Category World News

Pro-Palestinian activists placed shrouded dolls covered with red blood in front of the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm on Sunday, to symbolise children killed in Gaza since October 7th. Organisers said the action was a protest against Sweden’s ongoing arms trade with Israel.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Evhen Ihnatov was a young teenager when Russian forces occupied his hometown.

In the eight months of 2022 when the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson was overtaken, his mother was killed and his brother was forcibly held in Russia.

“We buried her in the countryside. Grandma was beside herself,” Ihnatov told Al Jazeera of the tragedy that befell the family when his mother, Tamara, died. He was aged just 13.

On October 6, 2022, Tamara, 54, had boarded a minibus that was ultimately blown to pieces on a bridge by a misdirected Ukrainian missile.

His brother left for a Russian camp on the day she died.

Now 16 and living in Mykolaiv, studying in a college to become a car mechanic and working part time in a pizzeria, Ihnatov has spoken to Al Jazeera about life in occupied Ukraine.

After graduation, he said he might sign a contract with the army.

But that ambition felt impossible when he was living under Russian control, a period he survived with angst, the denial of all things Russian and a sense of dark humour.

Kherson is the administrative capital of the eponymous southern region the size of Belgium, which mostly lies on the left bank of the Dnipro River, which bisects Ukraine.

Russians occupied the region and Kherson city, which sits on the Dnipro’s right bank, in early March 2022 and rolled out in November that year.

According to Ihnatov, other witnesses and rights groups, Ukrainians were mistreated, assaulted, abducted and tortured from day one. Russia regularly denies intentionally harming civilians.

“They beat people, a real lot,” Ihnatov said. “Those who really stood up are no more.”

A former Ukrainian serviceman he knew was assaulted so violently that he spent a week in an intensive care unit, Ihnatov said.

In the first weeks of occupation, Kherson city was rocked by protest rallies as Ukrainians tried to resist the new rulers. Moscow-appointed authorities soon packed hundreds of people into prisons or basements in large buildings.

“Detained for minor or imaginary transgressions, they were kept for months and used for forced labour or sexual violence,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a historian with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

Survivors have said they were forced to dig trenches, clean streets, trim trees and bushes, and haul garbage.

At least 17 women and men were raped by Russian soldiers, Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time, said in May 2023.

Rallies stopped because of the crackdown, but most of the locals remained pro-Ukrainian, Ihnatov believes. He said the fewer pro-Russian locals were mostly elderly and nostalgic about their Soviet-era youth, attracted to the idea of Russia because of Moscow’s promises of higher pensions.

But to him, the Russian soldiers did not look like “liberators”.

He said many drank heavily and sported prison tattoos. In July 2022, the Wagner mercenary group began recruiting tens of thousands of inmates from Russian prisons with promises of presidential pardons and high pay.

“They look at you like you’re meat, like you’re chicken,” Ihnatov said.

He said ethnic Russian soldiers or ethnic Ukrainians from the separatist region of Donbas in the east whom he saw several times a day on patrols or just moving around were often hostile towards Ukrainian teenagers. Ethnic Chechens were more relaxed and gave them sweets or food, he said.

Fearful of Russian forces, the Ihnatovs – Evhen’s seven siblings and their single, disabled mother who occasionally worked as a seamstress – moved to their grandmother’s house outside Kherson. While still occupied, the village was not as heavily patrolled as the city.

There was a cow, some ducks and a kitchen garden, but they were cash-strapped and moved back to the city right in time for the new school year that began on September 1, 2022.

But Russian-appointed authorities were facing an education disaster.

Many teachers had quit to protest against the Moscow-imposed curriculum, and enrolment fell as some parents preferred to take a risk and keep their children in Ukrainian schools online.

A Russian curriculum was introduced in all of Kherson’s 174 public schools, and by August, Russia-appointed officials and masked soldiers began knocking on doors, threatening parents and offering them monthly subsidies of $35 per child who would go to a Russia-run school.

Ihnatov’s eldest sister, Tetiana, enrolled her school-aged siblings.

Students at Ihnatov’s school were herded into the schoolyard to listen to the Russian anthem. But he and his friends “just turned around and went to have a smoke”, he said.

The school was not far from his apartment. He remembered seeing about 50 children staring at Russian flags and coats of arms on the school building.

His class had 22 students. They were surprised by an oversimplified approach of new teachers who treated the students like they knew nothing.

“They explained everything, every little thing,” he said.

Communication between students changed. Their conversations became cautious, and they did not discuss sensitive issues, worried others would overhear them.

“Everything was happening outside the school,” he said.

The new curriculum was taught in Russian and emphasised Russia’s “greatness” while Ukrainian was reduced to two “foreign language” lessons a week.

“Everything was about references to Russia,” Ihnatov said.

However, to his clique, Russia’s efforts appeared half-hearted.

Teachers were more interested in fake reporting and just gave away A’s, he said.

“They didn’t force us to study, couldn’t make us,” he said.

“I’d crank up the music in my earphones, didn’t care about what they were saying, because anyway I’d get an A. We got good grades for nothing. They wanted to show that everyone studies well,” he said.

Only his history teacher would confront his group of friends while “the rest were scared,” he said.

Their rebelliousness could have cost them more than reprimands had Russians stayed in Kherson longer, according to observers.

“What they did only worked because the occupation was short term. Had the occupation gone on, the screws would have gotten tighter,” Victoria Novikova, a senior researcher with The Reckoning Project, a global team of journalists and lawyers documenting, publicising and building cases of Russia’s alleged war crimes in Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.

After school, Ihnatov took odd jobs in grocery shops or the city market and hung out with his friends.

Ukraine ‘never existed’

The new teachers paid special attention to history classes. Instructors from Russia or annexed Crimea were promised as much as $130 a day for teaching in Kherson, the RBK-Ukraine news website reported.

New textbooks “proved” that Ukraine was an “artificial state” whose statehood “never existed” before the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The erasure of Ukrainian identity went hand in hand with the alleged plunder of cultural riches.

Russians robbed the giant Kherson regional library of first editions of Ukrainian classics and other valuable folios and works of art after the building was repeatedly shelled and staffers were denied entry, its director said.

“My eyes don’t want to see it. My heart doesn’t want to accept it,” Nadiya Korotun told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, thousands of children in occupied areas were reportedly taken to summer camps in Crimea or Russia – and never came back as part of what Kyiv calls a campaign of abduction and brainwashing.

Kyiv has accused Moscow of forcibly taking 20,000 Ukrainian children away and placing them in foster families or orphanages.

In 2023, The Hague-based International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the “unlawful deportation and transfer of children”.

Some of the abducted kids “broke”, a presidential adviser on children’s rights said.

“They are really maximally broken. Russians do absolutely everything to achieve that,” Daria Herasymchuk told Al Jazeera. “There were cases of Stockholm syndrome when [the abducted children] became Russian patriots.”

Ihnatov’s elder brother Vlad, 16 at the time, was among those who went to a camp – and was forcibly kept in Russia for a year until his sister travelled there to get him back.

In an unfortunate twist of fate, he had left for the camp hours before his mother was killed.

He was transported to a summer camp on Russia’s Black Sea coast and then transferred to the city of Yevpatoria in annexed Crimea, where he continued school – and was not allowed to return home.

His sister Tetiana travelled there to spend a week in a “basement” while Russian security officers “checked her”, Ihnatov said.

They returned to Ukraine via Belarus and Poland and “don’t talk much” about the experience, he said.

A month after his mother’s death, Moscow decided to withdraw its forces from Kherson city and the region’s right-bank area.

Ukrainian forces were greeted like long-lost family.

“The liberation was about nothing but joy, freedom and joy,” Ihnatov said.

But Russians holed up on the left bank and began shelling the city and flying drones to hunt down civilians.

“In a week or two, the cruellest shelling began. And then – fear,” Ihnatov said.

His sister decided to relocate the family to the Kyiv-controlled city of Mykolaiv, where they live in a rented three-bedroom apartment.

The United States and China are set to hold a second day of trade talks in Spain amid efforts to de-escalate tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

US and Chinese officials will meet at the Santa Cruz Palace in Madrid on Monday in their latest bid to reach a comprehensive trade deal after months of tit-for-tat trade salvoes between the sides.

Officials, led by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, held about six hours of talks on Sunday.

The talks, which are scheduled to run until Wednesday, come as relations between Washington and Beijing continue to be roiled by differences on trade, including China’s purchase of Russian oil.

President Donald Trump’s administration has been pushing US allies to impose steep tariffs on China and India over their purchases of Russian oil in a bid to pressure Russia to end its war in Ukraine.

In a social media post over the weekend, Trump said NATO countries should impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on Chinese goods until the war is brought to an end.

“China has a strong control, and even grip, over Russia, and these powerful Tariffs will break that grip,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.

Trump has already raised the tariff rate on Indian goods to 50 percent to push New Delhi away from Moscow, but he has so far not targeted China over its oil purchases.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Saturday appeared to hit out at Washington’s efforts to punish countries buying Russian oil, saying sanctions would only “complicate” the situation in Ukraine.

Wang’s comments came as China’s Ministry of Commerce launched two new investigations of the US chip sector, a day after the US Department of Commerce added 23 more Chinese entities to its restricted trade list.

The talks in Spain also come in advance of a Wednesday deadline for Chinese company ByteDance to divest from TikTok or face a ban on the video-sharing app in the US.

Trump has on three occasions delayed the enforcement of the ban, which was included in legislation passed by the US Congress last year with overwhelming bipartisan support.

US and Chinese officials last met in July in Stockholm, Sweden, following talks in London and Geneva, Switzerland, in May and June, respectively.

At their most recent meeting, the sides agreed to extend an earlier pause on tariffs of up to 145 percent for another 90 days.

Under the truce, the US has been charging a 30 percent duty on Chinese goods, while US goods are subject to a 10 percent levy.

Heiwai Tang, director of the Asia Global Institute in Hong Kong, said neither Washington nor Beijing currently have much incentive to fully back down from the trade war.

“China has rare earth and the manufacturing capacity that the US needs, while the US has the market that China can’t easily replace with another one. So both have some bargaining power against each other,” Tang told Al Jazeera.

Tang said he expects Trump to lower tariffs at some point as rising prices became more of an issue in the US.

“The question is when,” he said.

“Economists are not good at predicting the exact timing of events. If you ask me, it will be very likely that both sides will lower tariffs on each other in less than a year’s time.”

Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore, said she has modest expectations for the talks.

“If they can bundle something together, I would think they will try to promise to resolve TikTok by the end of Trump’s term. Extending the deadline for less than that just leads to new deadlines which are also likely to be problematic,” Elms told Al Jazeera.

A key agenda item of the talks, Elms said, is likely to be a long-mooted summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, possibly on the sidelines of October’s APEC summit in South Korea.

“I think there is a strong interest in getting Trump and Xi together in a matter of weeks,” she said.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative party has won local elections in the country’s most populous state, while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) nearly tripled its share of the vote from five years ago.

Merz’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won about 33.3 percent of the vote in his home state of North Rhine-Westphalia, preliminary results showed on Monday.

The centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) came in second with 22.1 percent, followed by the AfD, which won 14.5 percent.

The figure marks a 9.4 percentage-point increase in support for the nationalist, anti-immigration party since the last election.

North Rhine-Westphalia Premier Hendrik Wust, of the CDU, hailed the outcome, calling his state the “powerhouse” of the governing party.

But the strong showing for AfD, Wust told public broadcaster ARD, “must give us food for thought”.

The outcome “cannot let us sleep peacefully,” he said, and centrist politicians must ask themselves “what the right answers are when it comes to poverty and migration”.

AfD’s coleaders were jubilant.

Alice Weidel called the results a “huge success”, while Tino Chrupalla offered congratulations to the party’s supporters.

“This is a great success for us,” Chrupalla wrote in a post on X. “We are a people’s party and we all bear a great responsibility for Germany.”

The election on Sunday was the first electoral test for Merz, who took office in May.

The western state is home to nearly a quarter of Germany’s 83.51 million population and encompasses the industrial Ruhr area as well as key cities such as Cologne and Dusseldorf.

AfD ‘entrenching’ in western Germany

Oliviero Angeli, a political scientist at the Dresden University of Technology, said the results marked a “relative success” for the CDU, but also underscored the growing support for AfD in western Germany.

Angeli told Al Jazeera the CDU has strengthened its position in North Rhine-Westphalia, despite strong criticism of Merz, including accusations of policy stagnation at the federal level.

What is “striking”, however, is the performance of the AfD, he said.

The outcome shows the party “is steadily entrenching itself in the West” after the national election in February, in which it emerged as the strongest political force in eastern Germany and the second-biggest party at the national level.

“While AfD remains five to 10 percentage points below its national average, it is nonetheless consolidating its position in western Germany,” Angeli said.

“Migration continues to be the AfD’s core issue, and the party can still mobilise around it despite the recent decline in asylum applications,” he added.

The AfD, founded in 2013 by right-wing economists during the European debt crisis, has moved further right in the ensuing years, vehemently opposing the country’s decision to welcome a million refugees from the Middle East and parts of Africa in 2015.

Germany’s domestic security agency in May branded the AfD as a threat to the country’s democracy, describing it as a racist and anti-Muslim organisation that “aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society” and “subject them to unconstitutional discrimination”.

It said the party has stirred “irrational fears and hostility” towards minorities, as “evident in the numerous xenophobic, anti-minority, anti-Islamic, and anti-Muslim statements continually made by leading party officials”.

The AfD has condemned the classification as “a blow against democracy”.

The party’s strong showing on Monday prompted concern among politicians in neighbouring states, too.

Olaf Lies, the SPD premier of the state of Lower Saxony, said he was looking at the “AfD’s results with great concern”.