Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF director of emergency programs who has just returned from Ukraine, said that displacing 4.8 million of Ukraine’s 7.5 million children in such a short period of time was something that had not happened so quickly. for 31 years of humanitarian work.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN, Sergiy Kyslytsya, has claimed that Russia has taken more than 121,000 children from Ukraine and reportedly drafted a bill to simplify and speed up adoption processes for orphans, even those with parents and other relatives. .
Most of the children were evacuated from the besieged southern port of Mariupol and transported to eastern Donetsk and then to the Russian city of Taganrog, according to Kyslytsya.
Fontaine said that of Ukraine’s refugee children, 2.8 million are internally displaced and another 2 million are in other countries.
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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:
Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., who twice fell ill on suspicion of poisoning, has been arrested by police in Moscow, another prominent opposition figure said Monday.
Ilya Yashin said on Twitter that Kara-Murza was arrested on Monday near his residence in Moscow.  It was not clear if charges had been filed.
Kara-Murza was hospitalized with symptoms of poisoning twice, in 2015 and 2017. A journalist and associate of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was shot and killed in 2015, and dissident oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Kara-Murza almost to die of kidney failure in the first case.  It is suspected that he was poisoned but the cause has not been clarified.
Kara-Murza was taken to hospital with a sudden, similar illness in 2017 and placed in a medical coma.  His wife said doctors had confirmed she had been poisoned.
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PARIS —- Societe Generale has announced it is ending its Russian operations – making it the first major Western bank to announce that it is leaving Russia.
SocGen also sells its entire stake in Rosbank to a company affiliated with a Russian oligarch, costing the French bank about 3 billion euros ($ 3.3 billion).
Rosbank is a heavyweight in the Russian banking sector and Societe Generale was the majority shareholder.
“After several weeks of intensive work,” the bank said in a statement, it had signed an agreement with Russian investment fund Interros Capital to sell its entire stake in Rosbank and its insurance subsidiaries in Russia.
Interros is one of the largest funds in the country, holding assets in heavy industry and metallurgy.
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MILAN – Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi secured an agreement Monday on more gas imports via a Mediterranean pipeline from Algeria, in the latest push by a European Union state to reduce its dependence on Russian energy after its invasion of Ukraine.
Draghi told reporters in the Algerian capital after meeting with President Abdelmadjid Tebboune that an agreement to intensify bilateral energy co-operation along with an agreement to export more gas to Italy “are an important response to the strategic goal” of rapid replacement. Russian energy.
Russia is Italy’s largest gas supplier, accounting for 40% of total imports, followed by Algeria, which supplies about 21 billion cubic meters of gas via the Mediterranean pipeline.
The new agreement between the Italian energy company ENI and the Algerian Sonatrach will add up to 9 billion cubic meters of gas from Algeria, simply overshadowing Russia’s current 29 billion cubic meters per year.  Increased flows will begin in the fall, ENI said in a statement.
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LVIV, Ukraine – The mayor of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol tells the Associated Press that more than 10,000 civilians have been killed in the southeastern city by the Russian invasion in February.
Mayor Vadym Boychenko told the Associated Press by telephone on Monday that the bodies had been “carpeted on the streets of our city” and that the death toll could exceed 20,000.
Boichenko also said Russian forces had brought mobile crematoria to the city to dispose of the bodies, and accused Russian forces of refusing to allow humanitarian convoys to enter the city in a bid to cover up the massacre.
The mayor had previously stated 5,000 dead.  He explained that this data was on March 21, but “thousands more people were lying on the streets, it was simply impossible for us to collect them.”
About 120,000 civilians remain in Mariupol in dire need of food, water, warmth and communications, the mayor said.
Boichenko said about 150,000 people had been able to leave the city in private vehicles to other parts of Ukraine and that at least 33,000 had been transported to Russia or to separatist territories in Ukraine.
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WASHINGTON – The Pentagon’s latest assessment is that Russia is preparing, but has not yet launched, an intensive attack on Donbas.
A senior U.S. defense official said the Russians were moving more troops and supplies to the area and concentrating many of their missile strikes there.  The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss US internal military assessments.
The official said a large convoy of vehicles heading south to the eastern city of Izyum contained artillery as well as air and infantry support, as well as battlefield command and control elements and other materials.
The official said the convoy appears to have originated in the Belgorod and Valuyki regions of Russia, which are becoming key sites for Russian accumulation in the Donbas.
The official said that the Russians are also strengthening their presence in Donbas by developing more artillery southwest of the city of Donetsk in recent days.
– By Robert Burns
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Austrian Chancellor Carl Nehammer said his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow was “very immediate, open and tough”.
In a statement issued after his meeting, Nehamer said Monday that his main message to Putin was “that this war must end, because in a war both sides can only lose.”
Nehamer was the first European leader to meet Putin in Moscow since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February.
The Austrian leader stressed that Monday’s trip was not “a friendly visit”, but rather his “duty” to exhaust any possibility of ending the violence in Ukraine.
Nehammer’s visit to Moscow follows a trip to Kyiv on Saturday, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In a conversation with Putin, Nehammer said he had raised the issue of “serious war crimes” committed by the Russian military in the Ukrainian city of Bucha and others.  “Everyone responsible will be held accountable,” he added.
Austria is a member of the European Union and has backed sanctions by the 27-nation bloc against Russia, although it has so far opposed a halt to Russian gas supplies.  The country is militarily neutral and is not a member of NATO.
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UNITED NATIONS – The United Nations Children’s Fund says nearly two-thirds of all Ukrainian children have fled their homes in the six weeks since the invasion of Russia, and the United Nations has confirmed that 142 children have been killed and 229 injured. although these numbers are probably much higher.
Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF director of emergency programs who returned from Ukraine last week, told the UN Security Council on Monday that of the estimated 3.2 million children left in their homes, “almost half could be at risk. not to have enough food “and attacks.  on water supply infrastructure and power outages have left about 1.4 million people in the country without access to water.
He said the situation was worse in cities such as Mariupol and Hersonissos in the south, which have been besieged by Russian forces, where children and their families have spent weeks without running water, sanitation or regular food supplies.
“Hundreds of schools and educational facilities have been attacked or used for military purposes,” Fontaine said.  “Others serve as civilian shelters.”
He said the closure of schools affected the education of 5.7 million school-age children and 1.5 million students in higher education.
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SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina – Relatives of Srebrenica genocide victims worry that history is repeating itself in the war in Ukraine.
Hundreds of women who lost their sons, husbands and other relatives in the 1995 massacre of about 8,000 people in the eastern Bosnian city on Monday called for all those who committed war crimes to be brought to justice.
An association of relatives of the Srebrenica victims, the Srebrenica Mothers, has been working to keep alive the memory of the Bosnian Serb execution of mostly Muslim men and boys – mostly Muslims – in the last months of the 1992-95 war in the Netherlands.
Sehida Abdurrahmanovic says that “we spent all these years working to prevent this Srebrenica (murder) from happening to anyone else.”  But, he adds, “we are really sad to say that, but in today’s Europe it is happening again – Srebrenica is happening again.”
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LONDON – The World Bank says Ukraine’s economy will shrink by 45 percent this year as a result of Russia’s invasion, which has shut down half of the country’s businesses, stifled imports and exports, and damaged a huge body of vital infrastructure. .
Meanwhile, unprecedented sanctions imposed by Western allies in response to the war are plunging Russia into a deep recession, reducing more than a tenth of its economic growth, the Washington-based lender said in a report Sunday.
The report stated that economic activity is impossible in “large …