World

The bombing in eastern Ukraine is becoming more intense and, with no water or electricity, 100 people or so heeded the mayor’s call on Thursday to evacuate the city of Sloviansk which sits in Russia’s crosshairs.

“The situation is getting worse, the explosions are stronger and stronger and the bombs are falling more often,” 18-year-old student Goulnara Evgaripova told AFP.

Outside an administrative office, she boarded one of five minibuses earmarked to take people out of the city in the Donetsk region that Moscow wants to control.

One Russian strike killed three people, wounded six and left a trail of damage on Tuesday in Sloviansk, witnesses told AFP.

Mayor Vadim Liakh, spoke of a fresh bombardment on Thursday that damaged electricity lines on the edge of the city which boasted a population of 100,000 before the late February invasion.

“There is no electricity, the water supply is down,” Liakh posted on the Telgram messenger service.

“The best solution in this situation, is to evacuate.

“Take care of yourselves. Pack your bags,” he urged.

Dmytro, a 35-year-old labourer, admitted he was ready to leave with this family.

“There’s no water, my grandmother is handicapped and it’s hard for my mother to wash her.

“If we had running water, we would stay longer.”

Unlike many others Dmytro has somewhere safe to go.

But all he wants is for the war to be over. “It’s always better to be at home,” he explained.

Many analysts predict the war will go on for months more with fighting continuing in the Donbas where the Russians have made  headway in recent weeks and now control most of the strategic city of Severodonetsk, 80 kilometres (50 miles) east of Sloviansk.

At the end of May the key town of Lyman on the road to Sloviansk, 25 kilometres (15 miles) to the northeast, fell to the invaders.

– “We don’t deserve it” –

Aid worker Kateryna Perednenko, 24, returned to Sloviansk five days ago but is already preparing to leave again.

“It’s very difficult here. There’s bombing everywhere and it’s frightening. It’s just very scary. No water, no electricity, no gas either,” she said.

“I still can’t believe what is happening to us. It really hurts. I fear for my town and I fear from my country.

“And I fear that soon there will nothing left worth coming back for,” she said.

Leonid, aged 79, volunteers that he is going to Dnipro.

“From there I’ll take a train to Kyiv … then I’ll go to Europe as a refugee.  

“It’s painful. We don’t deserve it. We don’t understand why we are being punished.

“We are good, peaceful people, and all of a sudden Russia decides we are fascists.”

Leonid added his conviction that “the Russians will not take our town”, despite the growing bombardment.

In 2014, when Russia grabbed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, Moscow-backed separatists also seized Sloviansk, before Ukrainian forces regained control.

Western nations need to brace for a long “war of attrition” in Ukraine, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg warned Thursday following White House talks with US President Joe Biden.

“We just have to be prepared for the long haul,” the secretary general told reporters. “Because what we see is that this war has now become a war of attrition.”

Stoltenberg said Ukrainians are “paying a high price for defending their own country on the battlefield, but also we see that Russia is taking high casualties.”

While reiterating that NATO does not want to enter direct confrontation with Russia, Stoltenberg said the Western military alliance has a “responsibility” to support Ukraine.

“Most wars — also, most likely this war — will at some stage end at the negotiating table, but what we know is that what happens around the negotiating table is very closely linked to the situation on the ground, on the battlefield,” he said.

Asked if Ukraine was being pressured by the West to accept losses of territory in order to negotiate peace, Stoltenberg said “it’s not for us to decide or to have strong opinions what Ukraine should accept or not accept.”

The NATO chief would not comment on whether the alliance was discussing naval escorts to get grain exports blocked in Ukraine out through a Russian blockade of the Ukrainian coast, but said he welcomed efforts to find solutions.

“The easiest way to get more grain out and to reduce the pressure on food prices is for President Putin to end the war,” he said. “As long as that’s not the case, I welcome the effort by different countries, including NATO allies, also in close coordination with the UN, to look for ways to get more grain out.”

This includes efforts to expand land export routes under Ukraine’s control “but also the possibility of getting some grain out by ship.”

“I welcome those efforts,” he said.

Poland will only receive the money from its 35.4-billion euro ($38 billion) post-Covid economic recovery package if it carries out rule of law reforms, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday.

She said the EU’s approval of the plan announced on Wednesday was “important” but only “a first step, as the money will be disbursed when the reforms and investments are in place”.

“We are not at the end of the road on the rule of law in Poland,” she said, speaking alongside Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and President Andrzej Duda on a visit to Warsaw.

“Few believed that a compromise could be reached between us and the EU on the recovery plan but we have succeeded,” Morawiecki said.

The EU and Poland have been at loggerheads for years over changes pushed through by Poland’s right-wing populist government that critics say could undermine judicial independence.

The impasse has festered even as the EU strives to maintain unity to address the war in Ukraine.

Poland, which borders Ukraine, is on the frontline of the EU solidarity effort.

It is the main entry point into the bloc for the nearly seven million Ukrainians who have fled their war-torn country. 

And it serves as the logistics hub for weapons sent from EU countries and the United States into Ukraine.

One of the main points of contention over rule of law has been a “disciplinary chamber” for judges that has been rejected by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

“We are not at the end of the road on the rule of law in Poland,” von der Leyen said.

One condition for Poland to get its Covid recovery cash calls for judges’ disciplinary cases to be heard by a court compliant with EU law that is not the disciplinary chamber. 

Another is that judges already affected by disciplinary chamber rulings must have the right to have the decision reviewed by an EU-compliant court “without delay”. 

Also, judges cannot be hit with disciplinary procedures for asking the EU Court of Justice to rule on certain issues.

A new law making its way through the Polish parliament would dismantle some aspects of the disciplinary mechanism, although the opposition says that it does not go far enough.

“A first payment will only be possible when the new law is in force and ticks all the boxes under our contract,” von der Leyen said.

Hurricane Agatha, the first of the Pacific season, left nine people dead and six missing after slamming into southern Mexico, fewer than previously thought, authorities said Thursday.

Agatha barreled ashore on Monday near Puerto Angel in Oaxaca state as a Category Two hurricane, the second lowest on a scale of five, causing flooding, landslides and damage to homes.

The storm was the strongest to make landfall along Mexico’s Pacific coast in May since record keeping began in 1949, according to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC).

“We have nine officially confirmed deaths and six people still missing,” Oaxaca governor Alejandro Murat told reporters.

The previous day he had reported 11 dead and 22 missing based on preliminary information.

The toll was revised after communication and access was restored to remote mountain communities.

“The inhabitants of Oaxaca affected by this hurricane are not alone,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said.

“We’re going to support them, so that the roads are restored, so that the services are improved,” he told reporters.

Mexico is regularly lashed by tropical storms on both its Pacific and Atlantic coasts, generally between the months of May and November.

On Thursday the remnants of Agatha were located over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, home to major Caribbean beach resorts.

The country’s meteorological service said there was an 80 percent chance of a new storm forming within the next five days.

The gunman who shot dead four people at a hospital in the US state of Oklahoma killed the surgeon whom he blamed for pain after back surgery, police said Thursday.

The suspect, identified as Michael Louis, stormed into the Saint Francis hospital in the city of Tulsa on Wednesday with a rifle and a handgun, in the latest mass shooting in the United States in recent weeks.

Louis had recently been operated on by surgeon Preston Phillips at the hospital and had called the clinic to complain of continuing back pain, Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin said during a press conference.

Police found “a letter on the suspect, which made it clear that he came in with the intent to kill Dr. Phillips and anyone who got in his way,” Franklin said.

“He blamed Dr. Phillips for the ongoing pain following the surgery.”

As well as Phillips, the other victims included another physician, a receptionist and a patient.

“They stood in the way and Lewis gunned them down,” Franklin said, adding Louis then shot himself.

The suspect purchased an semi-automatic gun at a local gun shop shortly before the shooting, police said.

The killings come as families in Texas bury their dead after a school shooting left 19 young children and two teachers dead last week.

The tragedies have prompted calls for tighter gun control legislation but US lawmakers have failed to pass significant new laws despite years of worsening gun violence.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 233 mass shootings this year in the United States. It defines mass shootings as when four or more people are injured or killed in a single event, not including the shooter.