标签： Europe

As relentless Russian airstrikes and missile barrages continue to pummel Ukrainian cities, leaving a rising trail of death and civilian suffering, a new diplomatic rift has emerged over a U.S. decision to extend a key exemption to Western sanctions on Russian crude oil exports. The U.S. move extends the window for global buyers to purchase Russian oil and petroleum products already loaded onto cargo vessels at sea until May 16, a measure Washington says is designed to head off a catastrophic global energy supply crunch stoked by escalating conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran.

A deadly deliberate attack on a United Nations peacekeeping patrol in southern Lebanon has claimed the life of one French service member and left three other peacekeepers injured, two critically, according to senior UN and French officials. The incident, which unfolded on a routine mission near the village of Ghanduriyah, has deepened concerns over the safety of UN personnel in the region just days after a fragile 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect.

The fatal shooting occurred when the patrol, deployed with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), was working to clear explosive ordnance along a key road and reopen access to a UN position that had been cut off by weeks of cross-border fighting between Israel and the Iran-aligned militant group Hezbollah. French Armed Forces Minister Catherine Vautrin confirmed the unit was ambushed at close range by an armed faction. The fallen French peacekeeper was struck immediately by a direct small-arms round; fellow troops pulled him to safety but were unable to resuscitate him, Vautrin added.

French President Emmanuel Macron publicly placed blame for the attack squarely on Hezbollah, saying “Everything suggests that responsibility for this attack lies with Hezbollah.” He called on Lebanese national authorities to immediately arrest those responsible and fulfill their security commitments alongside UNIFIL personnel. A spokesperson for UN Secretary-General António Guterres echoed the condemnation, noting that an initial UNIFIL assessment attributed the gunfire to non-state actors, which the mission presumes to be Hezbollah. The spokesperson stressed the urgent need for all factions to honor the recently agreed cessation of hostilities and maintain full compliance with the ceasefire terms.

Hezbollah has forcefully rejected all accusations of involvement, calling the claims rushed and baseless. In an official statement released Saturday, the group urged stakeholders to exercise caution before assigning blame, calling for a full, transparent investigation by the Lebanese Armed Forces to uncover the full circumstances of the incident. The militant group also called for continued close coordination between UNIFIL, the Lebanese army, and local communities during this period of heightened volatility.

Lebanese national leaders have moved quickly to condemn the attack. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun spoke by phone with President Macron, pledging that all perpetrators would be brought to justice. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has formally ordered a full official investigation into the ambush. The Lebanese Armed Forces said the shooting followed earlier exchanges of fire with unidentified armed individuals, adding that it is maintaining close operational coordination with UNIFL during what it describes as an extremely sensitive security phase in southern Lebanon.

This attack is the latest in a string of deadly incidents targeting UN peacekeepers in the region. In late March, three Indonesian UNIFIL personnel were killed in two separate incidents: one in a vehicle-borne explosion and another in a projectile strike a day prior. Since UNIFIL was first established by the UN Security Council in 1978, following Israel’s initial invasion of southern Lebanon, more than 330 peacekeepers have lost their lives during the mission.

UNIFIL has reiterated that under binding international law, all armed and political actors are legally obligated to guarantee the safety and security of UN personnel deployed in the region. The mission emphasized that deliberate targeted attacks on peacekeepers constitute grave violations of international humanitarian law, and can be formally prosecuted as war crimes.

The current attack comes against a backdrop of sharply escalating tensions along the Lebanon-Israel Blue Line, where cross-border clashes between Hezbollah and Israel reignited on March 2, drastically raising the security risks for peacekeepers deployed to the area. The 10-day ceasefire brokered by the United States went into effect on April 16, with Washington calling on Hezbollah to strictly abide by the agreement’s terms.

Originally mandated to oversee Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, restore regional stability, and support the Lebanese government in reasserting sovereign control over its southern territory, UNIFIL’s mandate was expanded following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. UN Security Council Resolution 1701 expanded the mission’s responsibilities to include monitoring ceasefire compliance along the Blue Line, the de facto border between Israel and Lebanon, in partnership with the Lebanese Armed Forces.

On the cusp of their wedding day in April 1986, 19-year-old trainee teacher Iryna Stetsenko and 25-year-old nuclear power plant engineer Serhiy Lobanov had every reason to look forward to their future. The young couple were building their life in Pripyat, a purpose-built, newly constructed Soviet city constructed to house workers of the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. What they could not know that night was that 4 kilometers from their apartment, the world’s worst nuclear disaster was already unfolding.

It was just after midnight when Iryna, who had just finished polishing her nails for the ceremony, stepped out onto her balcony and heard an unfamiliar, deep rumble. “It was as if a hundred planes were roaring overhead, everything hummed, and every window pane shook,” she recalled. Serhiy, sleeping on a kitchen mattress in a relative’s apartment full of wedding guests, felt a low, rolling wave that he mistook for a minor earthquake before drifting back to sleep.

When dawn broke on April 26, Serhiy woke full of excitement for his sunny wedding day. As he ran pre-ceremony errands, he noticed signs that something was very wrong: soldiers in gas masks patrolled the streets, workers hosed down roads with foamy decontamination solution, and colleagues from the plant told him they had been called in urgently for an emergency they could not explain. Glancing across the city, he could see dark smoke billowing from the damaged Reactor Number Four. What would later become clear is that firefighters and plant workers had spent the entire night fighting a massive toxic blaze, absorbing potentially lethal doses of radiation to contain the disaster.

Though anxiety prickled at him, Serhiy continued with his plans. He found the city market nearly deserted on what was usually a busy Saturday morning, and picked five simple tulips for his bride. Back at Iryna’s apartment, her mother had spent the night fielding frantic calls from neighbors warning of an unspecified catastrophe, but Soviet information controls kept any details of the accident from being released. When Iryna’s mother called local authorities for answers, officials insisted all scheduled city events proceed as planned. Schools stayed open, and the wedding went forward.

The wedding party processed in a line of cars to Pripyat’s Palace of Culture, the city’s central venue for both state ceremonies and popular local discos. The couple exchanged their vows standing on a cloth embroidered with their names, then moved to a nearby café for their wedding banquet. But the joy of the day was swallowed by uncertainty. “Everyone knew something terrible had happened, but nobody knew what it was,” Serhiy said. The couple had practiced a traditional waltz for their first dance, but as the weight of the unfolding tragedy settled over them, they lost the rhythm almost immediately. “We just hugged each other and stayed that way, moving together in the hug,” Iryna remembered.

By the early hours of Sunday, just hours after they were married, the couple were warned to evacuate immediately: a mandatory evacuation train was set to depart Pripyat at 5 a.m. Iryna only had a thin celebration dress with her, so she slipped her voluminous wedding dress back on to run back to her mother’s apartment to pack. Her new shoes had already given her blisters, so she ran barefoot through rain puddles, wedding dress trailing behind her. As their train pulled out of the station in the pre-dawn dark, they could see the glowing, collapsed reactor against the sky. Serhiy described it as “looking straight into the eye of an active volcano.” Authorities told evacuees the displacement would only last three days. The couple never returned.

The 1986 Chernobyl explosion, which occurred in what is now northern Ukraine, was caused by a catastrophic failed safety test. The International Atomic Energy Agency and World Health Organization estimate the blast released 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Soviet Union faced widespread international condemnation for its slow, opaque response: it only confirmed the accident two days later, after Swedish nuclear monitors detected abnormal radiation drifting across Western Europe, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev did not address the disaster publicly for more than two weeks.

Nikolai Solovyov, a lead turbine engineer on shift at the plant when the explosion hit, described the moment: “It felt like an earthquake under our feet. We saw the roof collapsing, a blast of hot air rushed toward us carrying thick black dust, and then the sirens started.” He and his colleagues rushed to the site assuming a generator had exploded, never imagining the reactor itself had blown. One worker’s dosimeter registered radiation levels far beyond its measuring capacity. They found a colleague alive but vomiting, a clear sign of acute radiation sickness—he was among the first to die from the disaster.

The official death toll in the immediate aftermath of the accident stands at 31: two killed directly by the blast, 28 who died from acute radiation sickness in the weeks that followed, and one fatality from cardiac arrest. The long-term death toll remains fiercely contested: a 2005 UN agency study estimated up to 4,000 people may eventually die from radiation-related causes, while other independent estimates put the number as high as tens of thousands.

To contain the spreading radiation, Soviet authorities launched a massive clean-up operation, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of “liquidators” from across the union to stabilize the site and clear radioactive debris. Extreme radiation levels fried electronic equipment, forcing many workers to clear toxic debris by hand in short shifts designed to limit lethal exposure. Jaan Krinal, one of dozens of liquidators deployed from Soviet-era Estonia, recalled wearing 20+ kilograms of lead plating for protection, plus a construction helmet, goggles, and a dosimeter tucked in his pocket. He and fellow Estonian liquidator Rein Klaar worked in 60-second bursts on the roof of Reactor Three, with no time to process the danger they faced. “Nobody could tell us what was what,” Rein said. “There was no time to think.”

In the months after the evacuation, Iryna and Serhiy were staying with Iryna’s grandmother 300 kilometers away in the Poltava region, east of Kyiv, when doctors made an unexpected discovery: Iryna was three months pregnant. Evacuated women were broadly warned that radiation exposure could harm fetuses, and many were advised to terminate pregnancies. “I was scared to have the baby, and scared to have an abortion,” Iryna remembered. But one supportive female doctor encouraged her to carry the pregnancy to term, and later that year, Iryna gave birth to a healthy daughter, Katya. Today, Katya is a mother herself, and the couple have a 15-year-old granddaughter.

Four decades on, the legacy of the Chernobyl disaster stretches across generations, and new upheaval has again upended the lives of those who survived it. The site of the explosion has become an active war zone following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, Russian tanks seized the Chernobyl plant complex, holding staff hostage for five weeks, laying mines, and digging defensive trenches across contaminated land. In 2025, a drone strike punched a hole in the 1.6 billion USD safety shield installed over Reactor Four in 2016, replacing an unstable original concrete sarcophagus. While radiation levels did not spike after the strike, the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed the shield can no longer perform its primary safety function. The plant requires constant monitoring and maintenance to prevent further radiation leaks.

Much of the 1,000-square-mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is now safe for short-term visitor tours, but permanent settlement remains banned, and hotspots of deadly contamination remain in areas like the Red Forest, a stand of pine trees killed by radiation that remains heavily toxic. Pripyat, once celebrated as a beacon of Soviet technological progress and youthful optimism, is now a crumbling ghost city. The Palace of Culture where Iryna and Serhiy married stands abandoned and derelict, succumbing to decades of neglect.

For Iryna and Serhiy, displacement became a second reality in 2022, after a Russian missile struck their daughter’s Kyiv apartment. The couple fled Ukraine for a new life in Berlin, forced to uproot their lives for the second time—once for a nuclear disaster, once for war. Though they suspect radiation exposure has contributed to long-term health issues Iryna has endured, including two total knee replacements, and a 2016 heart attack Serhiy suffered, their four-decade marriage has become their anchor through every crisis.

“I think we really had to go through so many difficulties in life to understand that we really can’t be one without the other,” Iryna said. “After 40 years, I can say with certainty that we are like a thread and a needle. We do everything together.”

This story accompanies new BBC programming marking the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. UK viewers can watch *What Happened at Chernobyl* on BBC One at 8:30 p.m. on April 20, with streaming available on BBC iPlayer from 6 a.m. the same day. *The Last Dance Floor in Chernobyl*, a podcast telling the full story of Iryna and Serhiy’s wedding against the backdrop of disaster, will also be released.

MADRID – On a Saturday during her multi-nation European tour, exiled Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gathered thousands of supporters at a rally in Madrid’s iconic Puerta del Sol, while confirming she had turned down a planned meeting with Spain’s progressive Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The timing of the rejection carried sharp political irony: the same day Sánchez was hosting a high-profile summit of progressive leaders from across the globe who share his ideological alignment.

Unlike Sánchez, who has long been an outspoken critic of former U.S. President Donald Trump, Machado has openly praised Trump’s January action that ousted long-time Venezuelan authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. Earlier this year, the opposition figure even awarded Trump her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, a step she says she has no regrets over, despite the Trump administration having largely sidelined her pro-democracy advocacy efforts.

In comments to reporters after the rally, Machado justified her refusal to meet Sánchez, arguing that the proceedings of his Barcelona gathering of global progressive leaders made any such meeting inappropriate. She had previously stated her firm intention to return to Venezuela to continue her political work, though she declined to share specific details of when or how the return would be carried out, while openly acknowledging the immense challenges that would accompany any homecoming under current circumstances.

Machado’s European tour has already included meetings with top leaders from France, Italy and the Netherlands, and it unfolds against a shifting political landscape in Venezuelan opposition circles. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez has remained in her temporary role beyond the original 90-day deadline set for her position, and the U.S. government has recently relaxed a number of sanctions targeting Rodríguez. Machado has been openly critical of Rodríguez’s leadership, framing her interim government as a force that perpetuates “chaos, violence and terror” in the country. She has repeatedly reaffirmed her commitment to holding free, democratic elections in Venezuela, saying she is confident such a transition is coming.

Maintaining close ties to the former U.S. administration, Machado confirmed she is in permanent contact with Trump administration officials and says she trusts Washington’s phased approach to Venezuela following Maduro’s ouster. She went so far as to single out Trump as the only global head of state that has risked his own countrymen’s well-being to advance Venezuelan freedom, referencing the U.S. military operation carried out in January.

The rally itself was backed by prominent local conservative opposition figure Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the regional leader of Madrid who is one of Sánchez’s most vocal domestic critics. Ayuso formally welcomed Machado earlier the same day before the main public gathering.

Spain is home to more than 600,000 Venezuelan migrants, the largest concentration of Venezuelan people outside of the Americas. Most of these residents fled to Spain to escape political persecution, widespread violence, and Venezuela’s crippling economic collapse, with a majority settling in the capital city of Madrid.

Among the attendees was 27-year-old Venezuelan migrant Grehlsy Peñuela, who says she still pins her hopes for her home country on Machado and her eventual return to Caracas. Peñuela carried signs bearing the photos of her two cousins, who she says are still being held as political prisoners in the Venezuelan capital. Like many migrant supporters at the rally, she says she would only consider returning to Venezuela if one condition is met: the full resignation of the country’s current ruling government.