The man suspected of fatally shooting three Kurds in Paris ahead of Christmas weekend told investigators that he had set out that morning aiming to kill migrants or foreigners and then himself, according to prosecutors.

The 69-year-old man killed three people outside a Kurdish cultural center Friday and wounded three others and was then disarmed and subdued by one of the injured victims, the Paris prosecutor’s office said Sunday.

He was detained at the scene and transferred Saturday to psychiatric care. His name hasn’t been released. If he is released from psychiatric care, he faces potential charges of racially motivated murder, attempted murder and arms violations.

The prosecutor’s office said in a statement Sunday that the suspect told investigators that a 2016 burglary at his home marked a turning point for him, sparking what he called a “hatred toward foreigners that became completely pathological.”

The shooting in a bustling Parisian neighborhood shook and angered the Kurdish community and stirred up concerns about hate crimes at a time when far-right voices have gained prominence in France and around Europe.

The suspect told investigators that the morning of the shooting, he took his weapon first to the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis with the aim of killing foreigners but changed his mind, the prosecutor’s statement said. He then went to the Kurdish center in Paris, which is near his parents’ home.

He opened fire on one woman and two men there, then entered a Kurdish-run hair salon across the street and fired on three men. One of the wounded men in the hair salon managed to stop him and hold him until police arrived, the prosecutor’s statement said.

He told investigators he didn’t know his victims and described all “non-European foreigners” as his enemies, the statement said.

Two of the injured were still hospitalized Sunday with leg injuries.

Investigators are studying his computer and phone, but haven’t found any confirmed links to extremist ideology, the statement said.

On Saturday, members of France’s Kurdish community and anti-racism activists joined together in a demonstration of mourning and anger. The gathering was largely peaceful, with marchers holding portraits of the victims.

Some youths threw objects and set a few cars and garbage bins on fire, and police fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. A spokesperson for the Kurdish Democratic Council in France said the violence began after some people drove by waving a Turkish flag. Some of the marchers carried flags of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

In 2013, three women Kurdish activists, including Sakine Cansiz, a PKK founder, were found shot dead at a Kurdish center in Paris.

Turkey’s army has long been battling against Kurdish militants affiliated with the banned PKK in southeast Turkey as well as in northern Iraq. Turkey’s military also recently launched a series of strikes from the air and with artillery against Syrian Kurdish militant targets in northern Syria.

Turkey, the United States and the European Union consider the PKK a terror group, but Turkey accuses some European countries of leniency toward alleged PKK members. That frustration has been the main reason behind Turkey’s continued delay of Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO membership.

Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said Sunday the violence in the Paris protests was a result of lenience toward the PKK.

“The snake France fed is now biting them. Everyone should now see the real face of this terror organization,” Akar said.
…

A Christmas Eve shooting at a pub in northwest England killed a young woman and wounded three men, police said Sunday.

The Merseyside Police force said it was investigating the 11:50 p.m. Saturday shooting at the Lighthouse pub in the town of Wallasey as a murder case. Police have not detained any suspects.

“This investigation is in the very early stages, and we understand that this is a truly shocking and devastating incident that has happened just before Christmas Day in a busy venue full of young people,” Detective Superintendent David McCaughrean said.

The woman died at a hospital “with an injury consistent with a gunshot wound,” the police force said in a statement. Along with the three men wounded, several people were injured, according to the statement.

Investigators were seeking witnesses as well as cellphone video and closed-circuit television footage to figure out what happened, McCaughrean said.

“We believe that the gunman left the pub car park in a dark-colored vehicle, possibly a dark-colored Mercedes shortly after the shooting, and we are keen to hear from anyone who saw this to contact us immediately,” he said.

The minister of a nearby church told Britain’s Press Association news agency that the shooting will come as a shock to residents because of where the pub is located.

“We’ve got a lot of young people, families in that area. The Lighthouse is central in that community,” Jeffrey Hughes, minister of the United Reformed Church, said.

Hughes said his church’s Christmas morning service would not be “as much a celebration as it was going to be” because of the upsetting news.

The violence “shows us that even though we celebrate Christmas, we’re still very far from those ideals (of peace) as a society,” he told PA.

Gun violence is comparatively rare in Britain, where most police officers do not carry guns.

A fatal shooting at a pub in eastern England Friday night resulted in the arrest of a 44-year-old man, the Essex Police force said.

The suspect was charged with murder, possession of an offensive weapon in a public place and possession of a bladed article in a public place following the death of another man at the Lamb and Lion pub in Westcliff-on-Sea, police said.
…

Russia is ready to negotiate with all parties involved in the war in Ukraine but Kyiv and its Western backers have refused to engage in talks, President Vladimir Putin said in an interview aired Sunday.

Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine has triggered the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two and the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is, thus far, little end in sight to the war.

The Kremlin says it will fight until all its aims are achieved while Kyiv says it will not rest until every Russian soldier is ejected from all its territory, including Crimea which Russia annexed in 2014.

“We are ready to negotiate with everyone involved about acceptable solutions, but that is up to them — we are not the ones refusing to negotiate, they are,” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television in the interview.

CIA Director William Burns said in an interview published this month that while most conflicts end in negotiation, the CIA’s assessment was that Russia was not yet serious about a real negotiation to end the war.

An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Putin needed to return to reality and acknowledge that it was Russia which did not want any negotiations.

“Russia single-handedly attacked Ukraine and is killing citizens,” Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter. “Russia doesn’t want negotiations but tries to avoid responsibility.”

No other choice

Putin said Russia was acting in the “right direction” in Ukraine because the West, led by the United States, was trying to cleave Russia apart. Washington denies it is plotting Russia’s collapse.

“I believe that we are acting in the right direction, we are defending our national interests, the interests of our citizens, our people. And we have no other choice but to protect our citizens,” Putin said.

Asked if the geopolitical conflict with the West was approaching a dangerous level, Putin said: “I don’t think it’s so dangerous.”

Putin said the West had begun the conflict in Ukraine in 2014 by toppling a pro-Russian president in the Maidan Revolution protests.

Soon after that revolution, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and Russian-backed separatist forces began fighting Ukraine’s armed forces in eastern Ukraine.

“Actually, the fundamental thing here is the policy of our geopolitical opponents which is aimed at pulling apart Russia, historical Russia,” Putin said.

Putin casts what he calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine as a watershed moment when Moscow finally stood up to a Western bloc he says has been seeking to destroy Russia since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine and the West say Putin has no justification for what they cast as an imperial-style war of occupation which has sown suffering and death across Ukraine.

Putin described Russia as a “unique country” and said the vast majority of its people were united in wanting to defend it.

“As for the main part — the 99.9% of our citizens, our people who are ready to give everything for the interests of the Motherland — there is nothing unusual for me here,” Putin said.

“This just once again convinces me that Russia is a unique country and that we have an exceptional people. This has been confirmed throughout the history of Russia’s existence.”
…

A top aide to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday blamed street unrest that gripped Paris following the killing of three Kurds on outlawed PKK militants.

“This is PKK in France,” Erdogan’s foreign policy adviser Ibrahim Kalin tweeted, posting images of overturned and burning cars in Paris.

“The same terrorist organization you support in Syria,” he wrote in apparent reference to the YPG.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and its Western allies.

Ankara has been feuding with the U.S. and European powers about their support for Kurdish fighters in the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which it portrays as the Syrian offshoot of the PKK.

The YPG played a central role in the US-led campaign against Islamic State group jihadists in Syria. It is not proscribed as a terrorist organization by either the US or the European Union — an issue of constant tension in their relations with NATO member Turkey.

“The same PKK that has killed thousands of Turks, Kurds and security forces over the last 40 years. Now they are burning the streets of Paris. Will you still remain silent?” Kalin wrote.

The street protest broke out Friday after a 69-year-old white French gunman opened fire at a Kurdish cultural center in Paris, killing three.

A source close to the case told AFP that the gunman admitted to investigators that he was racist.

Some of the people who joined the subsequent protests chanted slogans mentioning the PKK.
…

Russian President Vladimir Putin blasted the West for trying to “tear apart” Russia, in extracts from an interview to be aired on national television later Sunday.

“At the core of it all is the policy of our geopolitical opponents aiming to tear apart Russia, the historical Russia,” Putin said.

“They have always tried to ‘divide and conquer’… Our goal is something else — to unite the Russian people,” he said.

Putin has used the concept of “historical Russia” to argue that Ukrainians and Russians are one people — undermining Kyiv’s sovereignty and justifying his 10-month offensive in Ukraine.

“We are acting in the right direction, we are protecting our national interests, the interests of our citizen, of our people,” Putin said.

The president repeated claims that Moscow was “ready to negotiate with all participants in this process [to find] an acceptable solution” to the conflict.

In his first trip outside Ukraine since the offensive began in February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earned firm pledges of support from US President Joe Biden, including the Pentagon’s most advanced air defense system.

“Of course we will destroy it, 100 percent!” Putin said, referring to the Patriot missile battery promised to Zelenskyy.
…

Ukrainians will create their own miracle this Christmas by showing they remain unbowed despite Russian attacks that have plunged millions into darkness, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a defiant message on Saturday.

Speaking 10 months to the day since Russian launched a war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions more, Zelenskyy said that while freedom came at a high price, slavery would cost even more.

“We endured at the beginning of the war,” he said. “We endured attacks, threats, nuclear blackmail, terror, missile strikes. Let’s endure this winter because we know what we are fighting for.”

Relentless Russian missile and drone attacks since October have caused massive damage to the country’s energy infrastructure, regularly leaving major cities without water and heat.

Zelenskyy made his remarks in a video address to Ukrainians who celebrate Christmas in December. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians and mark the occasion in early January.

“Even in total darkness – we will find each other – to hug each other tightly,” he said. “And if there is no heat, we will give a big hug to warm each other.”

“We will smile and be happy. As always. The difference is one. We will not wait for a miracle. After all, we create it ourselves.”

The clip, which lasted just less than nine minutes, was filmed outside at night with just a few white lights and a Christmas tree in the background.

Zelenskyy noted Ukrainian troops were fighting battles in the eastern Donbas region while others were in exile both home and abroad, having fled the Russians.

“We have been resisting them for more than three hundred days and eight years,” he said, a reference to Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea. “And will we allow them to achieve what they want?”
…

Maxi Jazz, the lead singer of the British electronic band Faithless, has died at the age of 65, the group announced Saturday.

The musician and DJ, whose real name was Maxwell Fraser, passed away at his home in south London, according to the dance music act behind 1990s hits including Insomnia and God is a DJ.

No details were given for the cause of his death.

“We are heartbroken to say Maxi Jazz died peacefully in his sleep last night,” Faithless tweeted, paying tribute to one of its legendary 1995 founding members.

“He was a man who changed our lives in so many ways. He gave proper meaning and a message to our music,” they said. “He was a lovely human being with time for everyone and wisdom that was both profound and accessible.”

Faithless first emerged in the mid-1990s, earning widespread recognition and critical acclaim with their album Insomnia.

They were seen as pioneers of the emerging dance music genre at the time.

The group, whose other core members included Rollo and Sister Bliss, went on to release six more studio albums as well as several compilation albums during their decades-spanning collaboration.

The most recent release was 2020’s All Blessed.

Jazz, who also fronted a band of musicians named Maxi Jazz & The E-Type Boys, will be best remembered for Faithless’ earlier tracks, including the 2001 club classic We Come 1.

The band was also renowned for its live performances and headlined some of the biggest festivals in the world, including on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage in 2002.

Sister Bliss paid tribute to her bandmate by sharing a black and white photo of him on Twitter.

“Sending love to all of you who shared our musical journey,” she wrote in the post. 

Jazz, who hailed from Brixton in south London, was a lifelong supporter of Premier League football team Crystal Palace and was made an associate director of the club in 2012.

Its official Twitter account described him as a “legendary musician” and said the team would walk out to a Faithless track on Monday, a public holiday known as Boxing Day in the U.K., in tribute. 
…

A fire ripped through an old people’s home in Russia’s Siberia region, killing 22 people and investigators are eyeing whether improper use of electrical equipment was to blame, news agencies said Saturday.

The blaze in the city of Kemerovo broke out Friday night and gutted the second floor of the building, which was not officially registered as a home for the elderly. It was out by the early hours when rescuers finished combing the rubble, state media and emergency services said.

Russia’s ministry for emergency situations said a group of senior officials had flown to Kemerovo, 3,600 km east of Moscow, and noted there were several possible causes for the blaze.

“One of them is a violation of the rules for the operation of electrical equipment,” the RIA news agency cited a ministry statement as saying.

RIA, citing city authorities, had earlier said breaches of fire safety regulations could have been to blame.

Many homes for the elderly operate without authorization in Russia, officials said, meaning they were considered private property and not subject to inspections.

Kemerovo saw one of the deadliest fires in Russia in recent times when a blaze swept through the upper floors of the “Winter Cherry” shopping center in 2018, killing 64 people.
…

At least 10 people were killed and 55 were injured by Russian shelling in the southern city of Kherson on Saturday.

One of the rockets landed next to a supermarket in downtown Kherson, Yuriy Sobolevskyi, first deputy head of Kherson Oblast Council, said in a Telegram post. According to Ukraine’s Interior ministry, 66 cars were on fire after the shelling.

Russia is “killing for the sake of intimidation and pleasure,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on Telegram Saturday.

Photos of the strike — burning cars and what appeared to be corpses — were on the president’s Telegram account.

“Social networks will most likely mark these photos as ‘sensitive content,'” Zelenskyy wrote. “But this is not sensitive content — it is the real life of Ukraine and Ukrainians.”

A pro-Moscow official responded by accusing Ukraine of launching the attack in order to blame Russia.

In a tweet, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said the shelling of downtown Kherson “is not only another war crime, but also revenge on its residents who resisted the occupation and proved to the whole world that Kherson is Ukraine.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged families in Europe, North America, and beyond to “spare a thought for Ukraine … which is fighting evil right now.”

In a video address Saturday evening, Zelenskyy said this Christmas there are no festivities in Ukraine.

“Dinner at the family table cannot be so tasty and warm. There may be empty chairs around it. And our houses and streets can’t be so bright,” he said.

But he added the path of the Ukrainian people is illuminated by faith and patience.

“We endured attacks, threats, nuclear blackmail, terror, missile strikes. Let’s endure this winter because we know what we are fighting for,” he said.

Also Saturday, two people were killed and five people were wounded in the Donetsk region, according to the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko.

Munitions shortage

Earlier Saturday, Britain’s Defense Ministry said Russia is facing a munitions shortage in its invasion of Ukraine.

The ministry said in an intelligence update Saturday that, “Despite the easing of its immediate personnel shortages, a shortage of munitions highly likely remains the key limiting factor on Russian offensive operations.”

“Russia has likely limited its long-range missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure to around once a week due to the limited availability of cruise missiles,” the ministry said. “Similarly, Russia is unlikely to have increased its stockpile of artillery munitions enough to enable large-scale offensive operations.”

The British Defense Ministry said the munitions shortage made Russia vulnerable.

“A vulnerability of Russia’s current operational design is that even just sustaining defensive operations along its lengthy front line requires a significant daily expenditure of shells and rockets,” it said.

U.S. aid package

The U.S. House of Representatives Friday approved a $45 billion aid package for Ukraine. The measure, part of a $1.66 trillion government funding bill that passed the Senate a day earlier, will now go to U.S. President Joe Biden for signing into law. This package follows U.S. aid worth about $50 billion sent to Ukraine previously this year.

The move comes after Zelenskyy’s wartime visit to Washington this week.

Upon his return to Kyiv, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces “are working toward victory” despite Russia’s relentless artillery, rocket and mortar fire and airstrikes on Ukraine.

“We will overcome everything,” Zelenskyy pledged on Telegram. “We are coming back from Washington with … something that will really help.”

The U.S. promised Patriot missiles, something Zelenskyy has long sought to help counter Russian airstrikes, which have destroyed cities, towns and villages and knocked out power and water supplies across the country over the past three months.

Saturday marked 10 months since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Zelenskyy thanked Biden and the U.S. Congress for supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

U.S. officials say, however, that the single Patriot battery that Biden promised to supply to Ukraine will not change the course of the war.

Eastern Europe Bureau Chief Myroslava Gongadze contributed to this report. Some material for this article came from The Associated Press, Reuters and the Agence France-Presse.
…

Clashes broke out for a second day in Paris Saturday between police and members of the Kurdish community angry at the Friday killings of three members of their community.

Cars were overturned, at least one vehicle was burned, and small fires set near Republic Square, the traditional venue for demonstrations in the city where Kurds earlier held a peaceful protest.

Clashes broke out as some demonstrators left the square, throwing projectiles at police who responded with tear gas. Skirmishes continued for around two hours before the protesters dispersed.

A gunman carried out the killings at a Kurdish cultural center and nearby cafe Friday in a busy part of Paris’ 10th district, stunning a community preparing to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the unresolved murder of three activists.

Police arrested a 69-year-old man who the authorities said had recently been freed from detention while awaiting trial for a saber attack on a migrant camp in Paris a year ago.

Following questioning of the suspect, investigators had added a suspected racist motive to initial accusations of murder and violence with weapons, the prosecutor’s office said Saturday.

After an angry crowd clashed with police Friday afternoon, the Kurdish democratic council in France (CDK-F) organized a gathering for Saturday at Republic Square.

Hundreds of Kurdish protesters, joined by politicians including the mayor of Paris’ 10th district, waved flags and listened to tributes to the victims.

“We are not being protected at all. In 10 years, six Kurdish activists have been killed in the heart of Paris in broad daylight,” Berivan Firat, a spokesperson for the CDK-F, told BFM TV at the demonstration.

She said the event turned violent after some protesters were provoked by people in a passing vehicle who displayed a Turkish flag and made a nationalistic gesture.

Friday’s murders came ahead of the anniversary of the killings of three Kurdish women in Paris in January 2013.

An investigation was dropped after the main suspect died shortly before coming to trial, before being re-opened in 2019.

“The Kurdish community is afraid. It was already traumatized by the triple murder (in 2013). It needs answers, support and consideration,” David Andic, a lawyer representing the CDK-F, told reporters Friday.

Kurdish representatives, who met with the Paris police chief Saturday, reiterated their call for Friday’s shooting to be considered a terror attack.

The questioning of the suspect was continuing, the prosecutor’s office added.
…

Russia is “killing for the sake of intimidation and pleasure,” Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted on Telegram Saturday after a Russian strike killed at least five people and wounded twenty in the recently liberated city of Kherson.

Photos of the strike – burning cars and what appeared to be corpses – were on the president’s Telegram account. 

“Social networks will most likely mark these photos as ‘sensitive content’,” Zelensky wrote.  “But this is not sensitive content – it is the real life of Ukraine and Ukrainians.”

Earlier Saturday, Britain’s Defense Ministry said Russia is facing a munitions shortage in its invasion of Ukraine.

The ministry said in an intelligence update Saturday that, “Despite the easing of its immediate personnel shortages, a shortage of munitions highly likely remains the key limiting factor on Russian offensive operations.”

“Russia has likely limited its long-range missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure to around once a week due to the limited availability of cruise missiles,” the ministry said. “Similarly, Russia is unlikely to have increased its stockpile of artillery munitions enough to enable large-scale offensive operations.”

The British defense ministry said the munitions shortage made Russia vulnerable. “A vulnerability of Russia’s current operational design is that even just sustaining defensive operations along its lengthy front line requires a significant daily expenditure of shells and rockets.”

The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday approved a $45 billion aid package for Ukraine. The measure, part of a $1.66 trillion government funding bill that passed the Senate a day earlier, will now go to U.S. President Joe Biden for signing into law. This package follows U.S. aid worth about $50 billion sent to Ukraine previously this year.

The move comes after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wartime visit to Washington this week.

Upon his return to Kyiv, Zelenskyy defiantly said that Ukrainian forces “are working toward victory” despite Russia’s relentless artillery, rocket and mortar fire and airstrikes on Ukraine.

Zelenskyy pledged on Telegram, “We will overcome everything.” He also said, “We are coming back from Washington with … something that will really help.”

The U.S. promised Patriot missiles to help Ukraine fight against the Russian invasion. Zelenskyy has long asked for Patriot missiles to help counter Russian airstrikes, which have destroyed cities, towns and villages during 10 months of conflict and knocked out power and water supplies across the country over the past three months.

Zelenskyy thanked Biden and the U.S. Congress for supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

U.S. officials say, however, that the single Patriot battery that Biden promised to supply to Ukraine will not change the course of the war.

Washington and its allies have been unwilling to supply Kyiv with modern battle tanks and long-range missiles called ATACMS, which can reach far behind front lines and into Russia itself.

Both Kyiv and the Biden administration are wary that retaining U.S. congressional support for aid could become more complicated once Republicans take a slim majority in the House in the new year: A few right-wing Republicans oppose aid, and other lawmakers have called for tighter budget oversight.

During a Friday visit to Tula, Russia, a center for arms manufacturing, Russian President Vladimir Putin told the country’s defense industry chiefs to do more to ensure that the Russian army quickly receive all the weapons, equipment and military hardware it needs to fight in Ukraine.

“The most important key task of our military-industrial complex is to provide our units and front-line forces with everything they need: weapons, equipment, ammunition and gear in the necessary quantities and of the right quality in the shortest possible time frames,” he said.

Eastern Europe Bureau Chief Myroslava Gongadze contributed to this report. Some material for this article came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
…

Russian officials say at least 20 people have died in a fire in a nursing home in the Siberian city of Kemerovo.

State media said the building was not officially registered as a nursing home.

The cause of the fire and how many people lived at the facility were not immediately clear.

Kemerovo is 3,600 kilometers east of Moscow.
…

When Olena Chekryzhova followed in her grandmother’s footsteps and began teaching English, she never dreamed the job would lead to a monthslong stay at a front-line military base.

But that has become her new reality as Ukrainian soldiers scramble to learn English – military terms especially – so they can make the most of combat aid from Washington and elsewhere against Russian forces.

Donated supplies like HIMARS rocket systems have been a battlefront game-changer, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s lightning visit to Washington this week yielded further pledges, including, for the first time, the Patriot missile defense system.

Soldiers have found, however, that training materials for this equipment are available mainly in English, which is often also necessary to communicate with foreign volunteer fighters they encounter in the field.

To help topple the language barrier, Chekryzhova, 35, has traded in her quiet life of classroom conjugation to give crash courses to the armed forces.

‘Small contribution’ for her nation

The work included a five-month stint at a base in the eastern industrial Donetsk region, where she lived alongside soldiers and took part in training sessions.

“Some people think I’m crazy,” she told AFP at the facility in Kyiv where she is stationed.

But she added, “I think that teaching English in this case is the small contribution that I can do for my country, for the people of my country and for the military, who are protecting us from this terrorist attack.”

Nearly all Ukrainian soldiers had at least some English instruction in school, but it was not always useful, especially for the older ones.

“It was back in Soviet times, and this English I learned at school is like nothing, basically,” said Igor Soldatenko, 50, one of Chekryzhova’s students in Kyiv.

“The whole system was inadequate, as I see now. We were just learning texts without understanding them. … Nobody could use it in real life.”

The recent lessons, by contrast, have been more practical, giving him words like “wounded,” “semiautomatic” and “cache” as well as phrases such as “killed in action.”

The learning goes both ways, with Chekryzhova gleaning a new understanding of tactics and strategy — and an appreciation of the trials of military life.

‘Double pain’

While in Donetsk, she grieved along with soldiers who lost comrades — some of whom she taught directly — in fighting in her hometown of Bakhmut, a target of incessant Russian assault in recent months.

“For me it’s a double pain. Because on the one hand it’s my hometown, and on the other hand it has now become the grave of my students,” she said.

During a recent one-hour conversation lesson in Kyiv, the only time Chekryzhova’s students slipped briefly into Ukrainian was when discussing those they have lost.

But despite fighting back tears, soldier Yuriy Kalmutskiy, 36, insisted on completing his idea in English, even if it was somewhat broken.

“I lose a lot of friends. … It was my circle of close people, and I lose … they. I lose they,” he said. “It’s very hard.”

As they work toward ultimately mastering English, Chekryzhova’s students told AFP they drew some inspiration from Zelenskyy’s journey with the language.

“A few years ago, he [had] awful English. Everybody knows this,” Kalmutskiy said. “But he learned.”

That progress came in handy on Wednesday when Zelenskyy addressed the U.S. Congress in English, declaring that “Ukraine is alive and kicking” while appealing for more aid.

Difficulty in expanding program

Yet while individual students have made similar strides, Chekryzhova told AFP she is struggling to scale up her program to reach even more.

International organizations have so far rebuffed her requests for funding, saying they can’t be seen giving money to the military.

“They say they would like to help children, they would like to help animals, the elderly, maybe some internally displaced people or people who are abroad,” she said.

Her students scoffed at this approach, and Chekryzhova said she has little interest in dealing with “puppies and kittens or some nice old ladies.”

All said they were convinced studying English would help them win the war while furthering Ukraine’s military integration with Western and other countries.

“So,” Chekryzhova said as the lesson ended, “Are you armed with English?”

“Yes,” Soldatenko responded. “Yes, I think so.”
…

French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, responsible for multiple murders in the 1970s across Asia, arrived in France on Saturday after almost 20 years in prison in Nepal.

Nepal’s top court ruled on Wednesday that he should be freed on health grounds and deported to France within 15 days.

On Friday, he was released and put on a flight at Kathmandu airport to take him to Paris via Doha. While on the flight to Doha, he insisted to an AFP journalist that he was “innocent.”

Sobhraj’s life was chronicled in the series “The Serpent,” co-produced by Netflix and the BBC.

Posing as a gem trader, he would befriend his victims, many of them Western backpackers on the 1970s hippie trail, before drugging, robbing and murdering them.

“I feel great… I have a lot to do. I have to sue a lot of people. Including the state of Nepal,” Sobhraj told AFP on Friday onboard the plane.

Asked if he thought he had been wrongly described as a serial killer, the 78-year-old said: “Yes, yes.”

He landed in the French capital Saturday morning, an AFP reporter confirmed.

On arrival at Paris, he was taken away by border police for extra “identity checks,” according to an airport source.

The airport source said he was “not wanted” by the authorities in France and that once all the checks had been carried out, he would be able to leave the airport.

‘Bikini killer’

Born in Saigon to an Indian father and a Vietnamese mother who later married a Frenchman, Sobhraj embarked on an international life of crime and ended up in Thailand in 1975.

Suave and sophisticated, he was implicated in the murder of a young American woman, whose body was found on a beach wearing a bikini.

Nicknamed the “bikini killer,” Sobhraj was eventually linked to more than 20 murders.

He was arrested in India in 1976 and ultimately spent 21 years in jail there, with a brief break in 1986 when he drugged prison guards and escaped. He was recaptured in the Indian coastal state of Goa.

Released in 1997, Sobhraj lived in Paris, giving paid interviews to journalists, but went back to Nepal in 2003.

‘Karma’

He was spotted in a casino playing baccarat by journalist Joseph Nathan, one of the founders of the Himalayan Times newspaper, and arrested.

“He looked harmless… It was sheer luck that I recognized him,” Nathan told AFP on Thursday.

“I think it was karma.”

A court in Nepal handed Sobhraj a life sentence the following year for killing U.S. tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. A decade later, he was also found guilty of killing Bronzich’s Canadian companion.

Talking to AFP among bemused fellow Qatar Airways passengers on Friday, Sobhraj insisted he was innocent of the killings in Nepal.

“The courts in Nepal, from (the) district court to high court to supreme court, all the judges, they were biased against Charles Sobhraj,” he said.

“I am innocent in those cases, OK? So I don’t have to feel bad for that, or good. I am innocent. It was built on fake documents,” he added.

Thai police officer Sompol Suthimai — whose work with Interpol was instrumental in securing the 1976 arrest — had pushed for Sobhraj to be extradited to Thailand and tried for murders there.

But Thursday, Sompol told AFP he did not object to the release, as both he and the criminal he once pursued were now too old.

“I don’t have any feelings towards him now that it’s been so long,” said Sompol, 90.

“I think he has already paid for his actions.” 
…

Moldovan intelligence officials say Russian forces could launch a military offensive early next year in southern Ukraine in order to link Russian forces there to Russian-backed separatists in Moldova’s Transnistria region. Anna Kosstutschenko reports. Camera: Paviel Syhodolskiy . Note: Some interviewees withheld their names for security reasons.

Some of the people interviewed did not provide their last names because of security concerns.
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Spanish prosecutors have dropped their investigation into the deaths of more than 20 migrants last June at the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave city of Melilla, saying in a statement Friday they found no evidence of criminal misconduct by Spanish security forces.

Prosecutors said they spent six months investigating what happened when hundreds of migrants — some estimates say around 2,000 — stormed the Melilla border fence in northwest Africa from the Moroccan side in an attempt to reach European soil. At least 23 migrants were officially reported dead, though human rights groups say the number was higher.

“It cannot be concluded that the conduct of the (Spanish) security officers involved increased the threat to the life and well-being of the immigrants, so no charge of reckless homicide can be brought,” said the Spanish prosecutors.

The migrants, according to the prosecutors’ statement, were “hostile and violent.”

Hundreds of men, some wielding sticks, climbed over the fence from Moroccan territory and were corralled into a border crossing area. When they managed to break through the gate to the Spanish side, a stampede apparently led to the crushing of many people.

Moroccan police launched tear gas and beat men with batons, even when some were prone on the ground. Spanish guards surrounded a group that managed to get through before apparently sending them back.

The clash ended with African men, clearly injured or even dead, piled on top of one another while Moroccan police in riot gear looked on.

The Spanish prosecutors said that “at no point did (Spanish) security officers have reason to believe that there were people at risk who required help.”

Spanish security officers who turned 470 of the immigrants back to Morocco did so in accordance with their duty and in conformity with Spain’s immigration law, the statement said.

So-called “pushbacks” — the forcible return of people across an international border without an assessment of their rights to apply for asylum or other protection, violating both international and EU law — are a contentious issue in Europe.

The prosecutors did fault some security officers who threw rocks at the immigrants, recommending disciplinary procedures against them.

Amnesty International said earlier this month that the handling of the investigation by Spain and Morocco, which has remained mostly silent on the matter, “smacks of a cover-up and racism.”
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The United States House of Representatives on Friday approved a $45 billion aid package for Ukraine. The measure, part of a $1.66 trillion government funding bill that passed the Senate a day earlier, will now go to President Joe Biden for signing into law. This package follows U.S. aid worth about $50 billion sent to Ukraine previously this year.  

The move comes after Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wartime visit to Washington this week. 

Upon his return to Kyiv, Zelenskyy defiantly said Ukrainian forces “are working toward victory” despite Russia’s relentless artillery, rocket and mortar fire and airstrikes on Ukraine.  

“We will overcome everything,” Zelenskyy pledged on Telegram. “We are coming back from Washington with … something that will really help.”  

The U.S. promised Patriot missiles to help Ukraine fight against the Russian invasion. Zelenskyy has long asked for Patriot missiles to help counter Russian airstrikes, which have destroyed cities, towns and villages during 10 months of conflict and knocked out power and water supplies across the country over the past three months.    

Zelenskyy thanked Biden and the U.S. Congress for supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia.  

U.S. officials say, however, that the single Patriot battery that Biden promised to supply to Ukraine will not change the course of the war. 

Washington and its allies have been unwilling to supply Kyiv with modern battle tanks and long-range missiles called ATACMS, which can reach far behind front lines and into Russia itself. 

Both Kyiv and the Biden administration are wary that retaining U.S. congressional support for aid could become more complicated once Republicans take a slim majority in the House in the new year. A few right-wing Republicans oppose aid, and other lawmakers have called for tighter budget oversight. 

During a Friday visit to Tula, Russia, a center for arms manufacturing, Russian President Vladimir Putin told the country’s defense industry chiefs to do more to ensure that the Russian army quickly receive all the weapons, equipment and military hardware it needs to fight in Ukraine.  

“The most important key task of our military-industrial complex is to provide our units and front-line forces with everything they need: weapons, equipment, ammunition and gear in the necessary quantities and of the right quality in the shortest possible time frames,” he said.  

Britain’s Defense Ministry said Friday in its intelligence update on Ukraine that Putin has been “presented with plans to expand the Russian military by around 30% to 1.5 million personnel.”  

The ministry said that the proposal was made Wednesday and that “Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu explained that the expansion would involve at least two brigades in northwestern Russia growing to divisional strength.”    

The British defense minister explained Russia’s move by citing “the supposed threat from Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to NATO.”  

“This constitutes one of the first insights into how Russia aspires to adapt its forces to the long-term strategic challenges resulting from its invasion of Ukraine,” the ministry update said. “It remains unclear how Russia will find the recruits to complete such an expansion at a time when its forces are under unprecedented pressure in Ukraine.”  

Zelenskyy’s Washington visit 

In Western Europe, Zelenskyy’s visit to the U.S. Capitol was seen as symbolic, a message to the world that the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine in its fight for survival.  

Observers in the region were pleased to hear Biden point to the need to “maintain NATO unity” when it came to arms supplies.  

“This strongly suggests that it is not the U.S. but other influential NATO states that are not convinced of the need to support Ukraine even more intensively,” Polish historian Lukasz Adamski of the Mieroszewski Center in Warsaw told VOA.  

Putin, however, said Zelenskyy’s trip only fueled the conflict.  

“They say they may send Patriot there, fine. We will crack the Patriot, too,” Putin told reporters. He said the delivery of the battery “only drags out the conflict.”  

In Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s Washington visit symbolized the war-honed relationship between two countries.    

It was important for Ukrainians and Zelenskyy to convey their appreciation of the unwavering support the U.S. has shown their country, Mykola Davydiuk, a Ukrainian political analyst and director at Think Tank Politics, told VOA.  

Putin said Russia is ready for talks with Ukraine on ending the conflict, despite his assessment that the U.S. delivery of a Patriot missile battery would extend it.  

“One way or another, all armed conflicts end with talks,” Putin said. “The sooner this understanding comes to those who oppose us, the better. We never rejected the talks.    

“We will strive for an end to this, and the sooner, the better, of course,” he added.    

The White House quickly countered Putin’s comments.  

John Kirby, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, said Putin had “shown absolutely zero indication that he’s willing to negotiate” an end to the war that began with Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine.    

“Everything he [Putin] is doing on the ground and in the air bespeaks a man who wants to continue to visit violence upon the Ukrainian people [and] escalate the war,” Kirby told reporters, according to Reuters.  

Also Thursday, Kirby said U.S. intelligence officers had determined that North Korea had completed an initial shipment of arms, including rockets and missiles, to the private Russian military company Wagner Group last month. The action was seen as a sign of the group’s expanding role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.  

The British government also condemned the shipment.  

Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin said no effort had been made for North Korea to supply weapons to Russia and dismissed the talk as “gossip and speculation,” Reuters reported.  

The Russian mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment. North Korea’s Foreign Ministry denied the reports, calling them groundless.  

Eastern Europe Bureau Chief Myroslava Gongadze contributed to this report. Some material for this article came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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A shooter killed two people and wounded four others in a gun attack near a Kurdish cultural center in Paris on Friday, the prosecutor’s office said.

Multiple gunshots were fired in the Rue d’Enghien, a street lined with small shops and cafes in the capital’s 10th arrondissement, sowing panic. Armed police guarded a security cordon and several ambulances were at the scene, live television images showed.

“A gun attack has taken place. Thank you to the security forces for their swift action,” tweeted deputy Mayor Emmanuel Gregoire. “Thoughts for the victims and those who witnessed this drama.”

An investigation into murder, manslaughter and aggravated violence has been opened, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

A 69-year-old man had been arrested and was in detention, the prosecutor’s office added. The incident was over, it said.

Police did not indicate the motives of the alleged shooter.

One witness told French news agency AFP that seven or eight shots had been fired. A second witness, speaking to BFM TV, said the suspected gunman was a white man who opened fire in silence.

 
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Confessed French serial killer Charles Sobhraj was freed from prison in Nepal on Friday after serving most of his sentence for the murders of American and Canadian backpackers.

Sobhraj was driven out of Central Jail in Kathmandu in a heavily guarded police convoy to the Department of Immigration, where he will wait for his travel documents to be prepared.

The country’s Supreme Court had ordered that Sobhraj, who was sentenced to life in prison in Nepal, be released because of poor health, good behavior and having already served most of his sentence. Life sentences in Nepal are 20 years.

The order also said he had to leave the country within 15 days.

Sobhraj’s attorney Gopal Siwakoti Chitan told reporters that the request for the travel documents must be made by the immigration department to the French embassy in Nepal, which could take some time. Offices are closed over the weekend for the Christmas holiday.

The court document said he had already served more than 75% of his sentence, making him eligible for release, and he has heart disease.

The Frenchman has in the past admitted killing several Western tourists and he is believed to have killed at least 20 people in Afghanistan, India, Thailand, Turkey, Nepal, Iran and Hong Kong during the 1970s. However, his 2004 conviction in Nepal was the first time he was found guilty in court.

Sobhraj was held for two decades in New Delhi’s maximum-security Tihar prison on suspicion of theft but was deported without charge to France in 1997. He resurfaced in September 2003 in Kathmandu.

His nickname, The Serpent, stems from his reputation as a disguise and escape artist.
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Russia’s space agency said it is considering a plan to send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) to bring home three crew members ahead of schedule, after their Soyuz capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbiting outpost.

Roscosmos and NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday they continue to investigate how the coolant line of the capsule’s external radiator sustained a tiny puncture last week, just as two cosmonauts were preparing for a routine spacewalk.

No final decision has been made about the precise means of flying the capsule’s three crew members back to Earth, whether by launching another Soyuz to retrieve them or by the seemingly less likely option of sending them home in the leaky capsule without most of its coolant.

Last week, Sergei Krikalev, Russia’s chief of crewed space programs, said the leak could have been caused by a micrometeoroid strike. But he and his NASA counterparts have left open the possibility of other culprits, such as a hardware failure or an impact by a tiny piece of space debris.

The Dec. 14 leak prompted mission controllers in Moscow to call off the spacewalk as a live NASA webcast showed what appeared to be a flurry of snowflake-like particles spewing from the rear of the Soyuz spacecraft.

The leak lasted for hours and emptied the radiator of coolant used to regulate temperatures inside the crew compartment of the spacecraft.

NASA has said that none of the ISS crew was ever in any danger from the leak.

Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dimitri Petelin, who were suited up for the spacewalk at the time, flew to the ISS aboard the now-crippled Soyuz MS-22 capsule along with U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio in September.

They were originally scheduled to fly back on the same spacecraft in March, but Krikalev and NASA’s ISS program manager, Joel Montalbano, said Roscosmos would return them to Earth two or three weeks early if Russian space officials decide to launch an empty crew capsule for their retrieval.

Four other ISS crew members — two more from NASA, a third Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut — rode to the ISS in October via a NASA-contracted SpaceX Crew Dragon and they also remain aboard, with their capsule parked at the station.

The leak has upended Russia’s ISS routines for the weeks ahead, forcing a suspension of all future Roscosmos spacewalks as officials in Moscow shift their focus to the leaky MS-22, a designated lifeboat for its three crew members if something goes wrong aboard the space station.

Two U.S. astronauts, Rubio and Josh Cassada, conducted a seven-hour spacewalk without incident on Thursday to install a new roll-out solar array outside the station, NASA said.

If MS-22 is deemed unsafe to carry crew members back to Earth, another Soyuz capsule in line to ferry Russia’s next crew to the station in March would instead “be sent up unmanned to have (a) healthy vehicle on board the station to be able to rescue crew,” Krikalev, Roscosmos’ executive director for human spaceflight, told reporters.

No mention was made of possibly sending a spare SpaceX Dragon for crew retrieval.

Pinpointing the cause of the leak could factor into decisions about the best way to return crew members.

The recent Geminid meteor shower initially seemed to raise the odds of a micrometeoroid strike as the origin, but the leak was facing the wrong way for that to be the case, Montalbano said, though a space rock could have come from another direction.

Sending the stricken MS-22 back to Earth unfixed with humans aboard appeared an unlikely choice given the vital role the coolant system plays to prevent overheating of the capsule’s crew compartment, which Montalbano and Krikalev said was currently being vented with air flow allowed through an open hatch to the ISS.
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