KYIV — A Russian drone hit a bus in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region early on Friday, injuring six construction workers, including one who was in a critical condition, the regional governor said.

Governor Oleh Syniehubov said the incident took place near the town of Derhachi, about 40 km (25 miles) from Hlyboke one of the border settlements where Russia opened a new front in the war in May.

Ukraine’s military halted the Russian offensive there, rushing in reinforcements after Russia pushed up to 10 km (six miles) into the border areas.

Thousands of people have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine February 2022.

 
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ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s communications authority blocked access to the social media platform Instagram on Friday, the latest instance of a clampdown on websites in the country.

The Information and Communication Technologies Authority, which regulates the internet, announced the block early Friday but did not provide a reason. Sabah newspaper, which is close to the government, said access was blocked in response to Instagram removing posts by Turkish users that expressed condolences over the killing of Hama political leader Ismail Haniyeh.

It came days after Fahrettin Altun, the presidential communications director and aide to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, criticized the Meta-owned platform for preventing users in Turkey from posting messages of condolences for Haniyeh.

Unlike its Western allies, Turkey does not consider Hamas to be a terror organization. A strong critic of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, Erdogan has described the group as “liberation fighters.”

The country is observing a day of mourning for Haniyeh on Friday, during which flags will be flown at half-staff.

Turkey has a track record of censoring social media and websites. Hundreds of thousands of domains have been blocked since 2022, according to the Freedom of Expression Association, a nonprofit organization regrouping lawyers and human rights activists. The video-sharing platform YouTube was blocked from 2007 to 2010.
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Solar panels, battery stations and generators have become allies for Ukrainian homeowners as they start getting ready for another winter of Russian attacks on their nation’s power grid. Lesia Bakalets reports from Kyiv. (Camera: Vladyslav Smilianets)
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Warsaw — The Polish and German presidents bowed their heads to the cadence of a military drum as they paid tribute Thursday to Poles slaughtered by Nazi Germany during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the ill-fated revolt.

As Poland marked the hallowed day, news broke that the oldest surviving insurgent in uprising, 106-year-old Barbara Sowa, died in the morning. With very few survivors left to take part in the ceremonies, it was a poignant reminder of the passing away of the generation shaped by the sacrifice of World War II.

Later, the city will stop and sirens will wail to pay tribute to the insurgents.

Polish President Andrzej Duda and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier stood together, heads bowed, to remember those days of August in 1944. They paid tribute to the Wola Massacre, the mass-murder of civilians of Warsaw’s Wola district carried out by the Germans from Aug. 5 to Aug. 12, 1944.

“They were led out of their homes, tenement houses, their homes were set on fire, and they themselves were shot in the streets, and their bodies were burned. Several tons of ashes were collected from the streets and squares of Wola, in order to place them in a common grave,” Duda said.

The German president’s bowed head and other symbolic gestures signaled remorse for the crimes of his nation. That Steinmeier “lays a wreath, bows his head, kneels before the commemorative cross,” calls for respect, said Duda, speaking for the nation under brutal occupation from 1939-1945, which suffered the extermination of millions of its citizens, Christian and Jewish, and the near-total destruction of its capital city.

Warsaw’s revolt began Aug. 1, 1944, by the clandestine Home Army, which acted on orders from Poland’s government-in-exile in London.

The aim was to free the capital from German occupiers and take control of the country ahead of the advancing Soviet army. Moscow, intending to rule postwar Poland, withheld help and kept its Red Army positioned on the other side of the Vistula River as the capital bled and burned.

The Nazis, with their professional army and superior weaponry, killed 200,000 Polish fighters and civilians and razed the city in revenge.

Today the uprising is remembered by Poles as one of the most important moments in a long history of independence struggles, often against Russia. The courage of the fighters remains a defining memory in the Polish image of itself as a nation willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.
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LONDON — Within hours of a stabbing attack in northwest England that killed three young girls and wounded several more children, a false name of a supposed suspect was circulating on social media. Hours after that, violent protesters were clashing with police outside a nearby mosque.

Police say the name was fake, as were rumors that the 17-year-old suspect was an asylum-seeker who had recently arrived in Britain. Detectives say the suspect charged Thursday with murder and attempted murder was born in the U.K., and British media including the BBC have reported that his parents are from Rwanda.

That information did little to slow the lightning spread of the false name or stop right-wing influencers pinning the blame on immigrants and Muslims.

“There’s a parallel universe where what was claimed by these rumors were the actual facts of the case,” said Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank that looks at issues including integration and national identity. “And that will be a difficult thing to manage.”

Local lawmaker Patrick Hurley said the result was “hundreds of people descending on the town, descending on Southport from outside of the area, intent on causing trouble — either because they believe what they’ve written, or because they are bad faith actors who wrote it in the first place, in the hope of causing community division.”

One of the first outlets to report the false name, Ali Al-Shakati, was Channel 3 Now, an account on the X social media platform that purports to be a news channel. A Facebook page of the same name says it is managed by people in Pakistan and the U.S. A related website on Wednesday showed a mix of possibly AI-generated news and entertainment stories, as well as an apology for “the misleading information” in its article on the Southport stabbings.

By the time the apology was posted, the incorrect identification had been repeated widely on social media.

“Some of the key actors are probably just generating traffic, possibly for monetization,” said Katwala. The misinformation was then spread further by “people committed to the U.K. domestic far right,” he said.

Governments around the world, including Britain’s, are struggling with how to curb toxic material online. U.K. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Tuesday that social media companies “need to take some responsibility” for the content on their sites.

Katwala said that social platforms such as Facebook and X worked to “de-amplify” false information in real time after mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Since Elon Musk, a self-styled free-speech champion, bought X, it has gutted teams that once fought misinformation on the platform and restored the accounts of banned conspiracy theories and extremists.

Rumors have swirled in the relative silence of police over the attack. Merseyside Police issued a statement saying the reported name for the suspect was incorrect, but have provided little information about him other than his age and birthplace of Cardiff, Wales.

Under U.K. law, suspects are not publicly named until they have been charged and those under 18 are usually not named at all. That has been seized on by some activists to suggest the police are withholding information about the attacker.

Tommy Robinson, founder of the far-right English Defense League, accused police of “gaslighting” the public. Nigel Farage, a veteran anti-immigration politician who was elected to Parliament in this month’s general election, posted a video on X speculating “whether the truth is being withheld from us” about the attack.

Brendan Cox, whose lawmaker wife Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right attacker in 2016, said Farage’s comments showed he was “nothing better than a Tommy Robinson in a suit.”

“It is beyond the pale to use a moment like this to spread your narrative and to spread your hatred, and we saw the results on Southport’s streets last night,” Cox told the BBC.
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Washington — The movement inside Russia of several high-profile political prisoners in recent days is fueling speculation that a prisoner swap with Western countries may be close.

Lawyers and relatives of at least eight individuals say they seem to have been moved from detention facilities across Russia. Those detained had been jailed for criticizing the Kremlin or spreading what Moscow views as false information about the Russian military.

At the same time, legal action by Belarus and Slovenia on foreign nationals has added to speculation in Western media that a multicountry swap, potentially involving Russia, the United States and Germany, may be in the works.

Among those detained in Russia whose location is currently unknown are former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan; British Russian activist and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who contributes to The Washington Post; and Liliya Chanysheva, who worked closely with late opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

Whelan is serving a 16-year prison sentence on espionage charges that he denies. His lawyer told the Interfax news agency she cannot contact him, adding, “There are rumors of a possible exchange.”

The Post reported late Wednesday that prison officials had confirmed Kara-Murza had been moved from a prison colony but would not say where he was taken. The columnist is serving a 25-year prison sentence after being accused of treason because he criticized Russia’s war in Ukraine.

While some analysts believe the disappearances may be a sign of an imminent prisoner swap, others, like Russia expert Keir Giles, are more skeptical.

“We need to bear in mind that the people that we see reported are only the tip of the iceberg, and there are so many others that don’t get that worldwide media attention,” Giles, who works at the British think tank Chatham House, told VOA.

“To be disappeared within the system for a period of days or weeks or even longer is not that unusual,” Giles added. “It’s hard to tell what within the Russian prison system is deliberate cruelty and what is simply the result of inefficiency and incompetence, but the net effect, of course, on the victims is exactly the same.”

Navalny, for instance, was abruptly moved in secret from a prison in central Russia to one above the Arctic Circle in December 2023. The move took 20 days, Giles said. The opposition leader died at the prison in February.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry and Washington embassy did not immediately reply to VOA’s emails requesting comment for this story.

Other political prisoners missing this past week include German Russian citizen Kevin Lik; opposition activist Ksenia Fadeeva; anti-war artist Sasha Skochilenko; and critical politician Ilya Yashin.

Their disappearances come on the heels of other developments.

In Belarus on Tuesday, President Alexander Lukashenko unexpectedly pardoned Rico Krieger, a German who had been sentenced to death on terrorism charges. Belarus and Russia are close allies.

And on Wednesday, a Slovenian court sentenced two Russians to time served for espionage and said they would be deported to Russia.

Sergei Davidis doesn’t think the timing can be a coincidence. He is the head of the Political Prisoners Support Program and a member of the board at the Russian human rights group Memorial.

Memorial’s cochair, Oleg Orlov, is among the political prisoners to recently vanish.

“It seems that there is no other reasonable explanation than expectations of some swap,” Davidis told VOA from the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.

He added that Russian President Vladimir Putin would need to pardon those involved in any potential swap as a formality.

Putin has previously signaled he would be willing to trade Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich for a Russian man named Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence in Germany for killing a Chechen dissident in Berlin.

Gershkovich is one of two American journalists imprisoned in Russia. The other is Alsu Kurmasheva. Both were convicted in secret trials on July 19 on charges that are widely viewed as bogus.

Commenting on remarks made by Putin earlier this year about a possible swap for Gershkovich, Giles said, “It is not a process that is pretending particularly hard to be legitimate. It’s just a straightforward extortion.”

The United States and Russia have been engaging in prisoner swap negotiations for months.

“The United States continues to be focused on working around the clock to work to get our wrongfully detained American citizens home,” State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told VOA at a Wednesday press briefing.

When asked about any updates on a potential prisoner swap, Patel said he had no updates.

Prisoner swaps are typically cloaked in secrecy.

Although the U.S. government has previously faced criticism for exchanging legitimate Russian criminals for innocent Americans, hostage advocate Diane Foley maintained that it is Washington’s duty to do everything it can to protect its citizens.

“They need to have the moral clarity to recognize that their citizen’s life is their responsibility. It’s their responsibility to do all they can to prioritize that life,” Foley told VOA.

Foley founded the Foley Foundation after the abduction and killing in Syria of her son, American journalist James Foley, in 2014. She says the U.S. has made some improvements in assisting families, but the burden still largely falls on relatives whose loved ones are unjustly held abroad.

Since launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has cracked down hard on anything perceived as criticism of the Kremlin, leading to the arrests of scores of activists and journalists. In late 2023, rights group Memorial estimated there were nearly 1,000 political prisoners jailed in Russia.

Saqib Ul Islam contributed to this report.
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Pristina, Kosovo/Washington — Journalists and media advocates are concerned that a new law in Kosovo could give the government greater control.

The new law seeks to license online media, give the Independent Media Commission, or IMC, power to monitor news websites, and increase the number of politically appointed members of the body, which is responsible for the regulation, management and oversight of the broadcasting frequency spectrum in the Republic of Kosovo.

The law includes hefty fines for the media that violate the law, ranging from $215 to $43,000. However, the legislation does not provide details of how the fines will be applied, according to the Media Freedom Rapid Response, which monitors conditions for the media.

First adopted by the Kosovo government in December, the law passed earlier in July, despite criticism. Two opposition parties have said they will refer the case to the Constitutional court.

Among the concerns is the increase in IMC members, all of whom are political appointees. With the Vetevendosje party holding the majority, the expansion has led to concerns that the IMC could come under political influence.

The government has pushed back against criticism. It says that it is seeking only to reform the media landscape.

The chair of the parliamentary committee on media, Valon Ramadani, has previously said the law does not “infringe the independence of media” and described it as an effort to align the country’s media laws with the EU standards.

Critics however say the law could allow for government overreach and expand the authority and the control of the IMC.

The chair of Association of Journalists of Kosovo, Xhemalj Rexha, says the law threatens the plurality of the media in Kosovo.

“This ability to allow many voices to be heard, especially among the Albanian-language media, is an added value, and Kosovo should be proud of it,” Rexha said during an event in Kosovo titled “Regulation or a Threat to the Media Freedom.”

“This is an attempt, among other things, to discourage the media from doing their job through these fines.”

Ardita Zejnullahu from the Association of Independent Electronic Media of Kosovo, also spoke on the panel.

He said the fines and the planned expansion of the Independent Media Commission were the main challenges.

“For a cable operator, a fine of 40,000 euros is negligible. But for a radio, a television or web-based media, which also fall under the Commission’s jurisdiction according to this law, it means their closure,” said Zejnullahu.

“The law does not define the sanctions or the type of violations that will be sanctioned. There is no distinction made between administrative, ethical or technical violations, and they remain at the discretion of the members of the Commission to determine.”

A group of watchdogs, including the Media Freedom Rapid Response, released a statement citing “alarm” over the law.

“Critics have seen the proposed legislation as an attack on the media, expressing worries that the ruling party may use this law to censor them. Now, [with these] risks becoming a reality, with potentially dire consequences for media freedom and independence,” said the statement.

Kosovo ranks 75 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index. Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the index, says that while the country is doing well in some areas, journalists can still be the target of political attacks.
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No evidence has surfaced linking the West to attacks against Wagner, although Ukraine has indicated it provided support to Mali separatists battling Russian troops.
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London — Huw Edwards, the BBC’s former top news presenter, pleaded guilty Wednesday to three counts of making indecent images of children. 

The offenses he pleaded guilty to at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in central London during a 26-minute hearing involved images shared on WhatsApp between December 2020 and August 2021 by a man who had initially contacted Edwards via social media. 

Edwards, who was the lead anchor on the BBC’s nighttime news for two decades and led the public broadcaster’s coverage of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, has been remanded on bail until a pre-sentencing hearing on Sept. 16. He could face up to 10 years in prison, though the prosecution conceded that a suspended sentence may be appropriate. 

The court heard that Edwards, 62, was involved in an online chat with an adult man on the messaging service who sent him 377 sexual images, of which 41 were indecent images of children. 

The images that were sent included seven of what are known as “category A,” which are the most indecent. Of those, the estimated age of most of the children was between 13 and 15, but one was aged between 7 and 9. 

The court also heard that the unnamed male asked Edwards on Feb. 2, 2021 whether what he was sending was too young. Edwards told him not to send any underage images. Five more, though, were sent, and the exchange of pornographic images continued until April 2022. 

“Accessing indecent images of underage people perpetuates the sexual exploitation of children, which has deep, long-lasting trauma on these victims,” said Claire Brinton of the Crown Prosecution Service. 

Speaking in Edwards’ defense, his lawyer Philip Evans said there is “no suggestion” that his client had “in the traditional sense of the word, created any image of any sort.” 

Edwards, he added, “did not keep any images, did not send any to anyone else and did not and has not sought similar images from anywhere else.” He added that Edwards had “both mental and physical” health issues and that he is “not just of good character, but of exceptional character.” 

Prosecutor Ian Hope told the court that Edwards’ “genuine remorse” was one reason why a suspended sentence might be considered. Setting out the potential penalties under the law, he said that where there is the prospect of rehabilitation, a community order and sexual offender treatment program could be considered as alternatives to prison. 

A spokesperson for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children said there should be “no doubt” about the seriousness of Edwards’ crimes. 

“It can be extremely traumatic for young people to know sexual images of themselves have been shared online,” the spokesperson said. “We also need to see online platforms do much more to identify and disrupt child abuse in private messaging services in order to safeguard young people.” 

Edwards, who was one of the BBC’s top earners, was suspended in July 2023 for separate claims made last year. He later resigned for health reasons. 
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