Since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a military draft on September 21st aiming to mobilise around 300,000 Russian men to fight in the war in Ukraine, an
estimated 400,000 Russians have fled the country, possibly even more.
The Kremlin has announced that a ceremony will take place Friday in Moscow that will launch a process of annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
After general elections on the 12th September, Sweden is on the threshold of a new era. The
Sweden Democrats (SD) won almost 21 percent of the votes and thus became the largest in a bloc of right-wing parties that now have a collective majority in the parliament. A nation that for a long time prided itself of being a beacon of tolerance and openness will now experience a historical transformation. The
Sweden Democrats was once founded by Nazi sympathisers and for decades shunned by mainstream politicians. However, SD has now tipped the political scale in a country previously known for its stable and predictable politics, and some of the party’s former foes are now willing to co-rule with them.
“I must say that I had a premonition of a war with Russia in 2014 when Russian troops had started to occupy Crimea,” said Mykola Zhuravel, a contemporary painter and sculptor, in an interview with IPS. Zhuravel, with his partner, Daria Tishchenko-Zhuravel, have used art to communicate and express the horrors of the war since 2014.
"This year the weather in Nagorno-Karabakh is warmer than in my home country, Senegal," jokes Sow Ababacar, a 22-year-old footballer from the local stadium in Stepanakert, the capital of this Caucasus enclave. Although he once dreamed of playing for the Senegalese national team, the midfielder is currently training with the disputed territory´s national squad.
Shortly before the 25 August approval by the Spanish Parliament of the government’s plan to save energy, the country’s right and far-right opposition parties revived their debate about an earlier suggestion of not wearing neckties in the Spanish Congress and Senate and other official institutions.
This month, the Tenth Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is taking place in New York (and scheduled to conclude August 26). The meeting of states parties, postponed four times because of the Covid-19 pandemic, had originally been scheduled for April 2020.
There are those cows watching the fight in the mud of rusty Soviet cars; there are those tethered dogs that bark next to bathtubs full of rainwater, or those cats that frolic in freedom. This is Armenia, a state of three million deep in the heart of the Caucasus region.
During Todd Bernhardt’s visit to Ukraine’s conflict zones, he encountered untold damage to hospitals, healthcare clinics, and communities. The Senior Director of Global Communications at the International Medical Corps also encountered enormous courage.
The war in Ukraine continues to have a devastating impact on the people of that country. Civilians are dying in the most tragic circumstances every day. Millions of lives have been destroyed or put on hold.
For years, Russia's relations with the European Union and the United States have been one of the main areas of conflict in the media. Washington and Brussels accuse Moscow of manipulation and disinformation and, after the invasion of Ukraine, decided to close their media outlets to Russian companies.
Women’s rights groups fear a new legal provision in Poland requiring doctors to collect records on all pregnancies could create what they have described as a ‘pregnancy register’ to monitor whether women are having abortions.
A mass attempt on June 24, 2022, of about 2000 African migrants to scale the border fence between Morocco and the Spanish
enclave of Melilla left at least 37 people dead.
The fast-changing environment requires Europe’s energy system not only to adapt but to also find the right mechanisms to ensure its unity in the face of turbulent challenges.
This month marks the mid-point of the much-heralded European Green Deal. Taking office at the end of 2019, the European Commission went into rhetoric overdrive.
This was Europe’s ‘man on the moon’ moment, we were told. The Green Deal would herald an economic paradigm shift, and
“reconcile the economy with our planet…to make it work for our people” the new President, Ursula von der Leyen, said.
It has been over 100 days since Russia first invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, turning the country into a slaughterhouse. The United Nations (UN) in
this report says that, as of 1 June, 2022, more than 6.9 million refugees have left Ukraine and 2.1 million have returned, while eight million people are displaced inside Ukraine itself.
War in Ukraine has caused the fastest growing refugee crisis since World War II.
Conflict has taken a horrific toll on civilians in Ukraine over the past three months with many families struggling to meet even their most basic needs, including education. Over 1,800 schools and universities have been damaged or destroyed since Russia’s invasion on February 24, according to Ukraine’s
Education Ministry. Russian forces have shelled and bombed numerous schools. Both sides have used schools as
military bases or for storing weapons.
So busy as they are with strengthening military alliances and devoting billions of taxpayers' money to double their war budgets and subsidise fossil fuels, European Governments seem not to care about the reiterated alerts that their continent faces a serious risk: the reduced availability -and more polluted– drinking water.
An ultraconservative group in Poland has begun checking with hospitals to find out if Ukrainian refugees are being offered terminations in line with the country’s strict abortion laws amid warnings refugee victims of rape are struggling to access local help and clinical services.
Less than halfway through the year, the May 19, 2022 passage of more than $41 billion in emergency funding for Ukraine positions the country to become the largest single recipient of U.S. security sector assistance in 2022.
While the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is shaking up the European security order, other parts of the world are being particularly affected by the war’s ‘side effects’.