The rare, localized humanitarian ceasefire brokered for Ukraine’s Kherson region, which opened a critical escape route for civilians trapped in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, is set to expire at 22:59 local Ukrainian time on Sunday, after holding without major violation since its launch the prior Tuesday. Negotiated with facilitation from U.S. First Lady Melania Trump and Pope Leo, the temporary truce was initially restricted to Oleshky – a settlement seized by Russian forces in the earliest days of the February 2022 full-scale invasion – before being expanded to cover a broader swathe of the frontline region. For nearly two years, Oleshky residents were trapped between the Dnipro River and occupying Russian troops, with all outbound routes heavily mined and targeted by regular drone attacks. Cut off from basic supplies, many surviving civilians were forced to boil wild garden weeds for sustenance amid catastrophic shortages of food, safe drinking water and electricity. Over the course of the ceasefire, hundreds of residents have been able to flee the besieged city: the evacuation route required displaced civilians to transit through Russian-held territory, fly to Belarus, then travel overland across Ukraine’s northern border to safety. The cohort of evacuees ranges in age from a 1-year-old infant to a 94-year-old elder, according to Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, with many tearful, long-awaited family reunions unfolding across the country over the weekend as separated loved ones met for the first time in years. While the Kherson ceasefire has held, widespread hostilities have continued unabated across other parts of the conflict zone. Overnight on Saturday, Russian forces launched coordinated strikes on energy infrastructure spanning four Ukrainian regions, leaving hundreds of thousands of households disconnected from the power grid. A separate deadly aerial attack hit residential areas in the Vinnytsia region, claiming the lives of two civilians, including a 13-year-old girl, according to official statements from Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. In retaliatory action, Ukrainian forces targeted a major missile fuel production facility in Russia’s Rostov region, igniting a large-scale fire that damaged four separate production units, President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed. Across Ukraine, emergency repair crews have worked around the clock to restore power to affected communities. By early evening Sunday, most households in the Dnipropetrovsk region had their electricity reconnected, though more than 60,000 residents remained without grid access. Systematic, repeated attacks on national energy infrastructure have forced authorities to implement rolling emergency blackouts nationwide; even in the capital city of Kyiv, most residents face multi-hour power outages throughout the day, with cascading disruptions to municipal water supplies. In a public social media address, President Zelensky noted that the intensity of Russian offensive strikes over the past week had reached “extremely high” levels, emphasizing that Moscow is deliberately exploiting Ukraine’s current shortage of ballistic missile interceptor systems to maximize damage. He confirmed that Kyiv is in daily communication with the United States, European Union member states and other allied partners to request accelerated deliveries of Patriot air defence systems – the only verified weapon platform capable of reliably neutralizing Russia’s advanced ballistic missiles. While expressing gratitude for existing military support and long-term aid commitments from international partners, Zelensky issued a renewed urgent call for immediate additional air defence assets to protect critical civilian infrastructure and population centres.
分类： world
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Israel intentionally released footage of Mossad operatives in Iran to provoke mass arrests, ex-chief says
In explosive closed-door remarks delivered at the 22 October 2025 Priority Summit and first reported by *The Jerusalem Post*, former Mossad director David Barnea laid out a previously undisclosed core strategic rationale behind Israel’s unusual choice to publish official, Mossad-branded footage of its covert activities inside Iran on the very first morning of Operation Rising Lion, the 12-day June 2025 cross-border conflict between the two nations.
Contrary to widespread initial assumptions that the early public release of operational video was merely a flex of the Israeli spy agency’s long-rumored deep penetration capabilities inside Iranian territory, Barnea explained the move was a deliberate disinformation gambit designed to overwhelm Tehran’s counterintelligence apparatus. By broadcasting proof that Israeli operatives were active across Iranian civilian population centers in the opening hours of the June 13 military campaign – which included Israeli airstrikes targeting Iranian ballistic missile sites, air defense installations, senior military commanders and nuclear scientists – Mossad leadership calculated that Iranian security forces would panic and carry out sweeping, indiscriminate mass arrests rather than conduct targeted, carefully vetted counterespionage operations.
Barnea confirmed that the strategy unfolded exactly as planned: Iranian authorities ultimately detained roughly 21,000 people in the weeks following the outbreak of hostilities, a figure corroborated by both official Iranian police statements from August 2025 and independent human rights documentation from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The massive dragnet, he noted, left Iranian counterintelligence agents completely unable to separate actual embedded Mossad operatives from ordinary, uninvolved civilians, forcing them to eventually release nearly all detainees after their identical accounts of being randomly picked up off streets, from vehicles or in public spaces proved impossible to parse.
Shockingly, Barnea also acknowledged that a significant number of people in Iran who have been sentenced to death and executed on charges of spying for Israel had no affiliation whatsoever with Mossad, or any other international intelligence agency, describing them as random, unfortunate civilians scapegoated by Iranian security forces eager to demonstrate they were cracking down on alleged Israeli infiltrators.
The unvarnished admission has drawn fierce condemnation from Trita Parsi, executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who framed the policy as a cynical, reckless choice that deliberately placed thousands of ordinary Iranian civilians in mortal danger to protect a tiny handful of Israeli operatives. Parsi noted in a public post on X that it was an unusually unguarded confession of how Israeli actions directly exposed the very Iranian population Israel has at times claimed to support to arbitrary detention, abuse and wrongful execution.
The 12-day June 2025 conflict concluded with a mutual ceasefire after Iran launched retaliatory missile strikes against Israeli territory in response to the initial Israeli bombing campaign. Iranian officials have long maintained that their sweeping post-conflict arrests were a necessary response to very real, documented threats of Mossad sabotage, espionage and on-the-ground support for Israeli military attacks inside their borders, and that the vast majority of detainees were rounded up based on public tip-offs and heightened national security protocols. Independent human rights groups have documented that the thousands of people swept up in the dragnet included not just suspected espionage targets, but journalists, human rights activists, social media users, members of marginalized ethnic and religious minority communities, and foreign nationals residing in Iran. -
Shops looted as German cost of living protests turn violent
A wave of post-demonstration violence unfolded across major German urban centers on Saturday, after thousands of young attendees joined largely peaceful daytime rallies organized by grassroots campaign group Gen Z regelt, which translates to “Gen Z Takes Charge”. The day’s scheduled protests were centered on a set of core demands: increased public funding for underresourced school systems, relief from soaring cost of living pressures, a rollback of planned public spending cuts, and an end to proposed compulsory military service across the country.
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How the downfall of Serbia’s Vučiċ mirrored that of Hungary’s Orbán
Last November, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić sat down for a casual lunch of traditional Balkan burek pastries at a bustling downtown bakery in Subotica, northern Serbia – Orbán opting for a cheese-filled pastry, Vučić choosing a meat variant. The two nationalist leaders, who had held power for 16 and 14 years respectively, then traveled to a nearby winery to hash out cross-border business deals, including Hungary’s planned acquisition of Serbia’s Nis oil refinery, and discuss shared diplomatic priorities: their close alliances with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and staunch support for Bosnian Serb separatist leader Milorad Dodik. The pair had spent years consolidating control over state institutions, building intertwined cross-border business empires, and overseeing landmark infrastructure projects such as the Chinese-funded, Chinese-engineered high-speed railway linking Belgrade and Budapest. At that November 2024 meeting, neither leader could have predicted they would both be ousted from office within 12 months.
Orbán fell first in April 2025, defeated by Péter Magyar’s centrist Tisza party in a landslide upset that defied nearly all pre-election forecasts. Just days later, a grassroots Serbian student movement, formed less than two years prior, secured a historic parliamentary election victory, marking the end of Vučić’s decades-long grip on power. The two victorious movements appear structurally distinct on the surface: Tisza is a personality-driven political organization centered on the energy and public profile of its leader Magyar, while Serbia’s Student List operates on a decentralized, leaderless model that rejects hierarchical governance.
Yet the two campaigns shared a defining, unprecedented strength: a cohort of tech-savvy young voters who mobilized at record turnouts of 79% in Hungary and 69% in Serbia, leveraging artificial intelligence tools to analyze electoral data, flag high-risk polling locations, and coordinate tens of thousands of civilian election monitors to counter long-documented patterns of voter intimidation and systemic electoral fraud deployed by the ruling parties. Hungarian civic action group DE played a direct, hands-on role in supporting the Serbian student campaign, sending 70 trained election observers to Serbia ahead of polling day, and hosting months of workshops even before the Serbian election was officially called to share tactics honed during Hungary’s earlier electoral fight.
One of the most effective shared strategies was the pre-emptive identification of “infected” polling districts: locations where abnormally high vote shares for incumbent parties in previous cycles strongly indicated widespread chain voting, voter coercion, or ballot tampering. On Serbian election day, student activists stationed both fixed teams at high-risk sites and roving mobile units across the northern Vojvodina province, filming all interactions with suspected ruling party operatives. Péter Klemm, a student activist based in Subotica, noted that masked pro-Vučić vigilantes began gathering near polling stations as early as 4 p.m. on election day, but the 20 to 30 civilian monitors posted at each threatened location acted as a powerful deterrent, blocking nearly all planned intimidation and fraud attempts.
The parallels between the two ousters extend far beyond campaign tactics. Vučić delivered his formal concession speech at exactly 9:30 p.m. on Serbian election night, matching the exact timestamp of Orbán’s concession announcement after his April defeat, a moment that shocked most international observers who had predicted both leaders would refuse to cede power peacefully. Unconfirmed widespread local reports indicate Vučić spoke to Orbán twice over the course of election night: once before his public concession, and again at 11:15 p.m., with multiple sources claiming Orbán convinced his long-time ally to avoid deploying state security forces to cling to power. Vučić has denied speaking to Orbán before his public announcement, though he acknowledged a later post-concession call, while Orbán has declined all requests for comment on the conversations. Strikingly, the two victorious parties also won nearly identical proportional representation seat shares: the Tisza party secured 140 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat national parliament, while Serbia’s Student List claimed exactly 140 seats in the 250-seat Serbian national assembly. Péter Magyar was the first European head of government to call the Serbian student leadership directly to congratulate them on their win, noting that the Hungarian movement’s success had clearly served as a source of inspiration for the Serbian youth campaign.
Both former incumbents now face the prospect of prosecution for long-rumored corruption and abuse of power, with newly empowered special anti-crime prosecution bodies in both countries – Serbia’s JTOK organized crime task force and Hungary’s newly established NVVH special prosecution service – holding overlapping investigative powers that legal experts say will allow for coordinated cross-border probes. The catalyst that sparked Serbia’s student movement, the November 2024 collapse of the Novi Sad railway station canopy – a disaster widely attributed to systemic corruption and negligent oversight that killed 16 people – also implicated Orbán-linked Hungarian firms that had been contracted for the station’s renovation work.
Áron Timar, founder of Hungary’s DE civic action group, noted that for years European political analysts operated under the assumption that Orbán and Vučić’s regimes would grow more entrenched and unassailable the longer they held office. “In reality, they grew steadily weaker the longer they clung to power,” Timar explained. “Once the public found its collective voice and rose up, there was no force left that could stop the shift.”
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I’ve been stuck on a tiny Pacific island for years and can’t get a transit visa to fly home
When 50-year-old Ruchira Ranasingha departed her native Sri Lanka in 2018, she never anticipated her path would lead to indefinite, involuntary residence on the postcard-perfect South Pacific archipelago of the Cook Islands, a destination most know for its powdery white beaches and jagged volcanic peaks. A former small-business owner who was forced to shut down her T-shirt factory amid crippling financial losses, Ranasingha fled mounting loan pressure after her husband, a long-time drug addict, died roughly seven years prior. She first relocated to Hong Kong to work as a domestic caregiver for elderly and child dependents, before travelling to New Zealand on a two-month visitor visa in December 2022 with hopes of building a stable new life.
As her visitor visa neared expiration, Ranasingha filed for asylum, citing threats from unpaid lenders back in Sri Lanka, and was granted an open work visa tied to her pending asylum claim. She secured a role at a local restaurant that agreed to sponsor her for a longer-term employment visa, but New Zealand’s immigration rules barred asylum seekers from applying for alternate visa classifications while their refugee claims remained under review, leading to that sponsorship bid being rejected. Seeking a path around this restriction, Ranasingha retained services from a local firm called Immigration & Secretarial Services, whose manager Sylviane Gallant advised her that she could file for a fresh work visa from an offshore location, and instructed her to exit New Zealand to complete the process.
Acting on that guidance, Ranasingha booked a short stay in the Cook Islands, a self-governing nation in free association with New Zealand, only to face a cascading series of catastrophic setbacks. Her offshore work visa application was immediately rejected, and her choice to leave New Zealand automatically voided the terms of her existing asylum-linked work authorization. New Zealand immigration authorities notified her she would no longer be eligible for any future visas to enter or even transit through their territory, a barrier that would quickly prove insurmountable.
With no valid travel documentation to return home, Ranasingha soon learned that every feasible international exit route from the Cook Islands was blocked. All direct commercial flights from the archipelago only connect to New Zealand, Hawaii in the United States, or Tahiti in French Polynesia. Both Hawaii and Tahiti require in-person biometric data submission for visa processing, a step that can only be completed inside New Zealand, which had already barred her from entry. Three separate transit visa applications to New Zealand were rejected, with officials stating they could not verify she had no intent to overstay, and four subsequent Australian transit visa bids were also denied on similar grounds. Even her dramatic public offer to travel back to Sri Lanka “handcuffed, bound and gagged” under official escort was dismissed, as New Zealand’s immigration minister’s office noted that physical restraints would not prevent a person from lodging a new asylum claim upon arrival in their territory.
Now stranded for more than three years, Ranasingha survives thanks to extraordinary acts of local goodwill: a Cook Islands hotel allowed her to move into free staff accommodation, local residents regularly donate food and clothing, and one hotel director gifted her a sewing machine that lets her generate a modest income making custom garments. She tells the BBC that her mother, who frequently reminds her that this outpouring of kindness must be a reward for past good deeds, is now in and out of hospital from chronic stress over her daughter’s prolonged disappearance, and her only son is set to get married in November, an event she is desperate to attend.
Immigration law specialist Alastair McClymont, based in Auckland, confirmed that Ranasingha received deeply negligent, unprofessional guidance from unregulated immigration consultants, who charged her thousands of New Zealand dollars in fees without disclosing the catastrophic risks of exiting New Zealand mid-asylum claim. He explained that New Zealand, Australia, the United States and France have aligned border security protocols that make it extremely unlikely any of those nations will approve transit for her, as all share intelligence that she previously filed an asylum claim stating her life was at risk in Sri Lanka, creating a presumption that she would attempt to overstay if allowed entry. The BBC attempted to reach Gallant for comment but received no response.
Ranasingha’s family has exhausted all domestic advocacy channels in Sri Lanka to secure her release, and the Sri Lankan Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that its High Commission in Wellington is working in close coordination with New Zealand authorities to explore all possible pathways for her repatriation, but no concrete resolution has been reached to date. The prolonged trauma has taken a severe toll on Ranasingha’s mental and physical health; in one recent emotional call to her brother, she expressed despair that if officials would not allow her to return home alive, they might at least agree to repatriate her remains after she dies. The story has drawn widespread public attention to the unregulated immigration consulting industry across the Pacific, which preys on vulnerable migrant applicants with misleading promises of simplified visa pathways. -
King to address slavery during Commonwealth speech in Antigua on final leg of Caribbean tour
Arriving in Antigua late Friday evening to wrap up his nine-day official Caribbean tour, King Charles III is poised to deliver a landmark address at the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) that will confront the enduring trauma of the transatlantic slave trade with unvarnished candour and genuine remorse, Buckingham Palace confirmed in official briefings. The planned Tuesday speech comes on the heels of a notable policy shift from UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who revealed in a Friday evening Guardian op-ed that his administration is open to the possibility of a formal UK apology for the country’s central role in the transatlantic slave trade — a marked departure from the long-held, decades-old government position that has never included a formal apology or consideration of reparations payments. Palace officials confirmed they were given advance notice of Burnham’s remarks, and that the King’s carefully crafted address has not been adjusted in response to the prime minister’s public comments, as decisions related to official government policy positions on apology and reparations fall exclusively under the purview of elected ministers, not the monarchy.
A Palace spokesperson emphasized that King Charles will not shy away from confronting the most shameful chapters of British colonial history during the tour, framing his address as a gesture of sincere respect for the ongoing intergovernmental conversations about historical harm that will unfold at CHOGM and in subsequent global fora. The royal tour has already placed the King at the centre of long-simmering public debates over the UK’s colonial legacy across the Caribbean: during his stop in the Bahamas, he acknowledged the profound “suffering of the past” in a public address, while in Guyana he visited the site of the 1823 Demerara Slave Rebellion, where hundreds of enslaved people were massacred and public executions were carried out in the aftermath of the uprising. That visit, accompanied by Guyana’s culture ministry official Steven Jacobs, was framed by the Palace as a dedicated opportunity for the King to deepen his understanding of enslavement history and acts of Black resistance. Beyond the conversations around colonial harm, the tour has also covered priority policy areas including climate action, youth economic opportunity, and expanded bilateral trade ties between the UK and Caribbean Commonwealth nations.
Royal insiders noted that King Charles is well-practised navigating the delicate diplomatic tightrope inherent to his role as head of the Commonwealth, and views his mandate as advocating collaboratively for the interests of the United Kingdom, its 14 overseas Realms, and the broader 56-nation Commonwealth bloc. A Palace spokesperson highlighted that amid a period of widespread institutional strain across the globe, the Commonwealth’s unique structure — large enough to carry global collective influence, yet small enough to enable close, trusting working relationships between national leaders — makes it a uniquely powerful vehicle for driving tangible, practical change that improves the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Burnham’s public commitment to strengthening the Commonwealth as a functional, impactful institution is expected to be warmly received by the King, who has long framed the intergovernmental bloc as a core priority of his reign.
Accompanied by Queen Camilla during the final leg of the tour, the royal couple will attend a Sunday morning church service in Antigua before joining official public celebrations to mark the island nation’s Independence Day. The tour unfolds against a backdrop of notable personal and public challenges for the 77-year-old monarch: he is currently undergoing ongoing treatment for cancer, following his diagnosis in early 2024, though Palace officials confirm he remains on a positive, steady recovery trajectory. By the end of the nine-day, 36-official-engagement tour in the region’s sweltering, humid climate, the King will also be just days away from marking his 78th birthday. Recent months have also seen a series of high-profile royal family headlines, including ongoing public scrutiny surrounding his brother Prince Andrew, the publication of a new memoir by his former brother-in-law Earl Spencer, and a surprise August visit to the UK by his son Prince Harry, accompanied by Meghan Markle and their two children. When asked by BBC reporters if the King remains confident that his approach to navigating family matters preserves public trust in the monarchy, a senior royal aide gave a concise, unreserved affirmative response, noting that all of the King’s actions are calibrated to uphold that public mandate. The Palace also declined to comment on recent unsubstantiated public allegations made about Meghan’s father Thomas Markle, stating that the institution does not publicly weigh in on private, personal family matters.
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‘Those children in Gaza are our children’: Macklemore finishes Free Palestine tour with sold-out London performance
Global hip-hop artist Macklemore has wrapped his landmark three-date Free Palestine benefit tour to overwhelming public demand, capping the run with a packed, sold-out show at London’s OVO Arena Wembley on Friday, October 30. Every stop on the itinerary — which also included Dublin’s 3Arena on October 26 and Paris’s Accor Arena on October 29 — sold out within hours of tickets being released, drawing massive crowds eager to stand in solidarity with Palestinian communities amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
The tour came together as a direct response to Macklemore being removed from the remaining North American legs of Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour back in September, after he made a public call for a free Palestine during a New Jersey live performance. What began as a moment of professional fallout quickly evolved into a sprawling, cross-cultural movement that pulled in A-list musicians, high-profile activists, Palestinian community leaders and human rights advocates across three European capitals.
Speaking to the capacity Wembley crowd, Macklemore opened up about the personal turning point that pushed him to launch the tour, explaining that staying silent in the face of the catastrophic, widely documented human toll of the Gaza war had grown far more uncomfortable than speaking out against the violence. “I was scrolling through footage, seeing this horrific, unimaginable catastrophe unfolding right in front of our eyes,” he told attendees. “At a certain point, it was more uncomfortable for me to stay quiet than to say something. I don’t think speaking up makes me brave or courageous — it just makes me human. Those children in Gaza are our children. There is no separation between us.” He went on to challenge the arbitrary borders and systemic divisions that drive global indifference to civilian suffering, asking the crowd: “What are we doing as a global community to tear these barriers down?”
His London set featured a mix of his chart-topping hits, including *Thrift Shop*, *Same Love*, *Glorious* and *Can’t Hold Us*, alongside the live debut of *Hind’s Hall*, his newly released protest track written in direct response to the Gaza conflict, which was met with roaring chants of “Free Palestine” from the audience.
The stacked London line-up spanned generations and movements: award-winning UK singer Paloma Faith, Palestinian-Canadian recording artist Nemahsis, climate action icon Greta Thunberg, Palestinian campaigner Arab Barghouti (son of long-detained Palestinian political leader Marwan Barghouti), Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, and Antoine Raffoul, a Palestinian displaced during the 1948 Nakba, all took the stage. Hollywood star Javier Bardem also sent a pre-recorded message of solidarity that was played for the crowd.
Arab Barghouti delivered one of the night’s most resonant addresses, speaking about his father’s 24 years of imprisonment by Israeli authorities. “Israel locked my father away 24 years ago hoping his people and the whole world would forget him,” he said. “But oppressors never understand one simple truth: you cannot imprison hope.” Marwan Barghouti, a towering figure in Palestinian political life, has now spent more than two decades in Israeli custody.
Thunberg, who opened the London show, pushed attendees to go beyond performative gestures, emphasizing that charity concerts and slogans alone would not end the decades-long Israeli occupation. “Philanthropy and well-meaning words will never bring this occupation to a close,” she stated, calling for sustained, organized grassroots pressure to drive tangible political change. Paloma Faith opened up about the very real professional and personal risks that come with publicly advocating for Palestinian rights as a high-profile public figure, noting that it often feels unnerving to take such a public stance. “But none of that fear comes even close to the horror of what would happen if we all stayed silent,” she told the crowd. She went on to challenge the global double standard that prioritizes the safety of some children over others, asking: “Why should my own kids matter any more than the children of Gaza, Palestine, Sudan, Yemen or the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Every single child deserves to be held by their mother and told they are safe. Right now, this world does not feel safe for any of them.” Nemahsis, whose real name is Nemah Hasan, told cheering fans: “My very existence as a Palestinian woman is the strongest form of resistance.”
The tour’s Dublin stop kicked off the run with an equally powerful line-up: Irish folk icon Hozier, Belfast rap collective Kneecap, and folk band Beoga — who had previously withdrawn from Sheeran’s tour in a show of solidarity with Macklemore after he was dropped — joined Palestinian singer Lina Makoul, actor Liam Cunningham and hip-hop duo Dead Prez on stage. Hozier used his set to raise awareness for 55 displaced Palestinian students from Gaza who are still waiting for visa approvals to take up university placements in Ireland. Addressing the Dublin crowd, Macklemore emphasized that the chant “Free Palestine” was never an exclusionary or divisive slogan: “It is not a call for hatred, it is not directed at any group of people — it is a call for all of us to recognize our shared humanity.”
The Paris stop two days later featured a roster of global talent including Norwegian artist Aurora, French singer Pomme, US rock band Portugal. The Man, and a host of regional Palestinian and Arab performers. Macklemore told the Paris audience: “Tonight we are all here for collective liberation. We are here for a free Palestine. We are here to celebrate the inherent dignity and right to life of every single human being who calls this planet home.”
All proceeds from the three fully benefit shows are being distributed to 12 frontline Palestinian support organizations, including Medical Aid for Palestinians, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Institute for Middle East Understanding, and medical non-profit Glia. Across every city, the tour served as both a massive fundraising drive for vulnerable Palestinian communities and a public platform to amplify unfiltered Palestinian voices, push for an immediate end to the occupation, and demand global political action to end civilian suffering in Gaza. -
‘We came back from hell’, say Ukrainians after years in Russia-occupied frontline city
For Viacheslav and his wife Olha, the long-awaited moment they stepped off a evacuation coach in northern Ukraine’s Chernihiv region alongside their two adult children and family dog felt like emerging from the depths of a nightmare they thought might never end. The pair were among hundreds of displaced civilians who successfully fled the Russian-occupied frontline city of Oleshky on Saturday, after being trapped in the besieged settlement for nearly three years. Seized by Russian forces in the opening days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Oleshky is geographically cut off: the wide Dnipro River blocks one edge of the city, while occupying military units control all access points on the other, leaving residents trapped in a no-man’s-land of constant violence and deprivation. Olha summed up the years of occupation with a single, unflinching word: “Horror.” Her husband put it even more bluntly: “We came back from hell.” For months, the couple and their fellow residents dared not attempt escape, as every potential route out was laced with landmines and targeted by regular drone strikes. As food and critical supplies ran perilously low earlier this month, desperate residents began venturing into mined areas in search of sustenance, with many killed or maimed by hidden explosives. Those too terrified to risk the journey outside were reduced to boiling wild garden weeds to stay alive. It was this rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation that pushed the remaining residents to cling to any glimmer of a way out. That path to safety opened earlier this week, when a temporary humanitarian ceasefire brokered by U.S. First Lady Melania Trump took effect across the Kherson region, marking the first multi-day period of relative calm the area had seen in nearly four years. Local authorities deployed 25 buses and accompanying ambulances for residents with limited mobility, offering a narrow four-hour evacuation window on Friday to ferry up to 750 people out of the city. The total remaining population of Oleshky and its surrounding communities was estimated at roughly 6,000, including 200 children, with 1,700 residing within the city limits itself. The evacuation route required travellers to cross Russian-occupied territory into southern Russia, then board flights to Belarus, before finally being transported by bus to a processing military facility in Chernihiv. Footage and witness accounts from the arrival site painted a visceral picture of both suffering and joy: many elderly evacuees, weakened by years of malnutrition and stress, had to be carried off the vehicles on stretchers, while others collapsed into tearful, long-delayed embraces with family members they had not seen in years. Mykhailo Palii, another evacuee, was met on the tarmac by his two daughters Dasha and Anya, who had spent years fearing he was dead. The pair sprinted across the tarmac screaming and sobbing before wrapping him in a tight hug. Palii revealed he had hidden the full extent of the daily danger in Oleshky from his family for months, including a missile strike that blew a massive hole in his bathroom, to spare them unnecessary worry. For Tetiana and her husband Volodymyr, who arrived carrying their family cat, the choice to evacuate was an easy one: their own home burned to the ground three years prior, and they had spent the time since sheltering in an abandoned neighbour’s house. “There is nothing for us to regret leaving,” Tetiana explained. “We have no remaining relatives there, our children are married and living elsewhere.” Even as they celebrated their new safety, the newly arrived evacuees carried heavy concerns for the thousands of vulnerable residents still trapped behind in Oleshky, enduring the same deprivation and violence they had just escaped. Now, the group faces the next daunting chapter of their journey: rebuilding their shattered lives across Ukraine. Palii said he is ready to take any available work, from construction to farm labour, to support his family. Olha, who has no other relatives elsewhere in Ukraine, plans to stay with acquaintances long-term while her family gets back on their feet. “If we managed to survive in hell, we will survive here too,” she said, with quiet, unshakable resolve.
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UN Western Sahara peacekeeping mission left in limbo after US-Russia veto standoff
A historic breakdown in routine UN Security Council proceedings has left the long-running Western Sahara peacekeeping operation entirely without an active mandate, after competing draft resolutions from Russia and the United States were both vetoed in a rare head-to-head clash between the two permanent Security Council powers. The impasse centers on decades of competing territorial claims in the mineral-rich North African territory, which was abandoned by former colonial ruler Spain in 1976. Morocco has long asserted historical sovereignty over the region, referring to it as its “southern provinces” and pouring billions of dollars into local infrastructure, education, and public service upgrades to integrate the territory into its national system. Opposing Rabat’s claim is the Algeria-based Polisario Front, a pro-independence movement that has waged a decades-long campaign for a fully sovereign Sahrawi state, with tens of thousands of its supporters residing in isolated refugee camps across the Algerian border. For nearly 30 years, the UN peacekeeping mission formally known as the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) has operated with a routinely renewed annual mandate, tasked with overseeing a UN-brokered ceasefire and organizing a long-promised independence referendum for the Sahrawi people. But the 2024 renewal process devolved into unprecedented confrontation after Washington tabled a draft resolution designed to elevate Morocco’s 2000s-era autonomy proposal to the sole official basis for all future negotiation talks. The U.S.-backed text also would have trimmed MINURSO’s military personnel contingent, stripped the word “referendum” from the mission’s official name to reflect decades of intractable disputes over voter eligibility that have made a popular vote functionally unworkable, and directed the UN refugee agency to conduct a full census of Polisario-run refugee populations in Algeria. The United Kingdom and France, the Security Council’s other two permanent European members, openly endorsed the U.S. draft and threw their support behind Morocco’s autonomy framework, which the Security Council had already partially backed as a negotiation foundation in the previous year’s mandate renewal. Speaking after the vote, U.S. UN Ambassador Michael Waltz emphasized that UN operational staff had confirmed for 30 consecutive years that the logistical and political barriers to holding a fair, agreed-upon referendum were insurmountable. “Some council members have chosen to wield their veto just to preserve the letter R for referendum in the mission’s title, even though the UN has not taken any concrete steps to organize that vote for decades,” Waltz stated. Russian representatives, however, pushed back fiercely against the U.S. draft, arguing that the text unacceptably pre-judged the final sovereign status of Western Sahara in violation of longstanding UN neutrality protocols. “The Security Council has no authority to pre-determine sovereignty disputes unilaterally, and we cannot endorse this lopsided, one-sided approach,” Russian UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the chamber, explaining his country’s decision to veto the U.S. resolution. After the U.S. draft failed, Russia tabled its own competing text, a straightforward 12-month mandate extension that would have left all existing MINURSO operating rules and the mission’s original name fully unchanged. The U.S. immediately vetoed this Russian draft, which garnered only 2 supportive votes out of 15 Security Council members, prompting Nebenzia to denounce the U.S. move as a “political murder of the peacekeeping mission.” At the time of the vote, MINURSO deployed 155 uniformed military personnel across the territory, with a projected annual operating budget of $62 million for the fiscal cycle that launched in June. Humanitarian advocacy organization Oxfam issued a stark public warning in the aftermath of the dual veto, noting that the sudden collapse of the mission’s mandate would eliminate critical ceasefire monitoring and de-escalation capabilities that have kept armed conflict at bay for decades. The group cautioned that the power vacuum would put ordinary Sahrawi civilians at severe risk, erode fragile regional stability, and effectively destroy remaining pathways to a negotiated, peaceful end to the 48-year-old territorial dispute. Roughly the vast majority of Sahrawi citizens reside in the portion of Western Sahara administered by Morocco, while an estimated 170,000 remain in Polisario-managed refugee camps in southern Algeria.
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Irish police assaulted in Dublin and threatened with ‘imitation’ gun
Irish national police service An Garda Síochána has launched a full-scale criminal investigation following a dangerous early-morning incident in central Dublin on Saturday, in which responding officers were threatened with a highly realistic imitation firearm. The chain of events unfolded shortly before 5 a.m. local time on busy Abbey Street, a high-footfall thoroughfare in the heart of the Irish capital’s city centre. Three Garda personnel – two uniformed serving officers and one trainee Garda who were on active routine patrol – first observed a man behaving suspiciously while travelling on a bicycle, and moved to intercept the individual to initiate an arrest attempt. As the confrontation escalated, a physical struggle broke out between the officers and the suspect, during which one Garda was physically assaulted, before the man produced the imitation weapon and threatened the attending officers. Fleeing the scene to evade capture, the suspect discarded the imitation firearm directly into the adjacent River Liffey. While the full weapon remains at large as of press time, Garda search teams successfully recovered a magazine linked to the device, which has been submitted to national forensic laboratories for full technical analysis. Initial preliminary assessments of the recovered magazine have confirmed the item is associated with a highly realistic imitation firearm that could easily be mistaken for a functional real weapon at a glance. Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly addressed the incident in an official public statement, noting that the dangerous encounter serves as a stark, recurring reminder of the unpredictable, life-threatening risks that frontline Garda members face as part of their daily duties protecting communities across Ireland. Search operations to locate the discarded imitation firearm in the River Liffey, trace the full identity of the male suspect who remains at large, and gather additional evidence are ongoing. An Garda Síochána has issued a public appeal for any witnesses who were in the Abbey Street area in the hour leading up to 5 a.m. on Saturday, or who captured any mobile phone or dashcam footage of the incident, to contact investigating officers immediately to assist with enquiries.