to break Russia’s siege.

Home to 400,000 people before Russia’s invasion, Mariupol has been reduced to rubble. Thousands of civilians have died and tens of thousands remain trapped.

“The situation in Mariupol is difficult and hard. Fighting is happening right now. The Russian army is constantly calling on additional units to storm the city,” defense ministry spokesperson Oleksandr Motuzyanyk told a briefing. He said the Russians have not completely captured it.

‘Significant’ victories

Zelenskyy said the military situation in the south and east was “still very difficult,” while praising the work of his armed forces.

“The successes of our military on the battlefield are really significant, historically significant. But they are still not enough to clean our land of the occupiers. We will beat them some more,” he said in a late-night video address, calling again for allies to send heavier weapons and for an international embargo on Russian oil.

Zelenskyy has appealed to U.S. President Joe Biden for the United States to designate Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism,” joining North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Syria, the Washington Post reported, citing people familiar with their conversation.

A White House spokesperson responded by saying, “We will continue to consider all options to increase the pressure on Putin.”

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and top finance officials will attend International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington next week, sources told Reuters.

It will be the first chance for key Ukrainian officials to meet in person with financial officials from advanced economies since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Holding out in Mariupol

If Moscow captures Mariupol, it would be the first big city to fall.

Russia’s defense ministry said it had captured the city’s Illich steel works. The report could not be confirmed. Ukrainian defenders are mainly believed to be holding out in Azovstal, another huge steel works.

Both plants are owned by Metinvest, the empire of Ukraine’s richest businessman and backbone of Ukraine’s industrial east – which told Reuters on Friday it would never let its enterprises operate under Russian occupation.

Moscow has used its naval power to blockade Ukrainian ports and threaten a potential amphibious landing along the coast. Without the Moskva, the largest warship sunk during conflict since Argentina’s General Belgrano in the 1982 Falklands war, its ability to menace Ukraine from the sea could be crippled.

Russia initially described its aims in Ukraine as “a special military operation” to disarm its neighbor and defeat nationalists there.

After its invasion force was driven from the outskirts of Kyiv this month, Moscow has said its main war aim is to capture the Donbas, the eastern region partly held by Russian-backed separatists since 2014.

Kyiv and its Western allies say those are bogus justifications for an unprovoked war of aggression that has driven a quarter of Ukraine’s 44 million people from their homes and led to the deaths of thousands.
…

The free flow of information about Russia’s war on Ukraine was a focus of this year’s TED – Technology, Environment and Design – conference in Vancouver, Canada. It was the first such gathering of esteemed speakers since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and architect Alison Killing was among the eclectic group of speakers opening the conference. She won the journalism award for using satellite imagery and open-source information to help uncover detention and forced labor camps in China’s Xinjiang region.

Killing spoke days after reports emerged of satellite imagery showing possible war crimes being committed by Russia in Ukraine. She told VOA one of the best ways to keep information flowing into Ukraine and Russia is for private citizens in both countries to use virtual private networks, or VPNs, on the internet.

“I think that open-source data and investigations have a really important role to play in helping to provide good information and in providing that information in a way that anyone can go and check it,” she said.

But Killing added that information, as always, must be fact-checked.

Bektour Iskender, who runs Kloop – a blogging website he started in 2007 to counter state-controlled media in Kyrgyzstan – said if governments are going to block websites, the more the better, because that encourages people to start using VPNs and other methods to seek independent sources of information.

“The worst situation, I think, is when a few media outlets are blocked, but like 95% is available, and then people just don’t care about the ones which are blocked, because they still have most of information available,” Iskender said. “But when you have like 50% of media, content blocked, then people start caring.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, said that while social media sites can play an important role in disseminating unfiltered information from sources on the ground, it’s important not to lose focus on who is doing the censoring and why.

“I think people can really get caught up in debates about misinformation on Facebook and, you know, who’s gatekeeping Twitter,” she said. “They can forget that there is a much, much more serious threat, which is authoritarian states, just bottlenecking true information about really, really important issues like Russia’s role in Ukraine right now.”

Billionaire Elon Musk appeared at the conference hours after announcing a $43 billion takeover bid for Twitter. The co-founder of electric car manufacturer Tesla said he would change the social media platform, including allowing users to edit tweets after posting them and making Twitter’s algorithms open source.

Philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates launched his upcoming book, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic. He urged developed countries collectively to spend $1 billion a year to prevent future pandemics by creating a team he called Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization, or GERM. The team would be made up of 3,000 doctors, diplomats, and policy and communication experts who would work with the World Health Organization to contain any future pandemic contagions within 100 days.

In an unusual move for the conference, TED head curator Chris Anderson started by asking the assembled crowd and those watching online to donate to five organizations helping with humanitarian relief in Ukraine. A total of $2.15 million was pledged by attendees to help relief efforts in Ukraine.
…

A Frenchman and a Moroccan received heavy prison terms on appeal Friday for an attack plot that was foiled after an intelligence agent posing as a jihadi infiltrated their cyber network.

Yassine Bousseria, 42, was sentenced to 24 years in prison for participation in a terrorist conspiracy to prepare terrorist acts, the same term he had been handed by a lower court in February.

The other man, Hicham El-Hanafi, 31, was sentenced to 30 years in prison, also in line with the lower court ruling.

A third person convicted in the case, Frenchman Hicham Makran, was sentenced to 22 years in jail in February and did not appeal.

The three were tried on charges of joining a terror group with a view to carrying out attacks.

An agent from France’s DGSI domestic intelligence service, using the codename Ulysse, had infiltrated communication networks of Islamic State (IS) group in a ruse that led to the arrest of the three.

The case began in 2016. After intelligence indicating the IS group was seeking to obtain weapons for a “violent action” on French soil, the DGSI agent penetrated an encrypted Telegram messaging loop and make contact with an IS “emir” in Syria, nicknamed Sayyaf.

Sayyaf said the jihadis needed munitions including four Kalashnikovs, which Ulysse said he could supply.

In June 2016, Sayyaf sent Ulysse $16,000 in cash.

With this money, Ulysse then told Sayyaf that he had bought weapons and hid them in a forest north of Paris. The surroundings were then equipped with surveillance cameras.

French intelligence then received information that the two French citizens, who had been around the Turkish-Syrian border, had come home.

They were arrested and found to have a USB key encrypted with the coordinates of the arms cache.
…

The only surviving member of the Islamic State attack team that terrorized Paris in 2015 asked Friday for forgiveness and expressed condolences for the victims, wiping away tears during court testimony as he pleaded with survivors to “detest me with moderation.”

For years, Salah Abdeslam was silent about what happened November 13, 2015, in the Bataclan theater, Paris cafes and the national stadium, and the 130 people who were killed. After his trial opened last year, he had a few outbursts of extremist bravado, but for months he refused to answer most questions.

Then this week, his words started flowing, in lengthy testimony that at times contradicted earlier statements. His words at times prompted angry outbursts from the public.

Survivors and victims’ families, who hope the extensive trial helps them find justice and clarity, had mixed reactions.

Abdeslam said the mastermind of the attacks persuaded him two days beforehand to join the team of suicide bombers. The next day, Abdeslam said, his brother Brahim showed him the cafe in northern Paris where Salah was meant to detonate himself in a crowd.

‘I wasn’t ready’

“For me, it was a shock. I didn’t know how to react. I showed that I wasn’t ready for that,” Abdeslam told the court. “He ended up convincing me.”

He recounted donning an explosive belt that night, as his brother and other Islamic State extremists who had fought in Syria were fanned out around Paris mounting parallel attacks.

“I enter the cafe, I order a drink,” Abdeslam said. “I was thinking. I looked at people laughing, dancing. And that’s when I knew that I couldn’t do it.”

“I told myself, ‘I’m not going to do it,’ ” he said, citing a sense of humanity.

A police explosives expert has told the court that the suicide belt was faulty, but Abdeslam testified that he disabled it.

Last month, he expressed regret that he hadn’t followed through on the attack.

But this week, he started showing signs of remorse.

“There are no words for this,” he said.

Tearful plea for forgiveness

Questioned Friday by his lawyer about his mother, and her loss over her older son’s death, Abdeslam started to cry for the first time since the trial began in September, according to French media reports.

“I ask you today to detest me with moderation,” he told the victims. “I offer my condolences, and I ask forgiveness for all the victims.”

He has also repeatedly asked forgiveness of three fellow defendants being tried for helping him escape.

Georges Salines, whose daughter Lola was killed in the Bataclan, was quoted by France-Info radio as saying: “Abdeslam is trying to settle a mountain of contradictions in his head. He’s trying to resolve them, but his path will be long.”

After leaving the cafe, Abdeslam described desperately attempting to reach friends to ask for help and taking a taxi across Paris to the suburb of Montrouge, where he said he removed the detonator from his explosive vest and tossed the vest in a garbage bin. He hid out at first near Paris, then fled with friends to Brussels, where he was arrested four months later.

He faces life in prison if convicted on murder charges.

The more than 2,400 civil parties to the case present their final arguments next month, and the verdict is expected on June 24. It’s among the biggest trials in modern French history.
…

It is more than 10,000 kilometers from Medyka, the Polish border city that is a first stop for many Ukrainian refugees, to Tijuana, Mexico, where more than 1,700 Ukrainians are waiting for a chance to cross into the United States.

“They’re arriving as tourists,” says Enrique Lucero Vásquez, the municipal director of migrant care in Tijuana, with whom I spoke in a sports complex that has been repurposed to receive the Ukrainian families.

About 400 people are already housed at the center, where they spend one to two nights before being escorted to the border crossing and admitted by the U.S. Border Patrol.

In 2018 I was in this same place, in an even more congested courtyard, but instead of Ukrainians it was packed with Central American migrants who had journeyed north in a series of caravans. The process this time is as different as the circumstances that led the people to flee their homelands.

As in Medyka — where I reported before coming to Tijuana — many of the refugees are separated from husbands, parents or children. I remember the pain in the face of Yulia Usik, a mother of children aged 4 and 5, when we spoke at the Przemysl train station in Poland.

Through tears, she repeated the words of her husband who had stayed in Ukraine to fight: “He promised that he would come back for us.”

Now history is repeating itself. This time it is at the San Ysidro checkpoint, where Ukrainian volunteers have set up chairs for people waiting to cross, that a mother of a 4-year-old girl and a 5-month-old girl talks to me with the help of a translation phone app.

Without revealing her name, the woman explains that on the first day of the war, after the first bombing, she decided to leave Ukraine. She arrived with her daughters in Poland where she has a sister and after three weeks decided to try to reach the United States, where another sister is living in Springfield, Missouri.

She traveled to Cancun with her daughters, her two sisters and her 56-year-old mother, who sits nearby with a scarf covering her head and a Ukrainian passport in her hand. In the midst of the people and the noise of construction at the border, the woman stares at the horizon, lost in thought.

According to the older daughter, the family has left four men behind in Ukraine to fight the Russian invaders.

Ukrainian Camp

Apart from the sports complex, a tent city has sprung up where about 800 refugees spend the night before traveling by municipal bus to the border crossing. Ukrainian volunteers provide security, food and amusement for the children who run around chasing soap bubbles.

Day and night, the cars line up to cross into San Ysidro, California, beckoned by the American hills visible behind the border wall. Voices rise in Russian and Ukrainian, though the laughter and tears of the children recognize no language barriers.

Lucero, the municipal director of migrant care in Tijuana, tells me the sports complex was opened for the refugees because the tent camp near the Tijuana-San Ysidro crossing had become too crowded.

He acknowledges that the city has responded more quickly to this crisis than to the usual flow of migrants from Central America, Haiti and more remote parts of Mexico. For those, the city maintains another 25 shelters where some have waited for almost two years for a change in American policy that will permit them to seek asylum in the U.S.

He also says some of these Ukrainian refugees have more resources than the Central Americans; some have even been staying in local hotels in the city.

Upon arrival in Tijuana, the refugees are registered by volunteers and placed on a waiting list, explains white-coated Gilberto, who prefers not to provide his surname. We speak in an improvised medical care center in the Ukrainian camp.

“I arrived two weeks ago, before I helped with transportation from the airport, to here or to the other side, but then I came here to help with the medical side,” he says. “Here they are on a priority list, those who came before are here, those who came after stay in the gymnasium, they are gradually moving to the line, but in an orderly manner.”

The coordination of all activities — arrival, transportation, registration, lodging and delivery to the Border Patrol — is managed by a mixed group of volunteers that includes representatives of The Light of the World Church in Sacramento, California, and Calvary Church in San Diego.

The volunteers are deeply committed to ensuring that the families are not only cared for but are quickly admitted into the United States.

To do this, they created a phone app that allows them not only to be registered on a list that will be presented to the Border Patrol, but also to maintain an orderly flow of people through the pedestrian checkpoint.

Anastasiya Polovin, a Ukrainian native now living in Orange County in the Los Angeles area, has left the music academy that she runs to assist her compatriots. Speaking to me in the sports complex, she stresses the importance of providing the refugees with hot food, showers and other basic comforts.

But she says, even more urgent is to speed up the process of admitting them into the United States under a humanitarian exception to normal admission procedures that is not available to most other migrants arriving at the border.

Polovin insists that the humanitarian exception should be available not only here in Tijuana after long journeys and considerable expense. Advocates for the refugees want the government to allow them to fly directly into the United States from Europe.

Polovin shares that she is originally from the besieged southern city of Mikolaiv, where Ukrainian forces halted the Russian advance toward Odesa. “I have lost many people I know,” she says.

Even so, she says, six of her relatives have recently made it into the United States and will join her mother who is already in California. Ironically, one of them was turned down for refugee status in the U.S. two years ago.

“It was not until the war began that he was guaranteed access,” she says.
…

A criminal case has been opened against a Siberian journalist whose news website had published content critical of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, Russian media reported on Thursday.

Mikhail Afanasyev, chief editor of Novy Fokus in the Russian region of Khakassia, was arrested by security forces Wednesday over the website’s reporting on 11 riot police who allegedly refused deployment to Ukraine as part of Russia’s military action there.

Afanasyev was accused Thursday of disseminating “deliberately false information” about the Russian armed forces, an offense which carries a maximum 10-year jail sentence under a law passed last month.

Afanasyev has published numerous investigations into sensitive issues in Khakassia, such as organized crime and alleged abuses of power by local officials.

He was accused of libel in 2009 over reporting that criticized the Russian government’s response to an explosion at the country’s largest hydroelectric plant that year. And in 2016, he reportedly faced death threats from a criminal gang active in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, after he detailed the group’s illegal activities and suspected ties to local police.

Another Siberia-based journalist was also arrested Wednesday on suspicion of breaching Russia’s new laws on media coverage of the situation in Ukraine. Sergei Mikhailov, founder of the LIStok weekly newspaper based in the Republic of Altay, was reportedly placed in pre-trial detention over the outlet’s alleged “calls for sanctions against Russia.”

LIStok’s website has been blocked since March for “promoting” activities opposing Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.
…

Editor’s note: Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch.

Impacts of Ukraine war reverberate globally

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Wednesday that because of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the developing world is facing a “perfect storm” threatening to devastate many of its economies. He said 1.7 billion people could be affected by disruptions in food, energy and finance systems.

UN Chief: Ukraine War Fallout Threatens Economic Crisis in Developing World

Sexual violence, trafficking growing in Ukrainian conflict

The United Nations said Monday that Ukrainian women and children are at heightened risk of sexual violence, rape and trafficking as reports grow of such violations. U.N. Women Executive Director Sima Bahous told the Security Council that young women and unaccompanied teenagers are at particular risk.

UN: Sexual Violence, Trafficking Increasing in Ukraine War

ICC prosecutor: Ukraine a ‘crime scene’

International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan visited the Ukrainian town of Bucha on Tuesday, as workers dug up bodies wrapped in black plastic bags from mass graves. He said the country has become a “crime scene.” His office has opened an investigation into alleged crimes falling under the court’s jurisdiction.

As Calls Grow for Justice on Ukraine, ICC Steps Forward

Millions of South Sudanese face growing hunger, famine

The U.N. said this week that more than 7 million South Sudanese will be facing a food crisis by July because of floods, drought and armed clashes. About 87,000 people in the Pibor administrative area and parts of Jonglei, Lakes and Unity states are also likely to be at catastrophic levels of famine by July. About 2.9 million people will be just one step lower, at emergency levels.

South Sudan Facing Food Crisis

Move in General Assembly to hold Security Council veto holders accountable

Nearly 40 countries plan to bring a draft resolution to the U.N. General Assembly that seeks to hold the five veto-wielding countries in the Security Council accountable when they exercise that right. If adopted, the resolution would require the General Assembly to meet when one of the five permanent Security Council members — Britain, China, France, Russia or the United States — uses its veto to block adoption of a council resolution.

UN Security Council Veto Holders Could Face Accountability

African states abstain on Russia resolutions, may signal revival of NAM

Some African nations’ repeated abstentions on U.S.-led resolutions condemning Russia at the United Nations could be a subtle signal for the revival of the Non-Aligned Movement, analysts say.

African States May Be Pushing to Revive Non-Aligned Movement, Analysts Say

In brief

Secretary-General Guterres said Wednesday that despite U.N. efforts, he does not think a nationwide humanitarian cease-fire will happen right now in Ukraine. He is hopeful, however, that several proposals the U.N. made for local cease-fires, humanitarian corridors, humanitarian assistance and civilian evacuations might still be possible, and he is awaiting a response from Russia.

The United Nations warned Thursday that as many as 6 million Somalis could face the risk of famine if the rainy season fails as expected and global food prices continue to rise. Three poor consecutive rainy seasons have deepened the country’s drought, plunging millions of people to crisis levels of food insecurity. Somalia imports 85% of its wheat from Ukraine and Russia, and the war there has also complicated the country’s food crisis. A humanitarian response plan requesting $1.5 billion is only 4.4% funded.

The U.N. says it continues to be concerned about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Myanmar. More than 900,000 people are displaced, including more than 560,000 who have been uprooted because of violence since the military coup in February 2021. The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that 35,700 people from Myanmar have crossed into neighboring countries. A humanitarian appeal for $826 million to assist 6.2 million people is only 4% funded.

Quote of note

“When the perpetrators walk free, the survivors walk in fear, carrying the burden of ostracism and shame.”

— Pramila Patten, special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, to the U.N. Security Council on the need for accountability.

What we are watching next week

On April 19, the U.N. Security Council will be briefed on the situation in Ukraine by the director general of the International Organization for Migration as well as by the U.N. Refugee Agency. More than 4.7 million people have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24
…