1UA TV

Thousands of people lined up in Moscow Saturday to pay their final respects to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, an architect of drastic reforms that helped end the Cold War.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was notably absent, with the Kremlin saying the president’s busy schedule prevented him from attending the funeral ceremony.

Mourners passed by Gorbachev’s open casket flanked by honor guards under the Russian flag in Moscow’s historic Hall of Columns, which has served as the venue for state funerals since Soviet times. Gorbachev’s daughter, Irina, and his two granddaughters sat beside the coffin.

Gorbachev was to be buried later on September 3 at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife, Raisa.

Gorbachev died on August 30 at the age 91 following a “serious and long illness” the hospital where he was treated said.

Gorbachev took over the Communist Party and Soviet leadership in 1985 and presided over six turbulent years that saw the fall of the Iron Curtain, the reunification of Germany, and ultimately the Soviet demise.

Despite the choice of the prestigious site for the farewell ceremony, the Kremlin stopped short of calling it a state funeral. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the ceremony will have “elements” of a state funeral, such as honor guards, and the government’s assistance in organizing it.

Declaring a state funeral for Gorbachev would have obliged Putin to attend it and would have required Moscow to invite foreign leaders, something that Russia was apparently reluctant to do amid growing tensions with the West over its unprovoked war in Ukraine.

The only senior foreign official to announce he would attend the funeral was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has often been critical of the Western sanctions against Russia.

Before the Ukraine conflict, Orban had a close relationship with Putin, but the Kremlin said there were no talks planned during his visit to Moscow.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council who served as Russia’s president in 2008-2012, attended the farewell ceremony. Medvedev then released a post on social media, referring to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and accusing the United States and its allies of trying to engineer Russia’s breakup, a policy he described as a “chess game with death.”

Flags were also flying at half-mast in Berlin on September 3, to honor the man who held back Soviet troops as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Some informarion for this report came from the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
…

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency are used to risky missions — from the radioactive aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in Japan to the politically charged Iranian nuclear program. But their deployment amid the war in Ukraine to Zaporizhzhia takes the threat to a new level and underscores the lengths to which the organization will go in attempts to avert a potentially catastrophic nuclear disaster.

The 6-month war sparked by Russia’s invasion of its western neighbor is forcing international organizations, not just the IAEA, to deploy teams during active hostilities in their efforts to impose order around Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, pursue accountability for war crimes and identify the dead.

“This is not the first time that an IAEA team has gone into a situation of armed hostilities,” said Tariq Rauf, the organization’s former head of verification and security, noting that the IAEA sent inspectors to Iraq in 2003 and to former Soviet Republic Georgia during fighting. “But this situation in Zaporizhzhia, I think it’s the most serious situation where the IAEA has sent people in ever, so it’s unprecedented.”

The IAEA’s Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi highlighted the risks Thursday when he led a team to the sprawling plant in southern Ukraine.

“There were moments when fire was obvious — heavy machine guns, artillery, mortars at two or three times were really very concerning, I would say, for all of us,” he said of his team’s journey through an active war zone to reach the plant.

Speaking to reporters after leaving colleagues inside, he said the agency was “not moving” from the plant from now on, and vowed a “continued presence” of agency experts.

But it remains to be seen what exactly the organization can accomplish.

“The IAEA cannot force a country to implement or enforce nuclear safety and security standards,” Rauf said in a telephone interview. “They can only advise and then it is up to … the state itself,” specifically the national nuclear regulator. In Ukraine, that is further complicated by the Russian occupation of the power station.

The IAEA is not the only international organization seeking to locate staff permanently in Ukraine amid the ongoing war.

International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan has visited Ukraine three times, set up an office in the country and sent investigators into a conflict zone to gather evidence amid widespread reports of atrocities. National governments including the Netherlands have sent expert investigators to help the court.

Khan told a United Nations meeting in April: “This is a time when we need to mobilize the law and send it into battle, not on the side of Ukraine against the Russian Federation or on the side of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, but on the side of humanity to protect, to preserve, to shield people … who have certain basic rights.”

The International Commission on Missing Persons, which uses a high-tech laboratory in The Hague to assist countries attempting to identify bodies, has already sent three missions to Ukraine and set up an office there.

Grossi, an Argentine diplomat, was previously a high-ranking official at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an organization that, after he had left, also was forced to send inspectors to conflicts.

In April 2018, an OPCW team sent to collect evidence of a suspected chlorine attack in Douma, Syria, was forced to wait in a hotel for days because of security concerns in the town, which was at the time under the protection of Russian military police.

When a U.N. security team visited Douma, gunmen shot at them and detonated an explosive, further delaying the OPCW’s fact-finding mission.

The IAEA’s biggest operation to monitor any country’s nuclear program is Iran, where it has been the key arbiter in determining the size, scope and aspects of Tehran’s program during the decades of tensions over it. Since Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, the IAEA has had surveillance cameras and physical inspections at Iranian sites, even as questions persist over Iran’s military nuclear program, which the agency said ended in 2003.

But that monitoring hasn’t been easy. Since then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the deal in 2018, Iran has stopped the IAEA from accessing footage from its surveillance cameras. Other online monitoring devices have been affected as well.

In 2019, Iran alleged an IAEA inspector tested positive for suspected traces of explosive nitrates while trying to visit Iran’s underground Natanz nuclear facility. The IAEA strongly disputed Iran’s description of the incident, as did the U.S.

Another risky and challenging mission was in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan. About two weeks after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami that caused reactor meltdowns and hydrogen explosions at reactor buildings, IAEA sent experts to monitor radiation, sample soil and check food safety, but they largely stayed outside of the plant. They returned later in full hazmat suits, masks, gloves and helmets to inspect the remains of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The situation in Zaporizhzhia, with Russia and Ukraine trading accusations of shelling the area, has the potential to be just as devastating.

“Any time a nuclear power plant is in the middle of armed hostilities, shelling on its territory and nearby creates unacceptable risks,” Rauf said. “So, you know, any misfired shell could hit one of the reactors or disable some system that can lead to much bigger consequences.”
…

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has sent a special envoy to attend this weekend’s beatification of former Pope John Paul I, saying it demonstrates the close relations between the island and the Vatican, which has been courting China.

The Vatican is Chinese-claimed Taiwan’s sole European diplomatic ally, and Taipei has watched with concern as Pope Francis has moved to improve relations with China. The democratically governed island has formal ties with only 14 countries, largely due to Chinese pressure.

In a statement late Friday, Taiwan’s presidential office said former Vice President Chen Chien-jen, a devout Catholic, would attend Sunday’s ceremony as part of a nine-day trip.

The visit “demonstrates the close friendship between the two countries,” it said. Chen will also take part in a reception with the pope for members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, it added.

Tsai expressed hope that Chen would “continue to deepen the friendship between Taiwan and the Vatican, and continue to protect the shared belief in universal values between Taiwan and the Vatican.”

He went to the Vatican three times while in office, in 2016, 2018 and 2019, including attending the canonization ceremony of Mother Teresa.

Pope Francis told Reuters in July said that while the Vatican’s secret and contested agreement with China on the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops is not ideal, he hoped it could be renewed in October because the Church takes the long view.

The deal, which was struck in 2018 and comes up for renewal every two years, was a bid to ease a longstanding divide across mainland China between an underground flock loyal to the pope and a state-backed official church.

Both sides now recognize the pope as supreme leader of the Catholic Church.

China’s constitution guarantees religious freedom, but in recent years the government has tightened restrictions on religions seen as a challenge to the authority of the ruling Communist Party.

Taiwan puts no restrictions on freedom of faith and has a thriving religious community that includes Christians, Buddhists and Muslims. 
…

An energy battle between Russia and the West over the war in Ukraine revved up Friday with Moscow delaying the reopening of its main gas pipeline to Germany and G-7 nations announcing a price cap on Russian oil exports.

Russian energy giant Gazprom said it could not resume the supply of natural gas to Germany, just hours before it was set to restart deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Russia blamed a technical fault in the pipeline for the move, which is likely to worsen Europe’s energy crisis.

European Commission spokesperson Eric Mamer said Friday on Twitter that Gazprom acted under “fallacious pretenses” to shut down the pipeline.

Turbine-maker Siemens Energy said Friday that there was no technical reason to stop shipping natural gas.

Moscow has blamed Western sanctions that took effect after Russia invaded Ukraine for hindering the maintenance of the gas pipeline. Europe accuses Russia of using its leverage over gas supplies to retaliate against European sanctions.

Also Friday, finance ministers from the Group of Seven wealthy democracies said they would work quickly to implement a price cap on Russian oil exports.

The G-7 ministers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States said the amount of the price cap would be determined later “based on a range of technical inputs.”

“This price cap on Russian oil exports is designed to reduce [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s revenues, closing an important source of funding for the war of aggression,” said German Finance Minister Christian Lindner.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed the decision by G-7 finance ministers.

“When this mechanism is implemented, it will become an important element of protecting civilized countries and energy markets from Russian hybrid aggression,” Zelenskyy said in his Friday evening video address.

The jockeying for control of energy supplies comes as Russian and Ukrainian forces engaged in fighting near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, where U.N. inspectors are seeking to avert a potential disaster.

Ukraine’s military said Friday that it had carried out strikes against a Russian base in the southern town of Enerhodar, near the nuclear power plant.

Russia and Ukraine accuse each other of shelling near the facility. Kyiv also accuses Moscow of storing ammunition around the plant and using it as a shield for carrying out attacks, charges Russia denies.

Inspectors from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have visited the Zaporizhzhia plant, braving artillery blasts to reach the facility on Thursday.

IAEA head Rafael Mariano Grossi said that he and his team saw everything they asked to see at the plant, that they were not surprised by anything, and that he would issue a report early next week on his findings.

Grossi, who has since left Ukraine and spoke with reporters Friday after arriving at the airport in Vienna, said, “My concern would be the physical integrity – would be the power supply and of course the staff” at Zaporizhzhia.

A team of 13 experts accompanied Grossi to Ukraine, and he said six have remained at Zaporizhzhia. Of those six, two will remain until hostilities cease, which Grossi said would make a huge difference.

“If something happens or if any limitation comes, they are going to be reporting it — report it to us,” Grossi said. “It is no longer a matter of ‘A said this, and B said the contrary.’ Now the IAEA is there.”  

Ukraine’s nuclear agency, Energoatom, on Friday accused Russia of “making every effort” to prevent the IAEA mission from learning the real situation at the facility.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address Thursday, “Ukraine did everything to make this mission happen. But it is bad that the occupiers are trying to turn this IAEA mission — a really necessary one — into a fruitless tour of the plant.”

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, leading the inspection group, told reporters Thursday the agency was “establishing our continued presence” at Europe’s biggest nuclear facility. He said it was obvious that the “physical integrity” of the Zaporizhzhia plant “has been violated several times.”

Grossi said, “I worried, I worry, and I will continue to be worried about the plant.”

The Zaporizhzhia plant has been controlled by Russia since the earliest days of its invasion but is operated by Ukrainian engineers.

With the nuclear plant in a war zone, world leaders have expressed fears it could be damaged and result in a radiation disaster like that at Ukraine’s Chernobyl plant in 1986.

VOA’s Margaret Besheer contributed to this report. Some information came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
…

A new hormone treatment improved the cognitive function of six men with Down syndrome by 10% to 30%, scientists said this week, adding the “promising” results may raise hopes of improving patients’ quality of life.

However, the scientists emphasized the small study did not point toward a cure for the cognitive disorders of people with Down syndrome and that far more research is needed.

“The experiment is very satisfactory, even if we remain cautious,” Nelly Pitteloud of Switzerland’s Lausanne University Hospital, co-author of a new study in the journal Science, said Thursday.

Down syndrome is the most common genetic form of intellectual disability, occurring in about one in 1,000 people, according to the World Health Organization.

Yet previous research has failed to significantly improve cognition when applied to people with the condition, which is why the latest findings are “particularly important,” the study said.

Recent discoveries have suggested that how the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) is produced in the brain can affect cognitive functioning such as memory, language and learning.

GnRH hormones regulate how much testosterone and estrogen are produced, and increased levels of it help spur puberty.

“We wondered if this hormone could play any role in establishing the symptoms of people with Down syndrome,” said Vincent Prevot, study co-author and head of neuroscience research at France’s INSERM institute.

Research on mice

The team first established that five strands of microRNA regulating the production of GnRH were dysfunctional in mice specifically engineered for Down syndrome research.

They then demonstrated that cognitive deficiencies — as well as loss of smell, a common symptom of Down syndrome — were linked to dysfunctioning GnRH secretion in the mice.

The team then gave the mice a GnRH medication used to treat low testosterone and delayed puberty in humans, finding that it restored some cognitive function and sense of smell.

A pilot study was conducted in Switzerland involving seven men with Down syndrome aged 20 to 50.

They each received the treatment through their arm every two hours over a period of six months, with the drug delivered in pulses to mimic the hormone’s frequency in people without Down syndrome.

Cognition and smell tests were carried out during the treatment, as were MRI scans.

Six of the seven men showed improvement in cognition with no significant side effects, and none showed a change in sense of smell.

“We have seen an improvement of between 10% to 30% in cognitive functions, in particular with visuospatial function, three-dimensional representation, understanding of instructions as well as attention,” Pitteloud said.

The patients were asked to draw a simple 3D bed at several stages throughout the therapy. Many struggled at the beginning but by the end the efforts were noticeably better.

‘Improve quality of life’

The authors acknowledged some limitations of the study, including its size and that the choice of patients was “pushed by their parents.”

“The clinical trial only focused on seven male patients — we still have a lot of work to do to prove the effectiveness of GnRH treatment for Down syndrome,” Pitteloud said.

A larger study involving a placebo and 50 to 60 patients, a third of them women, is expected to begin in the coming months.

“We are not going to cure the cognitive disorders of people with Down syndrome, but the improvement seen in our results already seems fundamental enough to hope to improve their quality of life,” Pitteloud said.

Fabian Fernandez, an expert in cognition and Down syndrome at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, hailed the “tour de force study.”

He told AFP that while it is “difficult to envision” how such an intensive treatment could be used for young people, it might be better suited to delay the Alzheimer’s disease-related dementia suffered by many adults with Down syndrome.

It was also difficult to predict how such an improvement could impact the lives of people with the condition, he said.

“For some, it could be significant, however, as it would enable them to be more independent with daily living activities such as maintaining and enjoying hobbies, finding belongings, using appliances in the home and traveling alone.”
…

Editor’s note: Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch.

IAEA team visits Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant

IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi led a team of inspectors to Ukraine this week on a support and assistance mission. He met in Kyiv with President Volodoymr Zelenskyy on Tuesday and then traveled through Ukrainian-held territory to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is in a Russian-controlled area. Grossi has been appealing to the parties for months to let his team inspect the plant to avert a potential nuclear accident. He spoke to reporters late Friday upon his return to Vienna about his mission.

UN appeals for $160m for victims of Pakistan’s ‘monsoon on steroids’

The United Nations appealed Tuesday for $160 million to assist 5.2 million people impacted by monsoon rains in Pakistan. By Friday, U.N. agencies had provided food aid to 300,000 people and clean water to 55,000 people. Pakistani officials say the climate-driven storms have badly impacted more than 33 million people and killed more than a thousand others since the seasonal rainfall began in June. More than 700,000 livestock have also been lost. The World Meteorological Organization forecasts the heavy rains are set to continue. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will travel to flood impacted areas next week.

UN rights chief releases long-awaited report on Xinjiang

Moments before her term expired at midnight on Wednesday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet released a long-awaited report that found the treatment of minorities in China’s Xinjiang province may constitute crimes against humanity. China dismissed the findings as “smears and slanders.”

Hunger stalks millions of Afghans

U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said Monday that 6 million Afghans are on the brink of famine, with winter around the corner and humanitarian appeals dramatically underfunded. In all, 24 million people need some kind of humanitarian assistance, and almost 19 million of them face acute hunger. An estimated 3 million children are acutely malnourished. Funds are needed quickly so aid agencies can purchase and pre-position supplies before winter sets in.

In brief

— UNESCO said Thursday that 244 million children and youth ages 6 to 18 are still out of school across the world as the new school year begins in many places. Sub-Saharan Africa has the most young people out of school – 98 million, while South and Central Asia has 85 million. UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said this should be a reminder of that “deep inequalities persist in access to education.”

— The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali, MINUSMA, said Wednesday that it will transport 1.5 tons of essential medicines each week to Gao in the northeast. Regional authorities requested MINUSMA’s help to ease a pharmaceutical shortage due to a blockade of the main supply route by terrorist groups since May. Peacekeepers from Togo and Jordan are also helping to provide medical care for local communities in Douentza town and Tin Hama.

— The Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday that global food commodity prices dipped for a fifth month in a row. The FAO Food Price Index averaged 138.0 points in August, down 1.9% from July, although remaining 7.9% above its value a year before. The cereal price index decreased by 1.4% from the previous month, driven by a 5.1% decline in international wheat prices attributed to improved production prospects in North America and Russia, as well as the resumption of exports from the Black Sea ports in Ukraine.

Good news

The first ship carrying Ukrainian wheat for the World Food Program under the Black Sea Grain Initiative arrived in Djibouti on Tuesday with 23,000 metric tons of grain. Its final destination will be Ethiopia, where millions face severe hunger. A second WFP-chartered vessel departed Ukraine on Tuesday with 37,000 metric tons of wheat grain that will be milled into flour in Turkey and then delivered to Yemen where 17 million people are facing acute hunger. WFP says the grain will provide a 50-kilogram bag of wheat flour to nearly 4 million Yemenis for one month. Before Russia’s February 24 invasion, Ukraine was WFP’s top provider of food items. WFP’s Deputy Emergency Coordinator in Ukraine Marianne Ward says the agency purchased 880,000 metric tons of commodities there last year.

What we are watching next week

The Security Council will hold two meetings on Ukraine. On Tuesday, at Russia’s request, IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi will brief remotely on his mission to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. The secretary-general will also address the meeting. On Wednesday, council members will meet again at the request of Albania and the United States to discuss the issue of forced displacement of Ukrainians.

Learn more about the forcible displacement of Ukrainians in this VOA Exclusive:
…

Group of Seven finance ministers agreed Friday to impose a price cap on Russian oil aimed at slashing revenues for Moscow’s war in Ukraine while keeping crude flowing to avoid price spikes, but their statement left out key details of the plan.

The ministers from the group of wealthy industrial democracies confirmed their commitment to the plan after a virtual meeting. They said, however, that the per-barrel level of the price cap would be determined later “based on a range of technical inputs” to be agreed by the coalition of countries implementing it.

“Today we confirm our joint political intention to finalize and implement a comprehensive prohibition of services, which enable maritime transportation of Russian-origin crude oil and petroleum products globally,” the G-7 ministers said.

The provision of maritime transportation services, including insurance and finance, would be allowed only if the Russian oil cargoes are purchased at or below the price level “determined by the broad coalition of countries adhering to and implementing the price cap.”

The ministers said they would work to finalize the details, through their own domestic processes, aiming to align it with the start of European Union sanctions that will ban Russian oil imports into the bloc starting in December.

The G-7 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.

The ministers said they would seek a broader coalition of oil importing countries to purchase Russian crude and petroleum products only at or below the price cap, and they will invite their input into the plan.

Some G-7 officials have expressed concerns the price cap would not be successful without participation of major importers such as China and India, which have sharply increased their purchases of Russian crude since Moscow launched its invasion in February. But others have said China and India have expressed interest in buying Russian oil at an even lower price in line with the cap.

Enforcing the cap would rely heavily on denying London-brokered shipping insurance, which covers about 95% of the world’s tanker fleet, and finance to cargoes priced above the cap. But analysts say alternatives can be found to circumvent the cap and market forces could render it ineffective.

Despite Russia’s falling oil export volumes, its oil export revenue in June increased by $700 million from May because of prices pushed higher by its war in Ukraine, the International Energy Agency said last month.

The G-7 finance ministers’ statement follows up on their leaders’ decision in June to explore the cap, a move Moscow says it will not abide by and can thwart by shipping oil to states not obeying the price ceiling.

Pricing concerns

The U.S. Treasury has raised concerns the EU embargo could set off a scramble for alternative supplies, spiking global crude prices to as much as $140 a barrel, and it has been promoting the price cap since May as a way to keep Russian crude flowing.

Russian oil prices have risen in anticipation of the EU embargo, with Urals crude trading at an $18-to-$25 per barrel discount to benchmark Brent crude, down from a $30-to-$40 discount earlier this year.
…

U.N. agencies are quickly mobilizing resources and staff to assess the damage and provide aid needed to assist millions of people made homeless and destitute by flooding in Pakistan.

Extensive rains, which have pummeled Pakistan since June, have inundated the country, putting a third of it under water. The United Nations said more than 1,100 people are known to have died, over 6,000 have been injured, 33 million have been left homeless and hundreds of thousands of buildings and infrastructure damaged or destroyed.

Aid agencies said bridges have been destroyed and roads turned into mud, cutting off access to many people in distress. The World Health Organization warns the floods are having a catastrophic impact on the health situation.

WHO representative in Pakistan Palitha Mahipala said major health risks are unfolding and will continue to unfold in the months to come as more rain is forecast. Speaking in the capital, Islamabad, he warned that people are ill-equipped to fend off disease outbreaks in camps lacking safe water and sanitary conditions.

“Major health concerns already reported with the spread of diarrheal diseases, skin infections, respiratory tract infections, malaria, and dengue fever,” Mahipala said. “Rains continue and projections are that floods will worsen further over the coming days, with even greater humanitarian and public health impact.”

Mahipala said there is an urgent need to scale up disease surveillance, restore damaged health facilities and ensure sufficient medicine and health supplies are obtained. He said mental health assistance and psychosocial help must be made available for affected communities.

He said the monsoon rains and floods have damaged and destroyed nearly 2,000 public and private health facilities. The loss of the clinics will seriously affect the ability of sick and injured people to get treatment they need.

Mahipala said shortages of health workers and limited health supplies also are disrupting health services and increasing the health risks for children and pregnant and lactating women.
…

Germany and the families of Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics have agreed on a compensation offer totaling $28 million, according to an interior ministry spokesperson on Friday.

Last month, the families had said they were unhappy with the latest German compensation offers and that they planned to boycott a ceremony on Monday in Munich marking the 50th anniversary of the attack in protest.

The federal government will contribute $22.5 million, while $5 million will come from the state of Bavaria, and $500,000 will come from Munich, said the spokesperson.

On September 5, 1972, members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage at the poorly secured athletes’ village by Palestinian gunmen from the radical Black September group.

Within 24 hours, 11 Israelis, five Palestinians and a German policeman were dead after a standoff and subsequent rescue effort erupted into gunfire.
…

Human Rights Watch issued a report Thursday documenting the forcible transfer of Ukrainian citizens to Russia and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, which HRW says constitutes war crimes and potential crimes against humanity.

The 71-page report, We Had No Choice: “Filtration” and the Crime of Forcibly Transferring Ukrainian Civilians to Russia, includes interviews with 18 people who went to Russia — 15 from the Mariupol area, one from Donetsk and two from the Kharkiv region. It said Russian and Russian-affiliated authorities also subjected thousands of Ukrainians to a form of compulsory, punitive and abusive security screening called filtration.

Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia Division at HRW, discussed the organization’s work in Ukraine with Natalya Churikova of VOA’s Ukrainian Service in an interview Wednesday.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

VOA: Who did you interview for this report? Were they Ukrainians in Russia?

Denber: So, the people who we interviewed were Ukrainians, Ukrainian citizens who had been forcibly transferred to Russia. So, about the time when we spoke to them, they were no longer in Russia. They had already made it out of Russia, for the most part. They were already in the countries of the European Union or Georgia.

VOA: How do you define forced deportation?

Denber: I think this is a really important question because … a forced transfer is a war crime and a potential crime against humanity. In order for it to apply in a situation like in Ukraine, where it’s an armed conflict and one side is bringing people to the opposite side or to other occupied areas, for the term, force transfer, to be applicable, you don’t have to actually put a gun to somebody’s head, or you don’t have to drag them in handcuffs.

What we documented was how Russian authorities, Russian forces, or forces that were affiliated with Russia, pretty much just made clear to Ukrainians to whom they were offering evacuation on a bus that they had no other choice. And that’s, in fact, the title of the report.

They pretty much told them they had no other choice, that they had to … get on this bus. Sometimes they said, “Well if you stay, it’ll be so much worse for you. You’re not going to survive.” Or sometimes they didn’t say anything at all. In some cases, they didn’t tell people where they were taking off to. In other cases, these forces rounded people up from shelters, from the streets, sometimes also from house-to-house searches, and put them on buses to so-called DNR, [Donetsk People’s Republic] and then onward to the Russian border.

VOA: What would be the legal way for Russia to deal with this situation? That they are in a state of war, and they really want the population to be safe?

Denber: The legal way would be to ensure that there was transportation offered to Ukrainian-held areas. Their responsibility was to make that available, because it wasn’t impossible. People who were fleeing either the Mariupol area, or even people who had been through filtration, if they had access to their own transportation, if they had their own car, or if they had enough money to hire a car, they were able to drive away and drive to Ukrainian-held areas. It’s just that if you didn’t have the money, you had no other choice [but] to get on a bus. And that’s the definition of forced transfer.

VOA: What about the filtration camps and the separation of families? We know that families are trying to escape together.

Denber: I think that almost everyone we talked to who went through filtration felt that they were in a very coerced situation. Some people felt like they were hostages. Some people felt like they were being accused of a crime. So, this was a very abusive process that had no legal framework whatsoever. Look, the Russian authorities are entitled to set up a screening process for people who are voluntarily going to Russia. That’s not what the case was here. And second of all, even if they’re setting up a screening process for security reasons for people who are voluntarily going to Russia, there are certain boundaries and limits that they need to observe.

There is nothing that could justify the scope of the screening that they were undertaking … by getting people’s biometric data. That’s hugely invasive, and it’s also consistent with what Russia is doing domestically. They’re using all kinds of mechanisms in order to scrape people’s biometric data with the purpose of controlling them. …

[Also,] they’re asking their opinions about the war. Their opinions about the military. Their opinions about Putin. Why is that? There is no real justification for that other than to intimidate people. And then they were invasively looking into people’s telephones and scraping everything they could. We don’t know what’s happened to that data.

VOA: In the report, you say that some of the civilians who were detained from the Mariupol area who were suspected of sympathizing with this battalion were put in the camp where Ukrainian prisoners of war were recently killed. Do you have any data about this?

Denber: So, all of the information that we got, we got from interviewing people — and quite detailed interviews. We interviewed many people who had been through the filtration process. We specifically asked people about what happened to people who flunked the filtration process, who the Russian or Russian-affiliated forces detained after they finished the gathering of data and the interviews, then the interrogations. And we understand that people told us that they have heard that people were taken to various other locations, including what their fate was after that. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to follow up on those things.

We did get details of one case of a man who was held because he flunked the filtration process, and he was eventually released. He didn’t want to talk about [his] experience, and he also talked about his son who was picked up in Mariupol and held for several weeks. He was suspected of being affiliated with the Ukrainian military, and … it was pretty clear that he was quite badly beaten.

VOA: Ukrainian authorities say almost 6,000 Ukrainian children are being deported to Russia, and some of them are being put up for adoption. Have you come across any of these cases?

Denber: In our report, we documented only one case of a forced transfer of children. And that was, of course, [the] transfer of 17 children who had been in an institution in Mariupol, and they were forcibly transferred. Somebody who ran the institution had a plan to get them out of Mariupol, and he was intercepted by some DNR person who took the children to the DNR. And that was it. We didn’t document any other cases other than that, but that doesn’t mean that those cases don’t exist.

VOA: We asked the U.N. refugee agency about their numbers, and they said the Russian Federation gives them the numbers, and they put them up for the public in their portal, and that Russia has become the biggest country to receive Ukrainian refugees. They said they didn’t have the means to check the numbers independently. Would your report be a basis for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to change the definition on the status of the Ukrainians in the Russian Federation?

Denber: That’s an excellent question. Our report certainly raises questions about how to define the people who have crossed the Ukrainian border into Russia. Look, we can’t say how many people were forcibly transferred into Russia. We don’t know. But we do know that large numbers of people were, because there were busloads and busloads and busloads of people. We do know that people were rounded up en masse and put on buses in this manner that is coercive. … It’s very hard to say exactly how many people were displaced from Ukraine and who ended up in Russia. It’s very hard to say how many of those people who ended up in Russia are genuinely refugees. How many of them are forcibly transferred. How many of them went voluntarily to Russia. It’s a very difficult numbers game.

VOA: Can Ukraine use your report as evidence in the International Court of Justice, where it has sued Russia for human rights violations?

Denber: I hope that anybody who is interested in justice will use our report as evidence of the crime of forced transfers. … We documented a number of cases, and I very much hope that our report is used by anybody who’s looking for justice.

VOA: In which case does forced deportation represent a crime against humanity?

Denber: It would have to do with the scale and the numbers. I think once we see who actually was forcibly transferred, we could talk about whether it was systematic, and whether it was combined with other crimes.

VOA: What would be the benchmark?

Denber: I really couldn’t say. I think that’s something the court would have to determine.
…