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Tag: war crimes
How Do You Cover A War That Is Occurring 5,800 Miles Away?

How Do You Cover A War That Is Occurring 5,800 Miles Away?

We are talking here of the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital that took place on October 17, and the bombing of a Hamas tunnel complex inside the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza on Tuesday. Thirty years ago, it would have been impossible to report on such occurrences if you were not a major newspaper or television network with a bureau on the ground in the country where it happened. Twenty years ago, it would have been difficult but not impossible. The internet was there, if not as fast, and there was email, but newspapers and network news shows didn’t have much reporting online, and very few if any videos were posted.

Today, of course, is a very different story. News stories about an event as big as a bombing appear nearly instantaneously. Photos from the scene are up on X (Twitter) and YouTube just as quickly, and so are videos. But what do you do with the stories and the photos and the videos that are available now? That’s what this story is about.

Last night, in the early evening, a story came up from something called “Memo: Middle East Monitor,” which says on its banner they’ve been “Creating new perspectives since 2009 covering Africa, Egypt, Israel, Middle East, News, and Palestine.” They headlined coverage of the Jabalia bombing this way: “Egypt condemns Israeli attack on residential square in Jabalia Refugee Camp.” Here is the photo at the top of the story:

I had read several stories online from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Associated Press, but nowhere had I seen the site of the bombing described as a “residential square,” which is defined on real estate websites and shows up on maps that identify “squares” like Foley Square and Washington Square, both in New York City, as an open area between buildings in an urban setting.

So, I went to Google Earth and Google Maps, which show maps and aerial images of places around the world differently in subtle ways. Sometimes the resolution of satellite photos is better on Google Earth than it is on Google Maps, sometimes it’s the other way around. And often one or the other will identify the location you’re looking for better than the other. Google Maps, for example, locates the center of Jabalia with a little red squiggle. Google Earth gives you an outline around the blocks covered by the Jabalia refugee camp.

From Google Earth, I could see there are two main areas of the camp. The southwestern part of the camp, where the Jabalia Refugee Camp Market is located, is a jumble of streets and tiny alleys in an area of low, tightly packed structures that look, from overhead at least, like shacks or small cinderblock houses. The area of the camp to the northeast has as its northern border a wide road marked General Beit Lahiya Boulevard, on which the Indonesian Hospital is located. That hospital appears in news stories as “close to” Jabalia, which according to the map, it is.

The northern area of Jabalia is more built up, on a regular grid of paved streets that run between larger buildings that from the satellite photo look like they might be three or four stories. Some of them have what appear to be water tanks on the roof, a common way to distribute water through a multi-story building with multiple apartments in the Middle East. I saw lots of them in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example.

The buildings at the edge of the blast-zone in Jabalia – and I looked at more than 30 photos of them – appear to be three to five stories. You can count the stories from the sides of the buildings that were blown out by the blasts. Several photos, like this one, show three taller buildings in the background that look to be eight stories tall, as shown here:

I started looking on Google Earth for sites that might be described as open areas between buildings, like parks or gathering places or parking lots. There are several of them in the northern area of Jabalia. They show up as tree-filled parks, or dirt lots, or what appear to be paved parking lots.

If you look to the right of the photo, you’ll see a large concrete slab that must be 20 feet across. In the foreground, you’ll see smaller, broken slabs with irregular shapes. They could be slabs of a concrete parking lot that were picked up and thrown away from the center of the crater shown in the photo, which is the largest of four craters that appear in all the different photos.

Here is another photo of this crater from further away. The leaning slab appears at the center of the photo:

It looks to me that the vantage point was a street that formed one side of the square. A damaged taxi is parked on the right, and the yellow CAT earthmover in the foreground looks to have driven on level ground to the position where it appears to be pushing debris to the left.

Tracy pointed out that the slabs could have been floors in apartment buildings, and that is possible. It appears that the men at the top right are standing atop the ruin of a building. The slab could have been the roof of that building that fell from left to right as the building collapsed. Looking further, I found a part of a floor from another apartment building. It is in the right center of the photo, the slab with a little square cut out on its left edge.


If you look above and to the left, you can see the building it may have come from: the little cut-out could have fit around the vertical wall shown in the open front of the building. The slab of floor at the center would have fallen down from the building as the front row of the apartments were destroyed by the blast. But the bigger, irregular slab leaning down into the crater at the center of the photo looks more like it was part of a paved area that collapsed when the blast sent material into the air from the center of the crater at the right.

Which brings up the nature of the weapon used in this bombing. Israel has said that the target was a Hamas commander, Ibrahim Biari, whom a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces described as an architect of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Biari was said to be hiding in a tunnel complex under the Jabalia refugee camp. Israel made use of what appears to be at least three and possibly four bunker-buster bombs in the attack.

Israel is known to have two types of U.S. supplied bunker buster bombs: The 2,000-pound GBU-31v3, and the 5,000 pound GBU 28, said to have four times the penetrating power of the earlier version they were supplied with. The different types of bunker buster bombs may explain the two sizes of craters. One appears to be 100 feet or more across, and nearly as deep. The other ones are about half as deep and half as wide, as shown in this BBC photo, with the largest crater in the foreground and two more visible in the background:

All of the bunker buster bombs are laser guided, which means they are dropped from a jet aircraft and guided to their target with a laser that “paints” the target from the aircraft. The bomb’s guidance system follows the laser to the target.

The bombs are fitted with a delay fuse, so that the bomb explodes not on impact with a concrete surface, but after it travels through the concrete and into the earth below, so the bomb goes off beneath the surface instead of on top of it. The point of a bunker buster is for the blast to go down and to the side beneath the earth. That’s what destroys bunkers or tunnels. A conventional high explosive warhead on a missile or artillery shell explodes upon impact, and all the blast goes up and out to the sides, producing the kind of craters we have seen in photos of misfired Russian 155 artillery rounds that landed in agricultural fields and left craters about 8 to 10 feet in diameter and about four feet deep.

Some bunker buster bombs have more sophisticated fuses that have accelerometers that can detect delays in the penetration of the warhead and set off the explosion after it has penetrated one or two floors of a building, for example, instead of going off when it first hits a concrete roof. That sort of bomb could have been used in the Jabalia bombing and would have blasted through the concrete floors of apartments before going off when it finally reached the bottom floor and penetrated its concrete slab. Or the bombs could have hit the surface of a parking lot, gone through the concrete and earth, and then exploded several meters below the surface of the earth.

Until and unless an inspection can be made of the site of the bombing, we won’t know whether Israel sent its bombs into what the Middle East Monitor called a residential square, an open area between buildings, or directly into buildings beneath which Israeli intelligence had identified as being above the tunnel they were trying to hit.

This is what you do when you can’t be on the scene. In this case, there has been no reporting from the scene of the explosion that describes the area where the bombs hit. In the case of the Al-Ahli Hospital, we could see that the warhead, whatever it was, and whoever fired it, hit a parking lot and not the hospital itself, and the hospital building was not damaged.

With the Jabalia bombing, we can see the craters left by the bombs, and we can see the damage done to apartment buildings around them, but we cannot know for sure whether the bombs hit a parking lot or directly landed on apartment buildings.

Either way, people were killed. One of them, according to Israel, was the Hamas commander who engineered the massacre on October 7. Other Hamas fighters were killed, too, according to the Israeli spokesman for the IDF. But innocent civilians were also killed in the collateral damage from the bunker buster bombs. Enlarging the satellite photos on Google Earth, I could see cars driving down streets in Jabalia and occasional pedestrians. People live there. They have lives, just like people have lives in Bakhmut and Mariupol and Kherson and Kharkiv in Ukraine, all cities that have been heavily bombed by Russia. And Ukrainians died in those bombings. I remember way back at the beginning of the war in Ukraine covering the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, publishing photos of a bomb crater in an open area between wings of the hospital. One photo showed a pregnant woman being escorted out of the door to the hospital, gripping her bulging stomach with both hands. She died a few days later.

It is a sad fact of these terrible wars that innocent people die. As I cover these wars from thousands of miles away, going over the photographs of destruction and the maps and the satellite photos and details of the weapons and how they work, one of the hardest jobs I have is remembering the human cost of war. The blood of the dead is the most expensive thing in any war, beyond the physical damage left by bombs and bullets. Please remember that with me.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Ukraine Or Vietnam: This Is What Losing A War Looks Like

Ukraine Or Vietnam: This Is What Losing A War Looks Like

For more columns like this one, and to support my work writing about politics, war, and the culture, you can buy a subscription right here. It will be much appreciated.

Writing about the madness of war reminded me of my first months as a second lieutenant in the Army. I was stationed at Fort Benning, the “Home of the Infantry,” to attend the Infantry School, a beginner course for lieutenants destined for platoon commands.

If you drove onto the post, located on the edge of Columbus, Georgia, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong. The first thing you saw was a gigantic wooden thermometer with its red indicator almost to the top, indicating 99 percent participation in the United Way fund drive on the post. Then came immaculately groomed grass along the sides of the road and sidewalks lined with white painted rocks and headquarters buildings with American flags flapping atop white flagpoles and platoons of trainees in fatigues and spit-shined combat boots marching in formation along the roadsides.

Looking at Fort Benning’s obsessive neatness and the discipline of the troops and the neatly lined-up vehicles in the motor pools, you would be forgiven if you forgot that the war in Vietnam was raging thousands of miles away across half a continent and the Pacific Ocean.

Beneath the placid surface of things at Fort Benning and outside its gates, however, things were coming apart. In June, Life magazine had published its ground-breaking cover story, “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” Inside were 10 pages of the photographs and names of 242 American soldiers who had been killed in a single week in Vietnam. Local papers around the country had been publishing photos of the boys from the small towns who had been killed as the deaths were announced, but this was the first time photographs of the war dead had been collected in a single place, and it was stunning.

It was as if the editors at Time-Life in New York City had finally decided to take a stand against the war. The dead were 19 years old, or 25, a few were in their 30’s, but their faces looked impossibly young. In the coming months and years, the Life cover with the faces of the dead would mark a turning point in support for the war. Richard Nixon, who had run for president saying he had a “secret plan” to end the war, had been in office only a few months, but even by then it was obvious there was no plan. We were losing the war in Vietnam, and more people were realizing that nearly every day.

On the post at Fort Benning, life went on as normal. At the Infantry School, we marched to and from classrooms and training areas with student platoon leaders marching alongside their platoons calling out the defiant cadence of the young and the doomed:

If I die in a combat zone

Box me up and ship me home

Tell my girl I done my best!

Lay my medals across my chest

Lay my body six foot down

Until you hear it touch the ground!

We rode in deuce-and-a-half trucks to the firing range; we spent rainy nights soaked to the skin on training maneuvers; we studied how to formulate mission statements and ops orders in classrooms in old World War II-era wooden buildings; we ate C-rations in the field and cold sandwiches and Cokes from food trucks on the post. Nobody talked about Vietnam. Nobody had orders yet; soldiers would be sent to brief stateside assignments, and then they’d get orders. It was far away in the future, the war, months away at least.

We read in the papers that in May, a great victory had been won at Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. A battalion from the 101st Airborne Division had driven a large unit of the North Vietnamese Army from a hilltop in the A Sau Valley near the border with Laos. The battle was part of the famed, or infamous, “search and destroy” tactics in the war, where U.S. army units basically went out into the boonies until they encountered the enemy and fought them. The battle of Hamburger Hill was supposed to interdict North Vietnamese supply routes into Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Back home, there were hints, rumblings that all was not well. Just before we graduated West Point in June, the Academy administration did something it had never done before. They brought a group of young officers back from the war, straight to West Point, and put on a panel in an auditorium to talk to my entire class about what it was like to be a young officer in combat.

During questions after their presentation, which could charitably be described as dispirited, someone I was sitting near asked about stories in the paper about drug use among soldiers over there. One of the older officers, I think he was a captain or a major, said the stories were false, liberal propaganda against the war. When the panel was over, one of the second lieutenants came down the steps from the stage straight over to where the questioner was sitting. A bunch of us gathered around as he said they had been ordered to deny stories of drug use, but it was a lie. Drug use was rampant in Vietnam he told us, sotto voce. Believe the papers, not the army.

One day at Fort Benning, I ran into a classmate at the PX and we stopped to talk. He told me something strange had happened recently. He was sharing an apartment off-post with another lieutenant he had found advertising for a roommate on a bulletin board somewhere. A few days before as he and his roommate were getting ready to drive onto the post, his roommate had been arrested by the MP’s and taken away. He didn’t know what for, and he hadn’t seen his roommate since. I asked him what the guy's name was. “Rusty Calley,” he answered. I forgot about it, writing it off as some goof who was probably picked up for coming on to a colonel’s wife at a bar and run out of the army.

It wouldn’t be until November that Seymour Hersh’s stories about the massacre at My Lai hit the press. We were gone from Fort Benning by then.

There were rumblings in my student company at the Infantry School as well. A few weeks into the course, they started putting pressure on us to contribute to the United Fund drive. The battalion commander was demanding 100 percent participation. Just for the hell of it, a friend and I drove down to the United Fund offices after getting off that afternoon. We asked to see something that told us how the United Fund money was being used in the Columbus community. They gave us a list of organizations – Boys and Girls Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, a small community theater group, that sort of thing.

We checked the United Fund documents we were given and saw that four Boy Scout troops were getting funds, a thousand dollars or something like that. We found the number for the local Boy Scouts office and learned that there were eight scout troops in the town. We went back to the United Fund and asked why four Boy Scout troops were getting United Fund money, but four weren’t. Unabashed, they told us those were the Black scout troops. We looked a little further into what the United Fund supported and what it didn’t and found that no Black organizations in Columbus received United Fund support.

The next day, we got our student company commander, who was Black, to announce to the whole company at morning formation that no money from the United Fund was going to Black organizations in Columbus. The United Fund was nakedly racist. He said he wasn’t contributing to the United Fund. We spread the word that we weren’t either. A few days later, the battalion commander came down and said only one guy in the company had contributed to the United Fund. Our lunch hour was canceled and we were marched over to an old World War II-era movie theater.

We were all seated when a major walked out on the stage and announced that Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the hero of Hamburger Hill, would be addressing us on why we should contribute to the United Fund. He was on some kind of tour giving speeches around the country to counter the bad reviews the battle of Hamburger Hill was getting in the press. With that, Honeycutt, a rather squat figure with a crewcut and thick neck in starched fatigues, strode across the stage into the spotlight. He made some short remarks about the big win at Hamburger Hill and then launched into a speech about discipline and morale and good order and how an army wasn’t an army unless everyone was on the same page, and on he went with boilerplate we had all heard a dozen times at West Point. And then he ended by banging on the podium and telling us that we wouldn’t be able to be good combat commanders unless we followed orders and gave to the United Fund!

The place erupted in applause. Honeycutt took it as applause for him and his speech, but the major who had introduced him got it that we were applauding for another reason. He signaled to Honeycutt from the wings to cut it short, but Honeycutt ignored the major and growled, “Questions, gentlemen?” There was a long silence, and then the guy sitting next to me, Strosher, got to his feet.

Strosher was a former sergeant who had been given a battlefield commission to first lieutenant two months previously in Vietnam because he had been the only guy in the 25th Infantry Division to blow an ambush in a year. Yes, that means exactly what you think it does. Soldiers had basically stopped fighting the war by the summer of 1969, and when they were sent out on night ambush patrols, they would just sit there. They wanted to stay alive more than they wanted to fight the VC.

Strosher said the ambush he commanded had been blown when one of his soldiers fell asleep and his head accidentally fell onto the trigger for a Claymore mine and set it off. A VC patrol happened to be walking past their position, and the rest of the patrol started firing and blowing their claymores and they killed a dozen enemy, and Strosher was a hero. He didn’t want to be promoted. He was happy as a sergeant, he told me, but the division commander insisted he take the commission, and he was sent back to the states to attend the Infantry School.

Strosher, who despite the silver bar on his collar, still looked and sounded like a sergeant and had the cocky attitude of a guy with 10 years in the service and two tours in Vietnam under his belt, knew the answer to the question he would ask Honeycutt before he asked it. He paused a moment and then introduced himself. “Sir, First Lieutenant Strosher. Can I ask where you were during the battle of Hamburger Hill?” He remained standing.

Honeycutt looked confused, as if he hadn’t been asked that question before. “Uh, I was in my C&C ship at my assigned altitude.” Honeycutt was referring to his command and control helicopter. Thinking to himself, doing a mental calculation, Honeycutt continued: “Uh, 2,500 feet as I recall.”

Strosher lifted a hand in a little wave and said, “Thank you, sir. That’s all I needed to know.” The place erupted in laughter. Honeycutt had done what we would today call saying the quiet part out loud. While 72 of his men were killed 2,500 feet below him, and 372 were wounded, he was circling the battlefield in a helicopter wearing a headset and microphone giving orders.

Wars aren’t lost on the battlefield alone. They’re lost in the countries that wage them with politics and posturing and lies and sending out puffed-up buffoons like Honeycutt to transform tragedy into heroism, loss into victory. Wars are lost by exercising racist policies and permitting, even rewarding, racist behavior and expecting no one to notice. Wars are lost by mistaking technology for genius, tactics for strategy, means for ends. If we take this hill and that town and kill that number of enemy soldiers and blow-up apartments and destroy hospitals and explode power stations and burn villages and kill civilians and damage and poison crops and call it a victory, then it will be, or so they think.

One year after I was at Fort Benning, I went back there to cover the trial of Lieutenant William Laws “Rusty” Calley for The Village Voice. He was charged with the premeditated murder of 109 civilians in the hamlet of My Lai in 1968. Calley put up the classic defense that he was just following orders. I was in the courtroom on the day that he testified. As I sat there, I heard whole paragraphs of the Infantry Manual come out of his mouth as he described the “standing assault” he and his platoon conducted that day.

Lieutenant Calley was a product of his times. He had been drafted into the army during Project 100,000, a program instituted by Robert McNamara to induct substandard men into the service at a time when they weren’t getting enough recruits and too many young men were dodging the draft. They lowered the IQ level necessary to serve, did away with the requirement for a high school diploma, and gave anyone serving less than two years in jail for minor offenses the opportunity to get out early if they would sign up for the army. Calley, who had dropped out of junior college, was one of the more stellar recruits and was sent to Officer Training School and became a second lieutenant in the Infantry.

This is what Calley told the jury in answer to a question from his own attorney on the day I was in the courtroom: “Well, I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so, sir.”

This is what losing looks like. This is Hamburger Hill. This is My Lai. This is Bucha. This is Mariupol. This is Kyiv. This is Odessa. This is Lviv.

This is the United States of America. This is the Russian Federation. This is war. There are no winners. Only the dead, and memory, if you can keep it.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

As Ukraine Reclaims Kyiv Region, Russian Retreat Exposes War Crimes​​

As Ukraine Reclaims Kyiv Region, Russian Retreat Exposes War Crimes​​

Kyiv (Ukraine) (AFP) - Ukraine said it had regained control of the Kyiv region, with Russian troops retreating from around the capital and Chernigiv city, as evidence emerged of civilian killings in areas the invading forces have been occupying.

AFP reporters saw at least 20 bodies, all in civilian clothing, strewn across a single street in the town of Bucha near the capital and the body of a missing photographer was discovered in a nearby village.

Three of them were tangled up in bicycles after taking their final ride, while others had fallen next to bullet-ridden and crushed cars.

One had his hands tied behind his back with a white cloth, and his Ukrainian passport left open beside his corpse, said AFP journalists who accessed the ravaged town.

"All these people were shot," Bucha's mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP, adding that 280 other bodies had been buried in mass graves in the town.

"These are the consequences of Russian occupation," said Fedoruk.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said she was "appalled by atrocities in Bucha and other towns in Ukraine".

"Reports of Russian forces targeting innocent civilians are abhorrent. The UK is working with others to collect evidence and support @IntlCrimCourt war crimes investigation. Those responsible will be held to account," Truss tweeted late Saturday.

The International Criminal Court has already opened a probe into possible war crimes committed in Ukraine, and several Western leaders, including President Joe Biden, have accused Russia's Vladimir Putin of being a "war criminal".

President Volodymyr Zelensky has also accused Russian soldiers of planting mines and other booby traps as they withdraw from northern Ukraine.

"They are leaving behind a complete disaster and many dangers.... Firstly, the air strikes may continue. Secondly, they are mining the whole territory. Mining houses, equipment, even the bodies of people who were killed," he said in a video address Saturday, warning returning residents of tripwires and other dangers.

"We are moving forward. Moving carefully and everyone who returns to this area must also be very careful," he said.

While Russian forces appeared to be withdrawing from the north, a series of explosions were heard Sunday morning in the historic Black Sea port of Odessa, with an AFP journalist reporting columns of black smoke and flames visible, apparently in an industrial part of the strategic city.

Anton Herashchenko, adviser to the interior minister, said Odessa was attacked from the air.

"Fires were reported in some areas. Part of the missiles were shot down by air defence," he wrote on Telegram.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to raise economic pressure on Russia, the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania announced Saturday that they had stopped all imports of Russian natural gas.

'Verbal Agreement' From Russia

In a potential sign of progress to end the fighting, Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia told local television channels that Russia had "verbally" accepted most of Kyiv's proposals in peace talks -- except on the issue of Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

Among the agreed-upon points was that a referendum on Ukraine's neutral status "will be the only way out of this situation", Arakhamia said.

He said any meeting between Zelensky and Putin would "with a high probability" take place in Turkey, which has sought to mediate the conflict.

As Russian forces withdraw from some northern areas, Moscow appears to be focusing on eastern and southern Ukraine, where it already holds vast swathes of territory.

"What is the aim of the Russian forces? They want to seize both Donbas and the south of Ukraine," Zelensky said in a video address late Saturday. "What is our goal? To defend our freedom, our land, and our people."

But Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak warned on social media that "without heavy weapons we won't be able to drive (Russia) out".

Ukraine authorities nevertheless offered citizens elements of good news Saturday in claiming progress against the Russians more than five weeks after Moscow's invasion triggered Europe's worst conflict in decades.

"Irpin, Bucha, Gostomel and the whole Kyiv region were liberated from the invader," deputy defence minister Ganna Maliar said on Facebook, referring to towns that have been heavily damaged or destroyed by fighting.

Putin ordered tanks into Russia's pro-Western neighbour on February 24, and Ukraine estimates 20,000 people have been killed in the war so far.

More than 10 million have had to flee their homes.

Pope Francis spoke of "icy winds of war" again sweeping over Europe as he brought up the conflict Saturday at the outset of his trip to Malta -- and made what appeared to be a barely veiled reference to Putin.

"Once again, some potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interests, is provoking and fomenting conflicts," the pope said, adding he was still considering a visit to Ukraine's capital.

Journalist Killed With 'Two Shots'

Ukrainian authorities said Saturday the body of a well-known photographer, Maks Levin, had been found near a village in the region around Kyiv that had been caught up in the fighting. Levin became the sixth journalist killed in the war, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Prosecutors said Levin, who was unarmed, "was killed by servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces with two shots from small-fire arms".

Levin, a 40-year-old father of four, had been reported missing on March 13; his body was found on April 1.

In Russia, hundreds of people gathered across the country Saturday to protest against the war in Ukraine. Police detained 211 people in several cities, including more than 20 people in a Moscow park under heavy snowfall, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors arrests.

Russia's efforts to consolidate its hold on southern and eastern areas of Ukraine have been hampered by the resistance of Mariupol despite devastating attacks lasting weeks.

At least 5,000 residents have been killed in the besieged southern port city, according to local officials, while the estimated 160,000 who remain face shortages of food, water and electricity.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said its team left for Mariupol on Saturday to make another attempt at conducting an evacuation, after being forced to turn back the day before.

In another southern city, Enerhodar, which is under Russian control, a Ukrainian official said Russian forces opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, injuring four.

In a video address, Zelensky thanked the residents of Enerhodar, the site of Europe's largest nuclear power plant, which had been seized by Russian troops in early March, for their bravery.

"When people protest, and the more they protest, the harder it is for the occupiers to destroy us, to destroy our freedom," Zelensky said.


Coronavirus, COVID-19, America

Why Accountability In America Is Gone — And How To Restore It

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch

Whether you consider the appalling death toll or the equally unacceptable rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, the United States has one of the worst records worldwide when it comes to the pandemic. Nevertheless, the president has continued to behave just as he promised he would in March when there had been only 40 deaths from the virus here and he said, "I don't take responsibility at all."

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