World

Paris-based graffiti legend C215 puts the final touches on a blue and yellow portrait of a young girl on a Kyiv bus shelter, a colourful contrast with the badly damaged buildings nearby.

“It’s a sign of support,” the energetic 48-year-old tells AFP, spray can in hand. “If this can bring a little smile or a bit of humanity in a difficult situation, then I’m satisfied.”

One of France’s leading street artists, the man — whose real name is Christian Guemy — travelled to Ukraine to tag the country’s walls with images of peace and innocence in a time of brutal war.

After the Russian invasion, the one-time Banksy collaborator did a huge mural of the same girl in the colours of the Ukrainian flag covering the side of a Paris apartment block.

But despite the dangers C215 felt he “had no choice” but to come to Ukraine itself, after meeting Ukrainians and wondering for several days what more he could do to help.

“I didn’t really decide to come to Kyiv, it was more that my paintings decided for me,” he told AFP last week, as Kyiv residents stopped and took pictures of him at work.

This painting of a young girl with a headband of flowers is located next to a metro station and food market that were badly damaged by a Russian strike — which he says shows Russia is deliberately targeting civilians.

“It’s very intense to see the contrast with the bombed building behind,” he said.

“If you want to do street art that speaks about war, the work must be in the place where the war is, and it must show the destruction and the situation in that country.”

– ‘A child is an innocent’ –

C215’s own journey began with a traumatic upbringing, born in a tough Paris suburb to a teenage mother who killed herself, and then a painful break-up that caused him to sink into depression.

After the split, he gave up his job to start doing graffiti, stencilling his daughter’s portrait to “channel my depression” and developing his technique of cutting out faces in card then spray-painting them.

That technique can now be seen in several places around Kyiv. 

C215 gives AFP a tour of his works, including one on a rusty signboard near the city’s TV tower that was targeted in a deadly Russian missile strike on March 2 which killed five people.

Another picture of a girl is stencilled on an abandoned tram near a checkpoint, painted in the same faded red and cream colours as the carriage.

He has also tagged walls in the western city of Lviv, where a huge missile struck an oil depot during his time there, and in the central town of Zhytomyr.

The imagery of childhood that haunts his work — he has said his work was “too French, too tragic” to continue his Banksy collaboration — is clear in all his Ukrainian works.

“A child is an innocent, a child doesn’t have to cope with war, and in this war there are millions of mothers and children that are spread all over Europe,” he said.

Walking off into the rain in his cagoule, C215 says he is returning to France soon but will definitely be coming back to Kyiv.

The reaction from Ukrainians themselves has been “super — that is what makes me happy”.

Peruvian President Pedro Castillo on Tuesday announced the end of a curfew in the capital Lima aimed at containing protests against rising fuel prices following crisis talks with Congress.

“We will with immediate effect remove this immobility (curfew). We call on the Peruvian people to be calm,” said the leftist leader, alongside Congress president Maria del Carmen Alva.

Police and soldiers patrolled the largely empty streets of the capital earlier Tuesday after Castillo announced the curfew shortly before midnight on Monday for Lima and the neighboring port city of Callao.

It was due to last until midnight on Tuesday as authorities attempted to curtail protests against rising fuel and toll prices amid growing economic hardship.

But news of the curfew’s end was met with cheers by hundreds of protesters outside Congress and in other parts of the capital, AFP journalists noted.

“The people did it!” said opposition legislator Alva on Twitter.

Shops and schools were closed and bus services mostly suspended but many workers, at hotels or hospitals for example, ignored the shut-down, which was widely criticized on social media. 

The measure took many in Lima by surprise, given that the most violent protests in recent days took place far from the capital.

Many had no choice but to take a taxi or walk to their place of work.

“It was a very late and improvised” announcement, complained Cinthya Rojas, a nutritionist who waited patiently for one of the handful of buses still running to get to work at a hospital east of Lima.

A hotel employee told AFP she had to pay the equivalent of $8, a small fortune on her salary, for a taxi to work.

Some tourists had difficulty finding food, with restaurants and supermarkets closed, but domestic and international flights continued as normal from Jorge Chavez airport, its concessioner said.

Residents of some Lima neighborhoods beat pots and pans at their windows in protest against the lockdown at noon.

– Soaring food prices –

“The measures taken, like those taken yesterday, are not against the people but in order to save the lives of compatriots,” said Castillo, balked by the first social protests of his eight-month-old presidency.

He had said the curfew move was “to reestablish peace” after countrywide protests amidst biting food inflation.

“There was information from a source that there were going to be acts of vandalism today. That is why we have taken this step,” Defense Minister Jose Gavidia said earlier on Tuesday. 

While Lima was under curfew, protests continued and roads were blocked in several smaller cities elsewhere in Peru.

Like much of the rest of the world, Peru’s economy is reeling from the damages wrought by the coronavirus pandemic.

The country’s Consumer Price Index in March saw its highest monthly increase in 26 years, driven by soaring food, transport and education prices, according to the national statistics institute. 

In an attempt to appease protesters, the government over the weekend eliminated the fuel tax and decreed a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage from May 1. 

But the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP) — the country’s main trade union federation — considered the measures insufficient and took to the streets again Monday in Lima and several regions in Peru’s north.

Some protesters set fire to toll booths on highways, looted shops and clashed with police.

Others burned tires and blocked the north-south Pan-American highway, the country’s most important artery for people and goods.

The disruptions halted public transport and closed schools on Monday.

“Social protest is a constitutional right, but it must be done within the law,” Castillo, a 52-year-old former rural school teacher, pleaded during his brief TV appearance late on Monday. 

– ‘Authoritarian measure’ –

Two-thirds of Peruvians disapprove of Castillo’s rule, according to an Ipsos opinion poll in March.

Castillo’s announcement of a curfew came a week after he escaped impeachment by Congress, where opponents accuse his administration of a “lack of direction” and of allowing corruption in his entourage.

It also coincided with the 30th anniversary of a coup staged by ex-president Alberto Fujimori, jailed over his regime’s bloody campaign against insurgents. 

“The measure dictated by President Pedro Castillo is openly unconstitutional, disproportionate and violates people’s right to individual freedom,” tweeted lawyer Carlos Rivera, a representative of Fujimori’s victims.

Political analyst Luis Benavente told AFP the curfew was “an authoritarian measure” that revealed “ineptitude, incapacity to govern.”

A large proportion of Lima’s 10 million residents work in the informal sector, as street sellers and other traders, meaning the curfew left them without income for the day.

A Copa Libertadores football match between Peruvian Club Sporting Cristal and Brazil’s Flamengo, which had been thrown into doubt, would go ahead as scheduled on Tuesday night in Lima, regional governing body CONMEBOL said on Instagram.

In the dank basement of a children’s hospital in Chernigiv there are cave paintings on the wall — tiny handprints, a smeared rainbow, a fluttering Ukrainian flag.

After Russian bombs began to fall on February 24 the underage patients came here to wait out the fury being visited on the city above.

They daubed the walls to pass the hours and days. Some wrote their names inside the silhouette of a cluster of balloons: Myroslava, Vasylyna, Glasha, Ulya.

“I did not count them, but there were quite a lot,” said 30 year-old Natalia, a member of Ukraine’s territorial defence forces, barely visible in the stifling gloom.

Before Russia launched the war she was an interior designer. But this is a dwelling no reasonable person would choose, least of all for children.

The entrance to the stairwell has been smashed through a wall. There is head-splitting pipework hidden in the dim. The odour of damp hangs thick in the air.

“We are very grateful that the children were taken out before we had no electricity, no water and no heat,” she said.

“Not all, but most of the children were taken out before all these benefits of civilisation disappeared.”

“They got a chance to survive.”

– A city encircled – 

Chernigiv — just 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the border with Belarus — was swiftly encircled in the early days of the invasion ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Moscow’s forces did not take the city but it was pounded with artillery and air strikes for more than a month before troops withdrew in recent days, regrouping for an offensive in eastern Ukraine.

Signs of the siege they waged to take this foothold towards the capital Kyiv are everywhere.

Apartment blocks have been gored by blasts. A hotel has a semicircle missing from its top half, as though the sky has taken a bite from above. The football stadium has been pummelled into its pitch.

The children’s hospital has also been marked by the deluge. On the upper floor there is a puckered, charred wound from an incoming strike. The windows are flecked with holes.

Now it is being used to store aid supplies. The children — cancer patients among them — are no longer here. They have been transported south.

But there are clues of the traumas they endured. On a ledge outside, a plastic bag of Lego is paired with another collection of trinkets — shrapnel garnered from the hospital grounds.

“Cluster bombs were flying, we have traces of these bombs,” said 51-year-old Olena Makoviy. “The injured were brought to the children’s hospital, both adults and children.”

“It was very scary here from the first days of the war,” she said. “They brought guys, handsome, young, but no longer alive.”

– Neighbours bury neighbours – 

City officials estimate around 350 civilians have been killed in Chernigiv.

Municipal council secretary Oleksandr Lomako said the city witnessed “war crimes” under “artillery, heavy weapons and bombs”.

Civilians died waiting in line for water and bread, and in early March an air strike on a 12-storey residential building claimed 45 to 50 lives, he said.

All of these bodies have been buried in a mass grave by fellow citizens, in a cleared patch of forest land. 

Galyna Troyanovska, 66, has come to look for the son of a friend buried among the forest of grave markers staked in the mud.

Like the children of Chernigiv, she has been living underground.

“We did not go out of the basements,” she said. “There was no water, no light, no gas, the walls were trembling.”

“We try not to cry, we have already cried before,” she adds. “We hold back, we need to live on.”

Ukraine’s president showed a harrowing video of dead civilians to the UN Security Council Tuesday and called for “accountability” for apparent Russian atrocities, as fears grow that Moscow is preparing new offensives.

With global revulsion solidifying over civilian killings in the town of Bucha, President Volodymyr Zelensky likened Russia’s assault to Nazi war crimes and Western nations ramped up sanctions against the Kremlin.

The United States is expected Wednesday to ban all new investment in Russia, while Britain announced it has frozen some $350 billion in assets from President Vladimir Putin’s “war chest” so far.

Despite the pressure, bombardments rocked the Kyiv area villages of Velyka Dymerka and Bogdanivka, where 12 people were killed by Russian firearms and artillery, Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said on Telegram.

And new warnings emerged from Ukraine that other shattered communities, notably the town of Borodianka, may have suffered even worse fates than Bucha.

Zelensky, in an impassioned speech by videolink from Kyiv to the 15-member Security Council, demanded stronger action as he delivered a chilling account of Putin’s six-week-old war.

People “were killed in their apartments, houses… civilians were crushed by tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road,” Zelensky said.

“They cut off limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed in front of their children.”

“Accountability must be inevitable,” he added, calling for Russia’s exclusion from the Security Council — on which it holds veto power.

“Are you ready to close the UN” and abandon international law, the president asked. “If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately.”

Zelensky’s plea follows the harrowing discovery of civilian victims in Bucha and other towns near Kyiv following Russian troop withdrawals, which he and other officials have denounced as war crimes and attempted genocide.

– ‘Deliberate campaign to kill’ –

In a subsequent address to Spanish lawmakers, Zelensky compared Russia’s devastating assault to the Nazis’ 1937 bombing of the town of Guernica.

During a grim cleanup Tuesday in Bucha, local workers placed the remains of partially burned bodies into black bags and lifted them into a van.

After touring the devastation, Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky told journalists that “dozens of bodies” remain in Bucha apartments and in nearby woods.

“What we’ve seen in Bucha is not the random act of a rogue unit. It’s a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

Looking ahead, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance expects a Russian push in “coming weeks” to try to seize Ukraine’s entire eastern region of Donbas, and create a land bridge to occupied Crimea. 

Both Washington and the EU have vowed to squeeze Russia’s economy until Putin is forced to halt the war he launched.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who said she would travel to Kyiv this week, has offered the bloc’s assistance in documenting proof of war crimes.

The Kremlin has denied any civilian killings, claiming the images emerging from Bucha and other sites are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.

But one Bucha resident named Olena told AFP she saw Russian soldiers shoot a man in cold blood after “brutal” troop units moved in.

“Right in front of my eyes, they fired on a man who was going to get food at the supermarket,” said the 43-year-old, who did not wish to give her family name.

Despite Olena’s and other firsthand accounts, Moscow’s UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia rejected Zelensky’s claims of Russian atrocities, telling the Security Council that the “ungrounded accusations… are not confirmed by any eye witnesses.”

Zelensky delivered a forceful rebuttal, airing a graphic, 90-second video of what he said were images from towns including Bucha, Irpin, Dymerka, and the besieged southern port of Mariupol.

The footage showed partially uncovered dead people, including children, in shallow graves, bodies in a courtyard, burned corpses in the streets, and slumped victims with hands tied behind their back.

In the push to isolate Moscow, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Slovenia expelled dozens of its diplomats suspected of being intelligence operatives, after France and Germany did the same Monday, for a total of some 180 expulsions in 48 hours.

The Kremlin called it a “short-sighted move” that would complicate efforts to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

Putin warned of “reprisals” for recent European measures targeting Russian gas giant Gazprom — and said Moscow would “monitor” its food exports to “hostile” nations, raising the spectre of further inflation surges worldwide.

– Worse than Bucha? –

Europe’s worst conflict in decades has killed as many as 20,000 people, according to Ukrainian estimates, and 4.25 million have fled the country.

Many in Ukraine are bracing for further Russian bombardments.

Ukrainian officials say over 400 civilian bodies have been recovered from the wider Kyiv region, many buried in mass graves.

But Zelensky said he had information of worse atrocities in places such as Borodianka.

“Bucha is not the worst,” Ukrainian presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych said on a Russian lawyer’s YouTube channel. “Everyone who managed to visit Borodianka says that it is much, much worse.”

AFP reporters who briefly visited the Borodianka area saw no bodies in the streets, but locals reported many deaths, and buildings were ravaged and blown open.

“I know five civilians were killed,” said 58-year-old Rafik Azimov. “But we don’t know how many more are left in the basements of the ruined buildings after the bombardments.”

“I buried six people,” another resident, Volodymyr Nahornyi, said. “More people are under the ruins.”

– A chance of talks –

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meanwhile said Tuesday on Russian television that Russia was “ready” to continue the negotiations.

Ukraine has proposed an international agreement with other countries guaranteeing its security in return for accepting a neutral and non-nuclear status, not joining NATO and refusing to host foreign military bases.

According to the Ukrainian proposal, Russia would not oppose Kyiv’s admission to the European Union.

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