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washington — Supporters of two U.S. nationals seen as unjustly imprisoned overseas are raising concerns about what they see as a murky process by which the U.S. government decides whether to designate such individuals as wrongfully detained.

Granting a wrongful detention designation to a U.S. national means the U.S. special envoy for hostage affairs is authorized to work with a coalition of government and private sector organizations to secure the detainee’s freedom.

Hostage rights advocates and relatives of the two U.S. nationals jailed in Iran and Russia tell VOA they want answers as to why the pair have been waiting months or years for a wrongful detention designation, while other Americans jailed in the same two countries have received the designation much more quickly.

Designations are granted if a review by the secretary of state concludes that the U.S. national’s case meets criteria  defined in the Levinson Act of 2020.

One U.S. national whose case has been under review for years is 62-year-old retired Iranian ship captain Shahab Dalili. After immigrating to the U.S. with his family in 2014 upon being granted permanent residency, he returned to Iran in 2016 to attend his father’s funeral and was arrested.

Iranian authorities sentenced Dalili to 10 years in prison for allegedly cooperating with a hostile government, a reference to the U.S. His family denies the charge.

While not a U.S. citizen, Dalili is considered a “U.S. national” under the Levinson Act, by virtue of his lawful permanent resident status.

The other U.S. national, whose case has been under review for months, is Alsu Kurmasheva, a 47-year-old U.S.-Russian dual citizen and Prague-based journalist with VOA sister network RFE/RL.

Kurmasheva had traveled to Russia last year to visit her elderly mother, but authorities blocked her from departing in June and confiscated her U.S. and Russian passports. They jailed her in October and charged her with failing to register as a foreign agent and with spreading falsehoods about the Russian military, offenses punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

RFE/RL and the U.S. Agency for Global Media say the charges were filed in reprisal for Kurmasheva’s work as a journalist.

Asked about Kurmasheva at a Tuesday news briefing, U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said the Biden administration remains “deeply concerned” about her detention and believes she should be released.

He said a “deliberative and fact-driven process” is underway regarding a wrongful detention designation in her case, but he declined to elaborate.

Speaking with reporters last August, Patel said Dalili’s case “has not yet been determined wrongfully detained” and declined to say more. There has been no update since then, Dalili’s son Darian told VOA.

In contrast to the unresolved status of Dalili’s eight-year detention, two Iranian Americans whom Iran freed from detention last September in a prisoner exchange with the U.S., and whom U.S. officials declined to name, received wrongful detention designations in what appears to be a relatively quick time.

The two individuals, whose backgrounds are revealed for the first time in this report as a result of a VOA open-source investigation, are San Diego-based international aid worker Fary Moini and Boston-based biologist Reza Behrouzi of Generate:Biomedicines.

Moini and Behrouzi were among five Americans released by Iran in the September exchange. The first indications that the two had been detained in Iran came from images of them published by news outlets and by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan as the group traveled to the U.S. via Qatar.

A day later, Iran’s NourNews site named the two previously unidentified Americans as “Reza Behrouzi” and “Fakhr al-Sadat Moini,” but gave no detail of their backgrounds. NourNews spelled Moini’s first name differently than “Fary,” the name she uses publicly in the U.S.

U.S. officials said all five of the Americans had been designated as wrongfully detained, including three previously known detainees who had been jailed for years: Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Sharghi.

VOA contacted the State Department to ask when, where and why Moini and Behrouzi were detained in Iran, but it declined to provide an on-the-record response. Neither of the two responded to VOA requests for comment sent by email and through their social media profiles.

But Behrouzi and Moini were active on their Facebook and X accounts until three months and 11 months respectively before their release, indicating both were detained for less than a year.

Upon hearing from VOA about the State Department’s silence on Moini’s and Behrouzi’s detentions in Iran, Darian Dalili said he believes “something is not right” about how they got their designations.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the prominent status of these two people, whereas my father [Shahab Dalili] is a regular father of two,” the younger Dalili said.

Nizar Zakka — a Lebanese American who spent almost four years in what the U.S. said was unjust detention in Iran until being freed in 2019 — has urged the Biden administration to seek Shahab Dalili’s release as a wrongfully detained U.S. national.

Zakka told VOA he was happy that Moini and Behrouzi were released. But he said their attainment of wrongful detention designations in what appears to be a matter of months, while Dalili has waited years without securing that status, shows the designation process is not transparent.

“The public has a right to know how two people freed by Iran in return for the U.S. unfreezing a huge sum of Iranian funds got their designations, whereas Dalili has not,” Zakka said. “U.S. nationals like Dalili also should not be left behind,” he added.

 

Russian American journalist Kurmasheva’s wait for a U.S. decision on whether she is wrongfully detained after more than six months of Russian imprisonment also contrasts with the case of American reporter Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal.

Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on March 29, 2023, on spying charges while working in the country as an accredited journalist. Twelve days later, Secretary of State Blinken announced his determination that Gershkovich was wrongfully detained.

Kurmasheva’s husband, Pavel Butorin, told VOA he does not know why Gershkovich got his designation so quickly while his wife continues to wait.

“The designation of Evan’s detention as wrongful was the right thing to do,” Butorin said. “But the designation process is opaque, and I don’t know where we are in it. I do know the State Department will prioritize those individuals formally designated as wrongfully detained in a prisoner exchange, so the designation is important for Alsu.”

Hostage rights advocate Diane Foley, president of U.S. nonprofit group Foley Foundation, told VOA she believes a big factor in Kurmasheva’s wait for a designation is her dual citizenship.

Foley said Gershkovich’s case for a designation was clearer because he is solely a U.S. citizen. She said Kurmasheva’s Russian citizenship means she is subject to Russian media regulations that the U.S. must examine to determine if she is jailed in violation of the detaining country’s own law, one of the criteria of the Levinson Act.

“That is what slows everything down,” Foley said. “But we are pushing for Alsu to get the designation because she is a press freedom advocate and there is no excuse for Russia to retaliate by detaining her on a technicality.”
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berlin — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Union leaders denounced Saturday a recent spate of attacks on politicians in Germany, including one that sent a member of the European Parliament to the hospital with serious injuries. 

Matthias Ecke, 41, a member of Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was hit and kicked Friday by a group of four people while putting up posters in Dresden, capital of the eastern state of Saxony, police said. An SPD source said his injuries would require an operation. 

Shortly before, what appeared to be the same group attacked a 28-year-old campaigner for the Greens, who was also putting up posters, police said, although his injuries were not as severe. 

“Democracy is threatened by this kind of thing,” Scholz told a convention of European socialists in Berlin. 

The attacks exemplify increased violence in Germany in recent years, often from the far-right, targeting especially leftist politicians. The BfV domestic intelligence agency says far-right extremism is the biggest threat to German democracy. 

Saxony premier Michael Kretschmer, a conservative, said such aggression and attempts at intimidation recalled the darkest era of German history, a reference to Nazi rule. 

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, a former German conservative minister, and the Italian head of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, both condemned the attack on Ecke. 

“The culprits must be brought to account,” von der Leyen said on X. 

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser vowed “tough action and further protective measures” in response to the attacks. 

Far-right support 

The heads of the SPD in Saxony, Henning Homann and Kathrin Michel, issued a statement in which they blamed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) for the rise in violence. 

“These people and their supporters bear responsibility for what is happening in this country,” they said. 

The AfD did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The party says it is the victim of a campaign by the media and political establishment. 

The AfD has seen a surge in support in the past year take it to second place in opinion polls nationwide. It is particularly strong in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, where surveys suggest it could come first in regional elections in September. 

Nationwide, the number of attacks on politicians of parties represented in parliament has doubled since 2019, according to government figures published in January. 

Greens party politicians face the most aggression, according to the data, with attacks on them rising sevenfold since 2019 to 1,219 last year. AfD politicians suffered 478 attacks and the SPD was third with 420. 

Theresa Ertel, a Greens candidate in municipal elections in Thuringia this month, said she knew of party members who no longer wanted to stand because of the aggressive political atmosphere. 

The Greens in her region had agreed that information stands should always have at least three staff for extra safety. 
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amsterdam — Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Mark Rutte joined around 4,000 people Saturday for the country’s annual World War II remembrance ceremony amid restricted public access and heightened security due to the war in Gaza. 

The ceremony on Amsterdam’s central Dam square, with the traditional two minutes of silence at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) to commemorate the victims of World War II, passed smoothly despite fears that there might be protests. 

Normally some 20,000 people attend the Dam commemoration without having to register. But earlier this week, municipal authorities announced unprecedented security measures to keep the ceremony safe and avoid possible disruptions linked to the Israel-Hamas war. 

At the opening of a Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam in March, pro-Palestinian protesters opposed to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza set off fireworks and booed Israeli President Isaac Herzog as he arrived on a visit. 

Every town and city in the Netherlands holds its own remembrance ceremony on May 4 and tens of thousands of people attend the events. Then on May 5, the Netherlands marks the anniversary of its liberation from Nazi occupation in 1945. 
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LONDON — London Mayor Sadiq Khan has a lot of cleaning up to do.

Khan, who made history Saturday by becoming the city’s first mayor elected to a third term, has pledged to make the River Thames swimmable.

It wasn’t a top campaign issue, but it’s an audacious goal considering the waterway was declared biologically dead not long before his birth in the city in 1970 and flows as an open sewer of sorts when heavy rains overwhelm London’s ancient plumbing system.

Taming the Thames would not be Khan’s first swim upstream. His narrative is built around overcoming the odds.

As he frequently points out, he is the son of a bus driver and a seamstress from Pakistan. He grew up in a three-bedroom public housing apartment with seven siblings in South London. He attended a rough school and went on to study law. He was a human rights lawyer before he was elected to Parliament in 2005 as a member of the center-left Labor Party, representing the area where he grew up.

In 2016, he became the first Muslim leader of a major Western capital, overcoming an opponent whose mayoral campaign was “at least somewhat Islamophobic,” said Patrick Diamond, a public policy professor at Queen Mary University of London.

“It was seen as an affirmation of him in terms of his status as a leading Muslim politician, but also as an affirmation of London in terms of its diversity, its liberalism, its cosmopolitanism,” Diamond said. “That was significant in a country which doesn’t historically have a very strong track record for having diversity in its senior politicians.”

Khan has faced subtle and overt discrimination throughout his career due to his ethnicity and religion. Some of the sharpest barbs have come from former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has feuded with him since Khan assailed Trump’s campaign pledge in 2015 to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

During a campaign rally Wednesday in Wisconsin, Trump said London and Paris were “no longer recognizable” after they “opened their doors to jihad.”

Khan, who has referred to Trump as the “poster boy for racists,” responded by saying Thursday’s election was a chance to “choose hope over fear and unity over division.”

“One of the things that he does incredibly well, and I would defy anyone to disagree with this, is representing London’s different and diverse communities,” said Jack Brown, a lecturer in London studies at King’s College London. “He hasn’t got absolutely everything right, but he is kind of a bringer together of different communities.”

Khan, who was ahead of the national Labor Party in calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, has taken a lot of flak for large pro-Palestinian marches in the city since the Israel-Hamas war. But he’s also known for speaking out against antisemitism and for building bridges with Jewish leaders, Brown said.

Despite his success at the polls, Khan is not an incredibly popular mayor. He’s been blamed for a lot of problems, many of which are beyond his control.

The mayor of London doesn’t have the authority of mayors in Paris or New York because power is shared with the city’s 32 boroughs and the financial district.

Khan has a 20-billion-pound ($25 billion) budget that primarily goes toward transport, policing and working with councils and developers to achieve his affordable housing targets that he has fallen far short of meeting. Borough councils are responsible for schools, rubbish collection, social services and public housing.

His time in office has been overshadowed by crises: first the U.K.’s break from the European Union, which weakened London’s thriving financial services industry, and then the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a cost-of-living crisis.

He has touted measures he put in place such as freezing rail and bus fares and providing free meals for all primary school pupils among his biggest achievements.

Khan has deflected much criticism by blaming his difficulties on a Conservative government that has impeded his plans. He said a projected win by Labor in a national election later this year would change his fortunes.

“For too long we’ve had a government that appears to be anti-London, that thinks the way to level up our country, to make it more equal, is make London poorer,” Khan told The Associated Press.

But Diamond said a Labor government will face the same fiscal problems as the current administration and is unlikely to suddenly make Khan’s life easier.

“You can’t always play the party politics card,” Diamond said. “The general sense in London is that Sadiq Khan does that too often. Or you can blame the Conservative government once or twice, but if it’s your only message, I think people maybe get a little bit tired and switch off to some extent.”

Khan has been criticized by opponents for a rise in crime — particularly incidents involving knives. He has responded by pledging more support for programs that work with youths to prevent crime while blaming government funding cuts.

In the outer suburbs, Khan has come under fire for expanding the city’s Ultra Low Emission Zone that fines drivers of more-polluting older cars 12.50 pounds (about $16) a day. Although the policy was introduced in central London in 2015 by his predecessor, Boris Johnson, it has widely been attributed to Khan because of its unpopular expansion, although it only applies to a small fraction of vehicles.

His main opponent, Susan Hall, a London Assembly member, vowed to “stop the war on motorists” and scrap the program on her first day in office if elected.

Khan, who has made cleaning up London’s air pollution a personal mission since he developed asthma as an adult, considers those efforts among his biggest wins.

Making the Thames swimmable in the next decade would expand his mission from clean air to clean water. Brown said that might be a more tangible achievement — given that air pollution is often invisible — but it’s probably not something that won over a lot of voters.
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PARIS — France’s world-leading cosmetics sector is counting on talks between Xi Jinping and Emmanuel Macron next week to help minimize the impact on French companies of tough new Chinese import rules requiring the sharing of formulas and manufacturing know-how. 

President Xi’s first visit to Europe in five years comes amid a backdrop of tense trade relations, with the European Union threatening China’s electric vehicle and green energy industries with tariffs. 

But progress toward an agreement between France and China on the regulation of cosmetics, including lipstick and fragrances, could be a bright spot in discussions in Paris next week. 

President Macron’s office said ahead of the meeting that cosmetics would be a topic of “great attention,” and that they sought to “find a solution that also protects the interests of our companies.” 

France is the world’s leading cosmetics exporter, shipping nearly 2 billion euros ($2.15 billion) worth of makeup and skin care products to China last year, second in importance only to aerospace products. 

New Chinese safety rules due to come into effect next year threaten that trade. 

From May 2025, cosmetics exporters will be required to share detailed information on their manufacturing processes with Beijing and receive Chinese inspectors in their factories, a measure that raises concerns about losing control of intellectual property. 

Under a plan proposed in talks between the two sides in the past year, French authorities would take responsibility for assuring the safety of some of its exports without the need for Chinese inspections. 

France would grant some similar measures to China, but it was not clear what areas those would cover. 

“This reciprocity will assure the highest standards of safety to Chinese consumers,” said Emmanuel Guichard, secretary general of France’s cosmetics industry association FEBEA, adding that the plan could be formalized during talks between Xi and Macron. 

FEBEA’s members include L’Oreal, LVMH and Coty. 

Under the agreement, France’s consumer and anti-fraud watchdog DGCCRF would ensure the safety of a number of French manufacturers that qualify for “white list” status. 

The agency said in a report issued Friday on its recent activities that it held its first meeting on certification of French cosmetics for export to China with China’s National Medical Products Administration, or NMPA, in December. 

The Elysee did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The DGCCRF did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The NMPA could not be reached for comment on a holiday weekend. Sunday is Labor Day in China, recognized as a national holiday. 
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KYIV, UKRAINE — Russia launched an overnight drone attack on Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Dnipro regions, injuring at least six people and hitting critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, regional officials said on Saturday.

The Ukrainian Air Force said the Russian forces launched 13 Shahed drones targeting the regions in the northeast and center of the country. The air defense units downed all the drones, the Air Force commander said.

However, debris from the downed drones struck civilian targets in Kharkiv in the northeast, injuring four people and sparking a fire in an office building, the regional governor said.

Oleh Synehubov, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said a 13-year-old child and a woman were being treated at a hospital. Two other women were treated on site. Emergency services were bringing the fire under control, he said.

In the industrial Dnipropetrovsk region, two people were wounded, said Serhiy Lysak, the regional governor. He said a critical infrastructure facility and three houses were damaged.
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DUESSELDORF, Germany — Herbert Rubinstein was 5 years old when he and his mother were taken from the Jewish ghetto of Chernivtsi and put on a cramped cattle wagon waiting to take them to their deaths. It was 1941, and Romanians collaborating with Germany’s Nazis were rounding up tens of thousands of Jews from his hometown in what is now southwestern Ukraine.

“It was nothing but a miracle that we survived,” Rubinstein told The Associated Press during a recent interview at his apartment in the western German city of Duesseldorf.

The 88-year-old Holocaust survivor is participating in a new digital campaign called #CancelHate. It was launched Thursday by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference.

It features videos of survivors from around the globe reading Holocaust denial posts from different social media platforms. Each post illustrates how denial and distortion can not only rewrite history but perpetuate antisemitic tropes and spread hate.

“I could never have imagined a day when Holocaust survivors would be confronting such a tremendous wave of Holocaust denial and distortion, but sadly, that day is here,” said Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference.

“We all saw what unchecked hatred led to — words of hate and antisemitism led to deportations, gas chambers and crematoria,” Schneider added. “Those who read these depraved posts are putting aside their own discomfort and trauma to ensure that current and future generations understand that unchecked hatred has no place in society.”

The Claims Conference’s new digital campaign comes at a time when antisemitic incidents, triggered by Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s ensuing military campaign in Gaza, have increased from Europe to the U.S. and beyond, to levels not seen in decades, according to major Jewish organizations.

Hamas and other militants abducted around 250 people in the attack and killed around 1,200, mostly civilians. They are still believed to be holding around 100 hostages and the remains of some 30 others. The war has ground on with little end in sight: the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, displaced around 80% of the population and pushed hundreds of thousands of people to the brink of famine.

The war has inflamed tensions around the world and triggered pro-Palestinian protests, including at college campuses in the U.S. and elsewhere. Israel and its supporters have branded the protests as antisemitic, while critics of Israel say it uses such allegations to silence opponents.

The launch of the Claims Conference campaign also comes days before Yom HaShoah — Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day — on Monday.

In one of the videos, Rubinstein reads out a hate post — only to juxtapose it with his personal testimony about his family’s suffering during the Holocaust.

“‘We have all been cheated, lied to, and exploited. The Holocaust did not happen the way it is written in our history books,'” he reads and then says: “That is a lie. The Holocaust happened. Unfortunately, way too many members of my family died in the Holocaust.”

Rubinstein then continues to talk about his own persecution as a Jewish child during the Holocaust.

While forced into the ghetto of Cernisvtsi, his family managed to obtain forged Polish identity documents, which were the only reason he and his mother were taken off the cattle train in 1941.

They fled and hid in several eastern European countries until the war ended in 1945. After that, they briefly went back to his hometown, only to find out that his father, who had been forced into the Soviet Red Army during the war, had been killed. They moved on to Amsterdam, where his mother married again, and eventually settled in Duesseldorf.

“I lived through the Holocaust. Six million were murdered. Hate and Holocaust denial have returned to our society today. I am very, very sad about this and I am fighting it with all my might,” Rubinstein says at the end of the video. “Words matter. Our words are our power. Cancel hate. Stop the hate.”

Even at his old age, Rubinstein, who calls himself an optimist, says he will continue fighting antisemitism every single day. And he has a message, especially for the young generation of Jews.

“Don’t panic,” Rubinstein says. “The good will win. You just have to do something about it.”
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PARIS — Freshly cooked bread, select cheeses and a broad veggie offer will be among the meals to be offered to athletes and visitors during the 2024 Paris Olympics — including, of course, gourmet dishes created by renowned French chefs.

About 40,000 meals are expected to be served each day during the Games to the more than 15,000 athletes from 200 different countries housed at the Olympic village.

Visitors, too, will be able to enjoy some specially created snacks at the different venues.

French food services company Sodexo Live!, which was selected to oversee the catering at the athletes’ village and 14 venues of the Paris Games, said it has created a total of 500 recipes, which will notably be offered at a sit-down eatery for up to 3,500 athletes at the village, meant to be the “world’s largest restaurant.”

“Of course, there will be some classics for athletes, like pasta,” said Nathalie Bellon-Szabo, global CEO of Sodexo Live! But the food will have a “very French touch.”

Athletes will also have access to “grab and go” food stands, including one dedicated exclusively to French cuisine cooked up by chefs.

Renowned French chef Amandine Chaignot, who runs a restaurant and a café-bistro in Paris, on Tuesday unveiled one of her recipes based on the iconic croissant.

“I wanted the recipe I suggested to be representative of the French terroir, but I wanted athletes to enjoy it at the same time,” she told The Associated Press. “It was quite obvious for me to make a croissant that I could twist. So, you have a bit of artichoke puree, a poached egg, a bit of truffle and a bit of cheese. It’s both vegetarian and still mouthwatering.”

Every day, during the July 26-August 11 Games, a top chef — including some awarded with Michelin stars — will cook in front of the athletes at the Olympic Village, “so they’ll be able to chat and better understand what French cuisine is about — and to understand a bit of our culture as well,” Chaignot said.

Daily specials will be accompanied by a wide range of salads, pastas, grilled meat and soups. Cheeses will include top quality camembert, brie and sheep’s milk-based Ossau-Iraty from southwestern France.

The Olympic Village will also feature a boulangerie producing fresh baguettes and a variety of other breads.

“The idea is to offer athletes the chance to grab a piping-hot baguette for breakfast,” said baker Tony Doré, who will be working at the Olympic Village’s main restaurant.

Athletes will even be able to participate in daily bakery trainings, and learn to make their own French baguette, said Doré.

In an effort to provide as many options as possible, meals offered will revolve around four cuisines: French, Asian, African and the Caribbean and international food.

Paris 2024 organizers have promised to make the Games more sustainable and environment-friendly — and that includes efforts to reduce the use of plastic. To this effect, the main restaurant at the village will use only reusable dishes.

Additionally, organizers say all meals will be based on seasonal products and 80% will come from France.

Plant-based food will represent 60% of the offer for visitors at the venues, including a “vegetarian hot-dog,” said Philipp Würz, head of Food and Beverage for the Paris 2024 Committee.

There’s “a huge amount of plant-based recipes that will be available for the general public to try, to experience and, hopefully, they will love it,” said Würz.

The urban park at the Place de la Concorde, in central Paris, will offer visitors 100% vegetarian food — a first in the Games’ history. The place will be the stage for Paris 2024’s most contemporary sporting disciplines: BMX freestyle, 3×3 basketball, skateboarding and breakdancing.
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Washington — On Saturday, March 2, at 2:20 a.m., Serhii Gadarzhi woke up to a drone approaching his apartment building in Odesa, Ukraine. He heard an explosion just outside his windows and rushed to his 2-year-old daughter’s bedroom. She was there. He grabbed the child, wrapped her in a blanket and went to check on his wife and their 4-month-old son.

“The door was open. There was nothing behind it — just emptiness. My Anichka is gone. My boy Timosha is gone,” Gadarzhi relates on the Odesa Baptist YouTube channel.

Their bodies were found in the rubble after almost 24 hours of searching. All seven floors had collapsed on top of his wife and the baby sleeping on her chest, Gadarzhi said. That Russian attack with Iranian-made drones killed 12 people, including five children and seven adults.

“I want to say to Mr. James Michael Johnson: Dear brother, we have a war going on. A terrible war. And so many believers, brothers and sisters, are being killed. Little children are being killed. Help is very important to us. Especially military help because if there were a missile to shoot down that drone, the drone wouldn’t have flown in our house,” he says on the video.

Johnson, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, had for months delayed bringing to the floor of the House a bill providing $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, including ammunition for its air defense systems. The bill was finally approved on April 20 despite resistance from some members of Johnson’s own Republican Party.

Just three days before the vote, Gadarzhi, a Ukrainian Baptist and son-in-law of a local Baptist pastor, told his story to Johnson in person. Gadarzhi told VOA that the speaker already knew about his family’s tragedy.

“One can see in his eyes that he was compassionate, that he wanted to support us and his response was very sincere,” he said.

That meeting followed eight months of behind-the-scenes efforts by Ukrainian Protestants and their allies in the United States to tell Republican members of Congress about the suffering of the faithful at the hands of the Russian forces in the occupied portions of Ukraine.

Steven Moore, an Oklahoma native, was behind some of these efforts. He worked as a chief of staff in the House of Representatives to a leading Republican member for seven years, after which he lived in Ukraine for a year.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, he was visiting his mother in Tulsa but was back in Ukraine on day five of the full-scale invasion. Moore founded the Ukraine Freedom Project NGO (UFP), which began delivering food and supplies to the front for the residents and Ukraine’s armed forces.

Through his work, he learned about abuses inflicted on Ukrainian civilians by the Russian occupying forces, but one story struck him. Victor, an Evangelical pastor from Lugansk, was evacuating a group of civilians, including a pregnant woman and a baby, when Russians stopped his car and took him to a basement.

“They tortured him for 25 days, including one day when they were torturing him with an electrical Taser. And a Russian Orthodox priest was standing over him, trying to cast demons out of him because he was an Evangelical Christian. It blew my mind,” Moore told VOA.

He shared this story with a friend, Karl Ahlgren, a fellow Oklahoman and former chief of staff of a Republican congressman.

“When the full-scale invasion started, Republicans in particular were pretty supportive of Ukraine, and then their support waned. We had to regroup and figure out what we could do to get the right message out to Republicans,” said Ahlgren, who joined UFP as a vice president for public policy.

Beginning in September 2023, Moore, Ahlgren and their Chief Operating Officer Anna Shvetsova met with about 100 members of Congress and their staff, telling them about the persecution of Ukrainian Protestants by Russians.

UFP conducted a survey that showed 70% of Evangelical Christians who vote Republican are more likely to support Ukraine if they learn about Russia torturing and murdering people of their faith, Moore said. They were surprised to discover that most members of Congress knew nothing about it.

“Of the people we met with, there were probably three or four who knew some of the things we were talking about,” Ahlgren said.

Moore said the group “had video of people talking about being tortured, and we would show these videos to members of Congress, to their staff, and they would tear up.”

Other organizations, including the advocacy group Razom for Ukraine, joined the effort.

“I’m an American Baptist. I was shocked, in particular, that so many Baptist churches in occupied Ukraine have been harassed,” said Melinda Haring, a senior adviser for Razom for Ukraine. “More than 26 pastors have been killed since the full-scale war, and 400 Baptist congregations have lost their premises or some of their property.”

She said that at the meetings with the members of Congress and their staffers, she and her colleagues provided statistics of damage caused by Russia to the Ukrainian Christians, told personal stories and prayed together.

Some efforts specifically targeted Johnson, a Southern Baptist from Louisiana.

“We sponsored a billboard with Mike Johnson’s favorite Bible verse,” Haring said. “It’s a passage from the Book of Esther. Esther is before her uncle Mordecai, and she’s afraid to see the king; if she goes and sees the king without his permission, she can be killed, and Mordecai says, ‘You were chosen for a time like this.’

“We learned that Mike Johnson believed he was chosen to be the speaker of the House for an important time. So, our billboard had a picture of a destroyed Baptist church in Berdiansk with that Bible quote.”

Razom placed six of the billboards in Louisiana, including one in front of Johnson’s Cypress Baptist Church in Shreveport.

Razom, UFP and other organizations cosponsored multiple trips by Ukrainian religious leaders to the United States and helped them to organize meetings with members of Congress.

In November, 18 religious leaders and members of the Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations visited the United States. In early February, dozens of representatives of Ukrainian churches attended Ukrainian Week in Washington, organized around the National Prayer Breakfast.

Then, four of them met with Johnson.

“The meeting with the speaker was very warm, and the conversation was constructive,” said Anatoliy Kozachok, the senior bishop of the Ukrainian Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith.

He said they handed Johnson two letters urging him to support Ukraine, one from all Ukrainian Christians and one from the Protestants. The speaker told them he and his colleagues were working hard to resolve the issue.

“We felt united as people with the same values. There was a desire to help and to find a solution to the issue of aid for Ukraine,” Kozachok told VOA.

Another meeting participant, Valeriy Antonyuk, head of the All-Ukrainian Union of Evangelical Christian Baptists, said the group discussed shared values with Johnson.

“We Baptists have always defended everyone’s right to practice their faith freely,” he told VOA.

The Ukrainian church leaders were far from the only ones bringing intense pressure on Johnson to defy much of his own party and allow the aid bill to come to a vote, and only Johnson knows how decisive their efforts were in his final decision.

But with Ukrainian forces losing ground and desperately short of ammunition, the bill sailed through Congress on a vote of 311 to 112 and was signed into law by President Joe Biden on April 24, clearing the way for the military assistance to begin flowing again.
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tbilisi, georgia — Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze on Friday rejected criticism from the United States and European Union of a draft “foreign agents” bill, saying opponents of it were unwilling to engage in a meaningful discussion. 

The draft legislation, which is winding its way through the Georgian Parliament, would require organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as agents of foreign influence, a requirement opponents attack as authoritarian and Kremlin-inspired. 

Several thousand protesters took to the streets again Friday to voice their opposition, moving toward the headquarters of the ruling Georgian Dream party and then attending a Holy Friday service ahead of Orthodox Easter Sunday.  

The European Union and the United States have urged Tbilisi to drop the legislation or risk harming its chances of European Union membership and a broader Euro-Atlantic future. 

The standoff is seen as part of a wider struggle that could determine whether Georgia, a country of 3.7 million people that has experienced war and revolution since the fall of the Soviet Union, moves closer to Europe or back under Moscow’s influence. 

Kobakhidze said the legislation was necessary for transparency and accountability in the South Caucasus nation. 

“I explained to [senior U.S. diplomat Derek] Chollet that false statements made by the officials of the U.S. State Department about the transparency bill and street rallies remind us of similar false statements made by the former U.S. ambassador in 2020-2023,” Kobakhidze said on X. 

He said the previous U.S. statements had encouraged violence from what he called foreign-funded actors and had supported “revolutionary processes” that he said had been unsuccessful.  

“I clarified to Mr. Chollet that it requires a special effort to restart the relations [between Georgia and the United States] against this background, which is impossible without a fair and honest approach.” 

The White House has expressed concern that the legislation could stifle dissent and free speech. 

Kobakhidze also expressed disappointment about a conversation with European Council President Charles Michel, saying the EU had “been reluctant to engage in substantive discussions.” 

“Furthermore, I highlighted that we have not yet heard any counterarguments against this proposed legislation,” he said. 

Michel said on X that “Georgian citizens’ call for an open democratic and pluralistic society must be heeded. … Georgia’s future belongs with the EU. Don’t miss this historic chance.” 

Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire founder of the Georgian Dream party and a former prime minister, has said he will fight for what he called “the full restoration of the sovereignty of Georgia.” 
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As Orthodox Christians in Ukraine prepare to celebrate Easter on May 5th, Orthodox priests in Ukraine are finding themselves trying to serve their church and support their state, even when those two are at adds. VOA’s Anna Kosstutschenko reports.
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LYPIVKA, Ukraine — This Orthodox Easter season, an extraordinary new church is bringing spiritual comfort to war-weary residents of the Ukrainian village of Lypivka. Two years ago, it also provided physical refuge from the horrors outside.

Almost 100 residents sheltered in a basement chapel at the Church of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary while Russian troops occupied the village in March 2022 as they closed in on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, 60 kilometers to the east.

“The fighting was right here,” the Rev. Hennadii Kharkivskyi said. He pointed to the churchyard, where a memorial stone commemorates six Ukrainian soldiers killed in the battle for Lypivka.

“They were injured and then the Russians came and shot each one, finished them off,” he said.

The two-week Russian occupation left the village shattered and the church itself — a modern replacement for an older structure — damaged while still under construction. It’s one of 129 war-damaged Ukrainian religious sites recorded by UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization.

“It’s solid concrete,” the priest said. “But it was pierced easily” by Russian shells, which blasted holes in the church and left a wall inside pockmarked with shrapnel scars. At the bottom of the basement staircase, a black scorch mark shows where a grenade was lobbed down.

But within weeks, workers were starting to repair the damage and work to finish the solid building topped by red domes that towers over the village, with its scarred and damaged buildings, blooming fruit trees and fields that the Russians left littered with land mines.

For many of those involved — including a tenacious priest, a wealthy philanthropist, a famous artist and a team of craftspeople — rebuilding this church plays a part in Ukraine’s struggle for culture, identity and its very existence. The building, a striking fusion of the ancient and the modern, reflects a country determined to express its soul even in wartime.

The building’s austere exterior masks a blaze of color inside. The vibrant red, blue, orange and gold panels decorating walls and ceiling are the work of Anatoliy Kryvolap, an artist whose bold, modernist images of saints and angels make this church unique in Ukraine.

The 77-year-old Kryvolap, whose abstract paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars at auction, said that he wanted to eschew the severe-looking icons he’d seen in many Orthodox churches.

“It seems to me that going to church to meet God should be a celebration,” he said.

There has been a church on this site for more than 300 years. An earlier building was destroyed by shelling during World War II. The small wooden church that replaced it was put to more workaday uses in Soviet times, when religion was suppressed.

Kharkivskyi reopened the parish in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and set about rebuilding the church, spiritually and physically, with funding from Bohdan Batrukh, a Ukrainian film producer and distributor.

Work stopped when Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Moscow’s forces reached the fringes of Kyiv before being driven back. Lypivka was liberated by the start of April.

Since then, fighting has been concentrated in the east and south of Ukraine, though aerial attacks with rockets, missiles and drones are a constant threat across the country.

By May 2022, workers had resumed work on the church. It has been slow going. Millions of Ukrainians fled the country when war erupted, including builders and craftspeople. Hundreds of thousands of others have joined the military.

Inside the church, a tower of wooden scaffolding climbs up to the dome, where a red and gold image of Christ raises a hand in blessing.

For now, services take place in the smaller basement, where the priest, in white and gold robes, recently conducted a service for a couple of dozen parishioners as the smell of incense wafted through the candlelit room.

He is expecting a large crowd for Easter, which falls on Sunday. Eastern Orthodox Christians usually celebrate Easter later than Catholic and Protestant churches, because they use a different method of calculating the date for the holy day that marks Christ’s resurrection.

A majority of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians, though the church is divided. Many belong to the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with which the Lypivka church is affiliated. The rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church was loyal to the patriarch in Moscow until splitting from Russia after the 2022 invasion and is viewed with suspicion by many Ukrainians.

Kharkivskyi says the size of his congregation has remained stable even though the population of the village has shrunk dramatically since the war began. In tough times, he says, people turn to religion.

“Like people say: ‘Air raid alert — go see God,’” the priest said wryly.

Liudmyla Havryliuk, who has a summer home in Lypivka, found herself drawn back to the village and its church even before the fighting stopped. When Russia invaded, she drove to Poland with her daughters, then 16 and 18 years old. But within weeks she came back to the village she loves, still besieged by the Russians.

The family hunkered down in their home, cooking with firewood, drawing water from a well, sometimes under Russian fire. Havryliuk said that when they saw Russian helicopters, they held hands and prayed.

“Not prayer in strict order, like in the book,” she said. “It was from my heart, from my soul, about what should we do? How can I save myself and especially my daughters?”

She goes to Lypivka’s church regularly, saying it’s a “place you can shelter mentally, within yourself.”

As Ukraine marks its third Easter at war, the church is nearing completion. Only a few of Kryvolap’s interior panels remain to be installed. He said that the shell holes will be left unrepaired as a reminder to future generations.

“(It’s) so that they will know what kind of ‘brothers’ we have, that these are just fascists,” he said, referring to the Russians.

“We are Orthodox, just like them, but destroying churches is something inhumane.”
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Kyiv, Ukraine — Two people were killed on Friday in a Russian attack on the city of Kurakhove, located in the eastern Donetsk region, which is bearing the brunt of the fighting between Kyiv and Moscow.

“Various high-rise buildings were damaged. Two people were injured, two people died,” the head of the military administration Roman Padun said on social media.

Kurakhove is near the front lines in eastern Ukraine, 40 kilometers west of the Russia-occupied main city of Donetsk.

Outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian troops in the wider region are struggling against Russian forces who are pushing toward the key town of Chasiv Yar.

Ukrainian officials have said Russian forces aimed to seize the hilltop town before May 9, when Russia marks victory over Nazi Germany of World War II, to give President Vladimir Putin a symbolic win.

In an interview with Britain’s The Times, Ukraine’s Ground Forces Commander Oleksandr Pavliuk described a dire situation around the key city.

“We are trying everything we can do to stop the Russian plan to capture Chasiv Yar before May 9,” Pavliuk was quoted as saying.

“But Russians have a 10-to-1 ratio of artillery superiority there, and total air superiority,” he said.

Ukrainian forces have been suffering from ammunition shortages, partly due to months-long delays in U.S. aid, which were approved by President Joe Biden last week after Congress finally passed the measure.

Biden vowed to ensure the aid shipments would reach Ukraine swiftly.
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Moscow has cracked down on Russian media outlets that offer independent reporting on the war in Ukraine, prompting hundreds of journalists to flee. While in exile, these media workers have found ways to keep the news flowing into the heavily censored country. For VOA News, Lisa Bryant has the story from Paris. VOA footage by Vahid Karami.
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Kyiv, Ukraine — Ukraine has an AI-generated spokesperson called Victoria who will make official statements on behalf of its foreign ministry.

The ministry said on Wednesday that it would “for the first time in history” use a digital spokesperson to read its statements, which will still be written by humans.

Dressed in a dark suit, the spokesperson introduced herself as Victoria Shi, a “digital person,” in a presentation posted on social media.

The figure gesticulates with her hands and moves her head as she speaks.

The foreign ministry’s press service told AFP that the statements given by Shi would not be generated by AI but “written and verified by real people.”

“It’s only the visual part that the AI helps us to generate,” it said.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the new spokesperson was a “technological leap that no diplomatic service in the world has yet made.”

The main reason for creating her was “saving time and resources” for diplomats, he said.

Shi’s creators are a team called The Game Changers who have also made virtual reality content related to the war in Ukraine.

The spokesperson’s name is based on the word victory and the Ukrainian for artificial intelligence: shtuchniy intelekt.

Shi’s appearance and voice are modeled on a real person: Rosalie Nombre, a singer and former contestant on Ukraine’s version of The Bachelor reality show.

Nombre was born in the now Russian-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

She has 54,000 followers on her Instagram account, which she uses to discuss stereotypes about mixed-race Ukrainians and those who grew up as Russian speakers.

The ministry said that Nombre took part free of charge.

It stressed that Shi and Nombre “are two different people” and that only the AI figure gives official statements.

To avoid fakes, these will be accompanied by a QR code linking them to text versions on the ministry’s website.

Shi will comment on consular services, currently a controversial topic.

Ukraine last week suspended such services for men of fighting age living abroad, making it necessary for them to return to their country for administrative procedures and potentially face the draft. 
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LONDON — British police arrested 45 people on Thursday after a violent protest in London against the transfer of asylum seekers form a hotel to a barge off southern England.

Dozens of protesters outside the hotel in Peckham, southeast London, attempted to stop a bus carrying the asylum seekers from leaving, reportedly deflating its tires and obstructing the vehicle by surrounding it, London’s Metropolitan Police said.

Tackling illegal migration is one of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s top priorities, and to bring down the high costs of accommodating migrants in hotels while their asylum claims are processed, the government has been trying to use barges and former military sites.

Critics, however, have called the Bibby Stockholm barge — which is docked at Portland Port in Dorset and can house up to 500 men — inhumane and compared it to a prison ship.

Several police officers were assaulted during the protest in Peckham, but none were seriously hurt, police said.

“We will always respect the right to peaceful protest, but when officers are assaulted and obstructed from their duty, then we can and will take decisive action,” Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ade Adelekan said.

Arrests were made for offenses that included obstruction of the highway, obstructing police and assault on police.

“Housing migrants in hotels costs the British taxpayer millions of pounds every day,” Home Secretary James Cleverly said on social media platform X, alongside a video of the protest.

“We will not allow this small group of students, posing for social media, to deter us from doing what is right for the British public,” he said.
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