Category News

Kiev, Ukraine – A huge transformer was destroyed by the Russian drone strike, which was surgically precise and carried out at a crucial power station in Kiev.

Mykola Svyrydenko, who resides close to Thermal Station 5, a sprawling, Soviet-era structure with two enormous steam pipes that supply the residents of Kyiv with electricity and heat, told Al Jazeera. “There is nothing left to repair.”

He witnessed the massive fire at the power station that erupted on October 10 as a predawn attack. According to authorities, the attack involved 465 drones and 32 missiles that targeted various Ukrainian cities.

Another local, Artyom Gavrilenko, said to Al Jazeera outside his five-story apartment complex, “This isn’t the first time the station has been hit.”

Russia has attempted to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the winter of 2022, forcing the nation to rely on subzero temperatures to power its homes and industries.

The Kyiv station attack is a recent development in Russia’s plan to obliterate Ukrainian power, transmission, and heating stations, as well as natural gas mines, pipelines, and underground reservoirs, despite having survived those assaults. Analysts believe that this change in Russian strategy will put Ukraine under unprecedented pressure.

The majority of the city’s almost four million-person population was left without power and running water for the majority of the day on October 10. Gavrilenko’s building and other locations. As people slammed into their power banks, some of which were chained to walls or trees to prevent theft.

One of Kyiv’s subway lines stopped operating for several hours, paralyzing traffic on the bridges connecting the city’s left and right banks, causing the city’s transboundary to become inaccessible. Energy Minister Mykola Kolesnik stated at a news conference on Monday that Russia had deliberately begun to attack natural gas distribution facilities.

He said, citing plans to increase the import of natural gas from Europe, “the enemy won’t stop, he confirmed it … only in early October, we’ve seen more than six strikes]on natural gas delivery facilities,” and they will continue.

He said, “We see the change in the enemy’s strategy that results in the regional power generation and transmission deficits.”

As a result of weather reports that predict a particularly cold winter with plenty of snow, millions of civilians are left defenseless against the upcoming winter chill.

Moscow uses hundreds of drones in its attacks, most of which have been modified to fly more quickly, higher altitudes, and dive on their targets with sharp angles to avoid being shot down or intercepted.

Russian missiles were also modified by software updates to veer off predetermined paths and confound sophisticated air defense systems made by Americans, including Patriots.

According to an analysis by the Centre for Information Resilience, a group based in London, the rate of missile interceptions increased dramatically from 37 percent in August to 6 percent in September as a result of the modifications.

The outcomes were devastating.

Russian missiles attacked a nearly finished factory in eastern Kyiv on August 28 that was supposed to house the heavy drones Bayraktar, a type of Turkish design. Two more missiles hit a nearby apartment building, slicing off two of its five floors, killing 22 civilians, including four children, and wounding dozens.

“I woke up and automatically pulled the blanket over my head”, Anatoly, a 63-year-old retiree, told Al Jazeera hours later, explaining how the blanket he was under saved his face from dagger-like glass shards.

He was speaking while puffing on cigarette after cigarette, standing next to a crew of rescue workers and what remained of his possessions – a dishwasher, a couple of shelves and a bundle of clothes.

The problem has been exacerbated by corruption.

In early August, Ukraine’s anticorruption agencies unveiled a giant corruption scheme to inflate the costs of anti-drone installations by up to 30 percent.

A lawmaker, city officials and National Guard servicemen were involved in the scheme, and four unidentified suspects were arrested, the agencies said.

“There must be full and fair accountability for this”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address.

The corruption case underscored Ukraine’s failures to protect energy infrastructure that has been pummelled since October 2022, said analysts.

“Instead of putting]the infrastructure] underground within the three years, they placed sandbags around it and stole funds on meaningless, but imposing ‘ drone interceptors'”, Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University who penned hundreds of detailed reports on the hostilities, told Al Jazeera.

As a result, the energy infrastructure is now close to collapsing.

“We’ll have a very harsh winter ahead of us”, an engineer at a state-run company that oversees the restoration of power stations and transmission lines told Al Jazeera.

He spoke on condition of anonymity as he is not authorised to talk to the media.

“Judging by the degree of destruction, we’ll hardly be able to repair what is being destroyed”, the engineer added.

Residents of Kyiv, meanwhile, are preparing for power and heat shortages, buying canisters of petrol, power banks, battery-powered electric blankets, rechargeable lamps of all kinds, or unfolding Christmas garlands — which shine, offering some light during blackouts — well before the holiday season.

Many are even snubbing fire prevention regulations by installing wood stoves in their apartments.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “will not catch us by surprise the way he did three years ago”, Olena Korotych, a mother of two, told Al Jazeera outside a supermarket, where she was buying torches.

At filling stations, employees nod understandingly when helping fill canisters – something that is banned in many countries.

A bus stop away from Thermal Power Station 5, Arslan Atamuradov, a migrant from Tajikistan, now uses such natural gas canisters to power the glistening grill at his shawarma kiosk, instead of the electricity he once relied on.

The band of robbers who broke into the Louvre Museum in Paris on Sunday morning and stole eight Napoleonic pieces of priceless jewellery in a four-minute heist were just the latest in a long line of daring thieves who have targeted the iconic museum.

The robbers used a truck-mounted ladder to reach the gilded Galerie d’Apollon (Apollo’s Gallery) on the second floor before taking an angle grinder to a window to access the French crown jewels. The heist took place at 9:30am (07:30 GMT), half an hour after the museum opened to visitors for the day. The robbers are still at large and the Louvre is currently closed.

A ninth item they stole – the crown belonging to Empress Eugenie, Napoleon III’s wife – was recovered nearby after it was dropped by the group, the French Ministry of the Interior said.

The Louvre was a royal palace for more than two centuries. It opened as a public museum in 1793 during the French Revolution. The revolution had made totems of monarchical history especially vulnerable to looters, and the Louvre, besides giving everyday French people a glimpse of these precious items, sought to protect the legacy they represented, for future generations.

That did not completely stop thieves, however. Over time, there have been several attempts to steal valuable items from the Louvre – often successful.

1911: The Mona Lisa is stolen

On August 21, 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen in what was deemed the “heist of the century”.

At the time, the Mona Lisa was one of Italian painter da Vinci’s lesser-known works and had been on display since 1797. Many now say it was the theft itself that propelled the painting to its modern fame. At the time, the painting was hanging on a wall in a room called the “Salon Carre”.

The heist was carried out by Vincenzo Peruggia, a 29-year-old Italian immigrant who had briefly worked at the Louvre. He entered the museum completely unchallenged on the evening of August 20, clad in his old museum uniform.

Peruggia hid in a storage closet overnight and, in the morning, when the museum was closed and almost empty, emerged from the closet. He simply removed the painting from the wall and wrapped it in a white sheet. As he made to leave the museum, he found the stairwell door to the courtyard locked. But instead of being suspicious, a Louvre plumber helped Peruggia to unlock the door, mistaking him for a colleague.

Museum security was rather less robust back then, and paintings would often be removed for maintenance or to be photographed. Hence, no one batted an eye at the absence of the da Vinci painting for more than a day.

Concern over its absence was eventually raised by a visiting artist, who came to the Salon Carre to paint. When the Louvre guards could not find the painting, police were alerted. What followed was an extensive manhunt and media frenzy.

The police did not initially find many leads. Avant garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested and questioned due to his links to earlier thefts from the Louvre. Apollinaire, who was cleared of suspicion, pointed to his friend, a young Pablo Picasso, who was also questioned by the police.

Picasso was cleared of suspicion in the theft of the Mona Lisa, but in a grand twist, it was revealed he had previously acquired Iberian statue heads which had been stolen from the Louvre. He returned these to the Louvre to avoid any further trouble.

Rumours and speculation mounted about the painting’s possible whereabouts, with many believing it was smuggled abroad. But, the whole time, the Mona Lisa was actually in Peruggia’s one-bedroom apartment in Paris.

It was finally recovered in 1913 when Peruggia attempted to sell it to a gallery in Italy. He believed the sale had been successful when an art dealer he was in touch with invited him to Italy for a potential sale to a gallery, and he took the painting with him. Instead of buying the painting, however, the gallery turned Peruggia in. He was arrested in his hotel room in Florence.

The Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre in 1914, and Peruggia was charged with the theft. He said he had been motivated by national pride to steal the painting, claiming the painting had been looted from Italy. The painting was actually completed in France by Da Vinci and sold to the French royal family.

1940s: The Nazis attempt to loot the Louvre

In 1940, the Nazis invaded France amid World War II and appeared poised to loot a section of the Louvre.

However, as a preemptive move, Jacques Jaujard, the director of France’s national museums, ordered more than 1,800 cases containing Louvre masterpieces, including the Mona Lisa, to be moved to the French countryside.

This prevented a large-scale cultural loss when the Nazis marched into a largely empty museum.

However, the Nazis did steal many pieces of Jewish artwork while occupying France. Many of these have been returned to France, and the Louvre began displaying them in 2018 in an attempt to reunite the stolen pieces with their original owners.

1960s to 1990s: More robberies

In 1966, five pieces of antique, handmade jewellery were stolen from John F Kennedy International Airport in New York. The jewellery was en route back to Paris from the United States, having been loaned by the Louvre for a museum display in Richmond, Virginia. Detectives later recovered the jewellery in a grocery bag, and three men were arrested for receiving stolen property.

In 1990, Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Portrait of a Seated Woman was cut from its frame and stolen from the third floor of the Louvre. At the same time, the museum discovered that some small jewellery items were also missing – and may have been for some time. “The disappearance of these objects, which are not of great value and are often seen on the market, is certainly quite old,” the then-director of museums in France said, according to The New York Times. It is unclear whether these items were ever recovered.

What’s different this time?

This week’s jewellery heist is distinctive because previous high-profile robberies in the Louvre have largely been of paintings.

“A jewellery theft is a very different thing to consider because of the high intrinsic value of the object stolen,” American art historian Noah Charney told Al Jazeera. Paintings have a non-intrinsic value, which is value assigned to them due to their cultural significance, he explained.

“A painting doesn’t have a high intrinsic value because it’s usually made of panel and pigment, and canvas and nothing more. Whereas jewellery has a high intrinsic value because if you break down what was stolen and sell the components, the value is still significant.

“With jewels, the cultural heritage value, which provides the majority of its value, is not something that the thieves are likely to take into consideration,” Charney added.

Does this make stolen jewels harder to trace?

Yes. Collections of jewels can be broken down, recut and sold in a way that does not link them to the intact stolen items, making them almost impossible to trace — yet very valuable.

They do not even need to be on the black market if the jewels are recut significantly enough that they are not identifiable.

“The only hope that police have, and we understand this from how past cases have played out, is if they offer a reward for the recovery of all the jewels intact that is higher than the value of the component parts of the jewellery,” Charney said.

Such a move might buy the police a bit more time to track down the items and catch those responsible as the thieves ponder their next move.

Massive demolition work began this week on the White House’s East Wing as part of United States President Donald Trump’s plans to build a new ballroom in a space traditionally reserved for the first lady.

The construction, which started on Monday, is the first structural change to the complex since 1948, and the first under Trump, who has already redecorated the Oval Office in lavish gold furnishings.

According to reporting by The Associated Press news agency, the project went ahead despite not being formally approved by the National Capital Planning Commission, the federal agency that oversees such operations, which is currently closed due to a nationwide government shutdown.

Trump first announced the new addition to the White House in July and again confirmed it in a post on Monday on his social media site, Truth Social.

Here’s what to know about the ballroom plans:

Why is the East Wing of the White House being demolished?

Trump, in his announcement on Monday, said the East Wing is being reconstructed to add a ballroom. The president had, in the past, complained about the White House lacking a space large enough to host fellow national leaders and other important guests, according to the AP. Such state dinners have typically been held on the White House lawns.

“I am pleased to announce that ground has been broken on the White House grounds to build the new, big, beautiful White House Ballroom,” Trump wrote on Monday, adding that the project was being funded entirely privately, and that it would not affect the main White House building itself – a point that some have viewed with scepticism due to the huge scale of the renovations.

“For more than 150 years, every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc. I am honored to be the first President to finally get this much-needed project underway — with zero cost to the American Taxpayer!” the president added.

The two-storey structure of the East Wing was added first in 1902. It has, since 1977, under Rosalynn Carter, housed the offices of the first lady and her staff, as well as a visitor’s entrance for foreign dignitaries. It also includes a large theatre and the Graphics and Calligraphy Office, responsible for producing invitations for non-political events held at the mansion. The wing is built directly on top of the underground emergency bunker reserved for the president.

What will be the cost of construction?

Trump’s ballroom is estimated to cost $250m, according to the AP and other US media reports. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, in an earlier statement in August, said it would cost approximately $200m.

Trump has said the costs would be footed by himself and private donors, although those entities have not been disclosed.

What will the ballroom be like?

The new ballroom will be approximately 90,000 square feet (8,360 square metres), and will have a seating capacity of about 650 guests, according to Leavitt. Reuters news agency reports the new room will be able to hold up to 999 people.

Currently, most White House events are held in the East Room, which seats approximately 200 people.

Leavitt said in August that construction will be completed “long before” the end of Trump’s term in January 2029. Offices there will be temporarily relocated during what she called the “modernisation” process. Leavitt added that “nothing will be torn down”.

“It will be beautiful,” Trump said earlier in July. “It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be – it will be near it, but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite.”

Washington-based McCrery Architects will lead the project, along with construction teams from Virginia-based Clark Construction. Engineering will be provided by AECOM, headquartered in Dallas.

What previous changes have been made to the White House?

The mansion has gone through numerous structural changes since it was first completed in 1800, as different presidents aimed to redesign it to their taste.

Some of the more notable changes in the past century include:

• Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), in 1902, removed old Victorian-style interiors, relocated the presidential offices from the second floor of the residence to a newly built West Wing, and expanded the State Dining Room to seat 100 guests from a previous 40. He also built a small East Wing as an entryway for formal guests.
• William Howard Taft (1909-1913) expanded the West Wing and created the first Oval Office.
• Franklin D Roosevelt (1933-1945), during World War II, expanded the East Wing from an entryway to a two-storey structure purposely built to cover the underground emergency bunker – the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC).
• Harry Truman (1945-1953) notably made some of the biggest changes. Workers gutted the internal structure to fix steel beams and concrete floors, leaving only the outer walls at some point. He also added the controversial second-floor “Truman Balcony” on the South Portico, which architectural purists argued clashed with the mansion’s original 16th-century Palladian style.
• John F Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy (1961-1963) built the Situation Room and refurbished other rooms with antiques.
• Richard Nixon (1969-1974) added a bowling alley and upgraded the Situation Room.
• Bill Clinton (1993-2001) improved security systems and internet connectivity, while George W Bush (2001-2009) renovated the press briefing room and restored several historical rooms, including the Abraham Lincoln Bedroom. Barack Obama (2009-2017) installed wi-fi throughout the White House and the West Wing and adapted existing tennis courts for basketball games.

What’s the history of the White House?

The White House, including the East and West Wings, is about 55,000 square feet across six floors. Its 18-acre grounds include 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, and 28 fireplaces.

Its construction started on October 13, 1792, under President George Washington, and lasted until November 1, 1800, under President John Adams. It was designed by Irish-born architect James Hoban, who modelled it after Ireland’s parliament building, Leinster House.