World

Ukraine’s Maryna Viazovska paid tribute to those suffering in her war-torn country on Tuesday when she became the second woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, known as the Nobel prize for mathematics.

Viazovska, a 37-year-old maths professor, received the prestigious award alongside three other winners at a ceremony in Helsinki.

“I am from Kyiv, Ukraine, and in February my life changed forever” when Moscow invaded, she said in a video displayed at the ceremony.

“Not only for me but for everyone in the world and especially the people in my country,” she said, adding that her two sisters had been evacuated from Kyiv.

“Right now Ukrainians are really paying the highest price for our beliefs and our freedom.”

The International Congress of Mathematicians, the event where the prize is awarded, was initially scheduled to be held in Russia’s second city, Saint Petersburg, and opened by President Vladimir Putin.

Earlier in the year hundreds of mathematicians signed an open letter protesting at the choice of the host city, and after Moscow invaded Ukraine the event was moved to the Finnish capital.

The other Fields winners were France’s Hugo Duminil-Copin of the University of Geneva, Britain’s James Maynard of Oxford University and June Huh of Princeton in the United States.

The medal, along with $15,000 Canadian dollars ($11,600), is awarded every four years to between two to four candidates under the age of 40 for “outstanding mathematical achievement”.

– ‘Sad and angry’ – 

Viazovska was born in 1984 in Ukraine and has been chair of number theory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne since 2018.

At the ceremony she paid tribute to Yulia Zdanovska, a young mathematician who was killed by a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in March.

“Her dream was to raise this new generation of scientist, doctors, teachers,” Viazovska told AFP.

“The fact that these dreams will not be realised, it’s terrible. We could just think of what kind of great future we could have had and what the war is robbing us of.”

She felt “very sad and angry” and “feels a lot of pain every time I read the news”, she added.

In a decision made before the war in Ukraine began, Viazovska was awarded the Fields Medal for her work in sphere packing — a problem posed by German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler nearly 400 years ago.

He proposed that the most compact way to pack spheres was in a pyramid, like oranges at a supermarket.

It was such a complex problem that it was not considered proved correct in the third dimension until 1998 via intense computer number-crunching.

Then in 2016, Viazovska solved the problem in the eighth dimension, using what is called an E8 lattice, and later also solved it in the 24th dimension.

Marcus du Sautoy, a British mathematics professor at Oxford University, told AFP it was a surprise when Viazovska came up with such “slick proof” compared to the “tortuous proof needed in three dimensions”.

The only previous female laureate in the prize’s 86-year history was Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died of breast cancer in 2017 just three years after winning the award.

Du Sautoy said he hoped Viazovska’s win “will contribute to inspiring more women to choose mathematics as a career”.

– ‘Express the inexpressible’ –

Duminil-Copin, 36, is a professor at both the University of Geneva and the French Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques.

He was honoured for solving “long-standing problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions”, which, according to the jury, has opened up several new research directions.

Maynard, 35, received the medal “for contributions to analytic number theory, which have led to major advances in the understanding in the structure of prime numbers”.

Du Sautoy said that even though prime numbers “get rarer and rarer as you count through the universe of numbers”, his Oxford colleague had been “able to show that infinitely often you’ll see two primes close together”.

June Huh, 39, was given the award for “transforming” the field of geometric combinatorics, “using methods of Hodge theory, tropical geometry and singularity theory”.

He is one of the rare Fields winner not to have focussed on mathematics in his teen years, after a bad elementary school test score convinced him he didn’t have a talent for it, he told Quanta Magazine.

“When I was young, math was like a faraway land, surrounded by giant walls that I could not climb,” Huh said in his video.

“I grew up in Korea and I dreamed of becoming a poet, to express the inexpressible. I eventually learned that mathematics is a way of doing that.”

Emergency services at the scene of a deadly avalanche in the Italian Dolomites recovered what body parts they could on Tuesday, with the dangers of venturing under the partially collapsed glacier slowing the search.

Rescue teams sent helicopters and drones up for a second day after Sunday’s disaster, which saw at least seven hikers killed when a section of the country’s largest Alpine glacier gave way, sending ice and rock hurtling down the mountain.

Italy has blamed the collapse on climate change and fears more of the glacier could come crashing down have prevented access to much of the area where hikers, some roped together, are believed to be buried.

Authorities had declared 14 people missing but revised that number down to five on Tuesday, after managing to trace some of those unaccounted for.

They had stressed from the start that the exact number of climbers at the scene when the avalanche hit was unknown.

“Operations on the ground will only be carried out to recover any remains discovered by the drones, to ensure rescuers’ safety,” the Trentino Alpine Rescue Service said Tuesday.

Experts were surveying the area to determine how best to enable teams with sniffer dogs to get out onto the site safely on Wednesday or Thursday, the Service’s national chief Maurizio Dellantonio told AGI news agency.

Relatives of people reported missing gathered at the town of Canazei, where recovered remains were placed in a make-shift morgue at a gymnasium.

“The important finds, not just bones, are first photographed, then recovered and put onto a helicopter” and flown to Canazei to be “catalogued and placed in cold storage”, Dellantonio said.

Such finds were “bones that have not been flayed, a piece of hand with a ring, tattoos, anything that can enable a person to be identified”, including shoes, backpacks and ice-picks.

– Still hope for survivors –

Helicopter pilot Fausto Zambelli told journalists some belongings had been spotted from the air, but it was not yet clear “if that means there are victims there, or if they belong to old hiking expeditions”.

He said hope of finding survivors under the ice was slim, but not entirely gone.

“If there are ‘pockets’ (of air), there’s still hope. Time is obviously short, but we still hope to find someone alive”.

The disaster struck one day after a record-high temperature of 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded at the summit of Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Italian Dolomites.

Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella said the collapse was “symbolic of the many tragedies that ungoverned climate change is causing in so many parts of the world”.

One of the bodies recovered belonged to a Czech who was travelling with a friend now registered as missing, the Czech foreign ministry told AFP.

The Trento public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation to determine the causes of the tragedy.

The glacier, nicknamed “queen of the Dolomites”, feeds the Avisio river and overlooks Lake Fedaia in the autonomous Italian province of Trento.

According to a March report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), melting ice and snow is one of 10 major threats caused by global warming, disrupting ecosystems and infrastructure.

Ukraine and its allies agreed Tuesday to a set of principles for rebuilding the war-torn country, including the need for broad reforms to boost transparency and root out corruption.

Wrapping up a two-day conference in the southern Swiss city of Lugano, leaders from some 40 countries signed the Lugano Declaration committing to support Ukraine through a likely long and expensive recovery.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned from Kyiv that the work ahead was “colossal”, and the duty of the “whole democratic world”.

His prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, who led a large delegation to Lugano, cautioned  that recovery from the massive destruction wrought since Russia’s full-scale invasion just four months ago would cost at least $750 billion.

He said the adoption of the declaration and of a set of seven founding principles for Ukraine’s reconstruction “gives great hope”.

“We shall be victorious, we will renew our country,” he told reporters. “We have to make everything that was destroyed better than it was.”

Swiss President Iganzio Cassis, who co-hosted the conference, hailed the declaration as a “key first step on the long road of Ukraine’s recovery”.

“Our work prepares for the time after the war even as the war is still raging,” he told the closing ceremony following a minute of silence for that war’s many victims. 

– ‘Make corruption impossible’ –

Among the principles agreed upon Tuesday was that Ukraine itself must be in the driving seat on how to rebuild, and also that the recovery process must go hand-in-hand with far-reaching reforms.

“The rule of law must be systematically strengthened and corruption eradicated,” the document said.

With billions of dollars in aid and assistance flowing into Ukraine, lingering concerns about widespread corruption have driven calls Kyiv to do more to ensure transparency and accountability.

The former Soviet state has long been ranked among the world’s most corrupt countries by Transparency International. In Europe, only Russia and Azerbaijan ranked worse.

Shmyhal insisted Tuesday that Ukraine had already taken great strides to fix the problem, including by broad digitalisation of public services and the awarding of contracts in sectors like construction, to reduce “human interaction” and the possibilities for corrupt transactions.

The goal, he said, is “not to fight corruption, but make corruption impossible.”

As for who will pay for the towering costs, Shmyhal suggested much of this amount could be covered using seized Russian assets. He pointed out that such assets frozen by Ukraine’s partners so far amounted to $300-500 billion.

“Unprovoked aggression should be paid by the aggressor,” he said. “Russia should pay for this.”

At his side, the Swiss president, whose country has long been a choice destination for Russian oligarchs to invest and stash away their fortunes, stressed the importance of respecting property rights and the rule of law.

Shmyhal on Monday laid out the government’s three-phase reconstruction plan, focused on the immediate needs of those affected by the war, followed by the financing of thousands of longer-term reconstruction projects, and ultimately on transforming Ukraine into a European, green and digital country.

To push the message, a number of ministers, as well as First Lady Olena Zelenska, also spoke Monday to lay out the massive reconstruction needs, as well as their vision for a new Ukraine. 

– ‘For the long-haul’ –

The Ukrainians have proposed that allied countries “adopt” specific regions of Ukraine, and lead the recovery there to render it more efficient.

Britain has proposed taking on the Kyiv region, while France would concentrate on the heavily-hit Chernihiv region. Australia and Denmark are also among countries that have voiced interest in leading specific reconstruction efforts.

“We understand that this is for the long-haul, and we are ready,” high-level French diplomat Francois Delattre told AFP.

Lugano was seen as a first step towards the rebuilding of Ukraine, and there are already several follow-up conferences planned, with one led by the EU in a few months.

London has agreed to host a Ukraine Recovery Conference next year, while Germany has said it can host the 2024 edition.

“I am confident that in a year we will no longer talk about a draft plan, but about results, successful projects and realised opportunity,” Shmyhal said.

Fighting raged on Tuesday in and around Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region as Russian troops tried to build on recent battlefield gains, while NATO pressed ahead with Finland and Sweden’s momentous membership bids.

With the war well into its fifth month, Kyiv’s allies committed on Tuesday to supporting Ukraine through what is likely to be a lengthy and expensive recovery, agreeing on the need for broad reforms to boost transparency and tackle corruption.

The two days of talks in the Swiss city of Lugano heard that rebuilding the war-ravaged country is estimated to cost at least $750 billion.

But on the battlefield the conflict continued to wreak devastation, with the Ukrainian president’s office reporting Russian shelling and missile strikes in several regions overnight.

Kremlin forces were pounding their next key target, the city of Sloviansk in Donetsk, with “massive” shelling, the city’s mayor said on Tuesday. 

At least two people were killed and seven others wounded in strikes that targeted the city’s central market, authorities said.

Donetsk is the southwestern half of the Donbas which, unlike the northeastern half — Lugansk –, has not been almost entirely captured by Russia.

Russian bombardments have killed at least six people and injured another 19 since Sunday in Sloviansk, which had a pre-war population of around 100,000. 

In Moscow, the defence ministry reported that Russian forces had targeted the city of Kharkiv with “high-precision” weapons over the past 24 hours, killing up to 150 Ukrainian servicemen.

Russia also said it was investigating the torture of Russian soldiers held prisoner in Ukraine that were recently released as part of a prisoner swap. 

– ‘Fighting continues’ –

In Brussels, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the foreign ministers of Sweden and Finland hailed Tuesday as “historic” when they kicked off accession procedures for the two countries that will expand the military alliance to 32 members.

“The membership of both Finland and Sweden will not only contribute to our own security but to the collective security of the alliance,” said Finland’s Pekka Haavisto, after protocols were signed launching the required ratification process.

Sweden and Finland both announced their intention to drop decades of military non-alignment and become part of NATO in the wake of Russia invading Ukraine in February.

After abandoning its initial war aim of capturing Kyiv following tough Ukrainian resistance, Russia has since focused its efforts on securing control of the Donbas.

Ukraine said its forces were still defending “a small part” of Lugansk province, despite Moscow saying its troops were now in full control there after capturing the strategic city of Lysychansk, near the border with Donetsk.

The fall of Lysychansk on Sunday, a week after the Ukrainian army also retreated from the neighbouring city of Severodonetsk, frees up Russian forces to advance on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in Donetsk.

“Fighting continues on the administrative borders of the region,” the Ukrainian president’s office said on Tuesday.

In a sign Moscow was trying to consolidate supply lines for its ongoing push, Ukraine’s armed forces said Russian troops in Lugansk were “taking measures” to restore transport infrastructure behind the fighting lines.

– ‘Provocations’ –

Russian forces heading west were also closing in on the small city of Siversk — which lies between Lysychansk and Sloviansk — after days of shelling there.

Two Ukrainian Red Cross minibuses were heading there to evacuate willing civilians, according to AFP reporters on the ground.

To the southwest, in the Moscow-occupied Kherson region, Russia’s troops were deploying helicopters and various artillery to try to stem Ukrainian counter-attacks.

“Ukrainian aviation and missile and artillery units continue to strike enemy depots and invaders’ concentrations, in particular in the Kherson region,” Ukraine’s armed forces said.

The intensifying battles in southern Ukraine come as Kremlin-installed authorities in Kherson announced that an official from Russia’s powerful FSB security services had taken over control of the regional government there. 

Kherson city, which lies close to Moscow-annexed Crimea, was the first major city to fall to Russian forces in February. 

Moscow has since launched a campaign of so-called Russification, trying to introduce the ruble, giving out Russian passports and opening a first Russian bank at the end of June.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been reiterating calls for more weapons from the West so Kyiv can keep up the resistance and its counter-offensives to regain lost territories.

Appearing by video on Tuesday at an annual forum hosted by The Economist magazine, he predicted Belarus — an ally of Moscow — would not be drawn into the war but “provocations” by its northern neighbour was likely to continue.

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said on Saturday his army had intercepted missiles fired at his country by Ukrainian forces last week.

Meanwhile, as the meeting of Ukraine’s allies in Switzerland ended, leaders from some 40 countries signed the Lugano Declaration pinpointing principles for rebuilding Ukraine.

“Our work prepares for the time after the war even as the war is still raging,” said Swiss President and co-host Ignazio Cassis.

Australian tennis ace Nick Kyrgios will face court after being charged with assault, his barrister told the Canberra Times newspaper Tuesday.

The news broke as the 27-year-old, one of the most polarising yet exciting figures in tennis, prepared to enter the quarter-finals at Wimbledon on Wednesday.

Police in the Australian Capital Territory, where Canberra is located, released only a brief statement on Tuesday evening without identifying the player.

“ACT Policing can confirm a 27-year-old Watson man is scheduled to face the ACT Magistrates court on the 2nd of August in relation to one charge of common assault following an incident in December 2021,” the statement said.

Barrister Jason Moffett told the Canberra Times that his client was aware of the charge.

“It’s in the context of a domestic relationship,” he was quoted as saying.

“The nature of the allegation is serious, and Mr Kyrgios takes the allegation very seriously.”

The barrister said Kyrgios would not comment because it was a court matter, but would release a statement “in the fullness of time”.

The world number 40 will face Chile’s Cristian Garin in Wimbledon for a place in the semi-finals.

It will be Kyrgios’s first quarter-final at the Slams since the 2015 Australian Open.