Russia is demanding that Ukraine arrest its own security chief and extradite him to Moscow.
The Russian Foreign Ministry accused Vasyl Malyuk of being involved in terrorist acts.
Malyuk said in July 2023 that his agency had destroyed a bridge in Crimea in October 2022.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded on Sunday evening that Ukraine arrest the head of its own security services and extradite him to Russia.
The ministry issued a statement blaming Vasyl Malyuk, the chief of the Security Service of Ukraine, for an explosion at a bridge in Crimea that Russia said killed five people in October 2022.
The statement called the explosion one of several “barbaric bomb attacks,” mentioning them alongside the devastating Moscow concert hall attack in March 2022 that killed at least 140 people.
Russia has accused Kyiv of facilitating the concert hall attack, with leader Vladimir Putin saying that Ukraine’s authorities allowed the gunmen to pass through its borders. No evidence was presented to support this accusation, and the terrorist group ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for the killings.
As for the bridge explosion in Crimea, Malyuk said publicly in July 2023 that his agency was behind the attack.
“It is one of our actions, namely the destruction of the Crimean bridge on October 8 last year,” he told Ukrainian TV, per The Associated Press.
Before this admission, Ukraine was already widely regarded as responsible for the bridge’s destruction.
Russia’s foreign ministry described the bridge attack as a terrorist act, and said it told Kyiv to “immediately arrest and extradite every person implicated.”
Moscow and Kyiv have been engaged in open war since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Ukraine’s security service told local media that Russia’s claims of Kyiv-sanctioned terrorism were “especially cynical on the anniversary of the liberation of the town of Bucha and the atrocities committed by the Russians there.”
“So any words by the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry are worthless,” it said in a statement, per Ukrainska Pravda.
The security service added that Putin himself is subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, over accusations of his forces carrying out war crimes against children in Ukraine.
The press team for the Security Service of Ukraine did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
House to send Mayorkas articles of impeachment to Senate – CBS News
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Speaker Mike Johnson says the House will send the Senate two articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his handling of the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane reports.
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WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., notified Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Thursday that the House will send impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the upper chamber on April 10.
Johnson and 11 GOP-appointed impeachment managers said in a letter to Schumer that they will present the “duly passed articles of impeachment” the House passed against Mayorkas on that day, when the Senate will be back in session.
“We urge you to schedule a trial of the matter expeditiously,” the letter to Schumer said.
The GOP-controlled House voted to impeach Mayorkas on Feb. 13 for “high crimes and misdemeanors, including his willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law and his breach of the public trust,” the letter said.
“The evidence on both charges is clear, comprehensive, and compelling,” they added. Mayorkas is the second Cabinet member to be impeached in U.S. history after William Belknap, who was the secretary of war under then-President Ulysses S. Grant.
They argued that Mayorkas violated U.S. immigration laws and is “responsible for releasing millions of illegal aliens into the interior and creating unlawful mass-parole programs.” The lawmakers also accused the DHS secretary of lying to Congress and the public “about the scope of the crisis and his role in it.”
Referring to the migrant situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, Johnson and the impeachment managers said Americans “demand a secure border, an end to this crisis, and accountability for those responsible.”
NBC News has reached out to Schumer’s office for comment.
This is a developing story.
Rebecca Shabad
Rebecca Shabad is a politics reporter for NBC News based in Washington.
JERUSALEM — Reem Abu Obeida and Manal Abu Shaban are both 48-year-old grandmothers from the Gaza Strip, both suffer from breast cancer and both are awaiting an Israeli Supreme Court decision that they say could be a death sentence.
“They would be sending us to the area of hell,” Abu Obeida told NBC News on Thursday. “Our fate will be death.”
The women are among a group of Palestinians from Gaza who have been getting treatment in the cities of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but now potentially face deportation back to Gaza, where the health care system has all but collapsed and basic medicines are scarce almost six months after Israel launched its military campaign in the enclave.
Their fate — along with that of the rest of the group of around 20 women and children, patients and their companions — is now in the hands of Israel’s Supreme Court, which issued a temporary injunction Thursday to prevent them being sent back to Gaza. It will make a final decision next month.
Israel’s government, which is arguing that the patients have completed their treatment and have no further need to stay, has asked the court for 30 days to consider its options.
Cancer patients Manal Abu Shaban and Reem Abu Obedia started their treatment in Israel before the war.Shira Pinson / NBC News
Abu Obeida and Abu Shaban, along with the other patients, say they need ongoing monitoring and follow-up care that is impossible to get in war-torn Gaza.
Among the patients are several children, according to a court filing from Physicians for Human Rights Israel, an Israeli nongovernmental organization, fighting to stop the deportation.
“These are kids and grandparents. Sending them to the inferno, to a place where there is no safety is basically pure evil. Just a heartless action,” said Guy Shalev, the NGO’s executive director.
He said that a 9-year-old girl who was brought out of Gaza to donate bone marrow to her sick brother was facing deportation along with her grandmother. Her brother and their mother had permission to stay because he was still receiving treatment, he added.
The girl’s father was killed in the fighting, meaning she would have to return to Gaza without either parent, Shalev said, adding that the Israeli health care professionals treating her, even those reluctant to speak out against the war, had been “very strict in kind of saying we’re not going to let these people leave the hospital.”
“The taxi was already on the way to pick them up,” he added.
The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli authority involved in the case, did not respond to a request for comment from NBC News.
But in a statement to Israeli media, a COGAT spokesman said: “Gaza residents and their companions who have received medical treatment in Israeli hospitals, and are no longer required to continue medical treatment, are being returned to the Gaza Strip. In cases where further medical treatment is required, COGAT coordinates with the hospitals the continuation of their stay in order to ensure their health.”
They added that the transition of people back to Gaza would be done in coordination with international aid organizations, including the Red Cross, and Israeli military forces on the ground.
In a guest house for outpatients being treated at Augusta Victoria, an imposing hospital on the Mount of Olives in east Jerusalem that primarily provides care for Palestinians from the occupied West Bank, Abu Obeida and Abu Shaban said they left Gaza in September and they had not seen their families since war broke out following the Hamas Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that left over 1,200 dead.
The room in the guest house where Manal Abu Shaban and Reem Abu Obedia are staying after their cancer treatment.Shira Pinson / NBC News
Since then they’ve watched from an agonizing distance as Israel’s military offensive has leveled much of Gaza and killed almost 33,000 people, according to health officials in the enclave. Many more bodies are thought to be under the rubble of destroyed buildings.
“We are living in a tragedy. The body is here, but the soul and the heart is there,” said Abu Obeida, who comes from the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza. The mom of 11 said her home had been destroyed by an Israeli strike and although her family had survived, three of her daughters had been dug out of the rubble.
Both said they were torn between a desperate desire to reunite with their families and fears for their own health and of burdening their loved ones.
“There is no treatment there at all. Our children live in a tent without food, water or medicine. There are no necessities,” Abu Obeida said, adding that her immune system was still weak after the cancer treatment.
Abu Shaban said she was initially joyful at the thought of being able to return to her home in northern Gaza, where her husband and five children remain. But later she said she learned that Israeli authorities intended to send her to either Khan Younis or Rafah, in southern Gaza, where she has no family.
“I wanted to return to my home and my children,” she said, adding that “tears fell because I was not returning to my home.”
Israel’s government has blocked Palestinians from returning to northern Gaza, where it says the fight against Hamas is ongoing, almost six months into the war.
Most painful, Abu Shaban said, was missing the birth of a new granddaughter named Rahma, which means “mercy” in Arabic. “She is 3 months old, and I haven’t seen her yet. They send me her pictures, but I want to hold her, hug her and see her,” she added.
It was impossible to describe the “feeling of a mother who left her children,” she said.
China, Russia send 11 military vessels near Alaska, U.S. responds with 4 Navy destroyers – CBS News
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Four U.S. Navy warships were dispatched to the Aleutian Islands after 11 military vessels jointly operated by China and Russia were spotted in American waters last week. Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan called the move by Russia and China “unprecedented.” Weijia Jiang explains what the show of force means amid heightened tensions between the U.S., China and Russia.
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI (AP) — Haitians are expressing skepticism over an offer by Kenya to lead an international police force aimed at combatting the gang violence that has wracked the Caribbean nation.
They say the sexual abuse and a devastating cholera outbreak that have accompanied foreign forces in past decades don’t inspire much trust. But Haitians also say uncontrolled bloodshed in their country leaves them with few other options.
Florence Casimir, an elementary school teacher, said that while past international interventions have damaged Haiti, their abuses don’t compare to the brutality of gangs, which kidnap her students and force parents to pay hefty ransoms.
“It will never be better (than past interventions), but the Haitian people don’t have a choice at this point,” Casimir said. “The Haitian people can’t fight it on their own.”
After Primer Minister Ariel Henry urged the world in October to deploy an armed force to fight the gangs, the United Nations has struggled to convince a nation to lead efforts to restore the order in the Caribbean country, in part due to past controversy over peacekeeping missions. There’s been little appetite for a U.S.- or U.N.-led force, and the United States unsuccessfullt tried to persuade Canada to lead a force.
As the search continued, gang warfare continued to worsen, leading to a wave of hundreds of kidnappings and the emergence of vigilante forces taking justice into their own hands. Today, armed groups control an estimated 80% of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
Kenya has offered to send 1,000 police officers to help train and assist an overwhelmed Haitian police force, saying it hopes to “restore normalcy in the country.” This week, the United States said it will put forward a resolution to the U.N. Security Council to authorize the force.
“This is not a traditional peacekeeping force,” the U.S. ambassador at the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said at a news conference.
Kenya’s proposal has sparked debate among Haitians, many of whom distrust international interventions after the failures and abuses of U.N. peacekeeping missions over the decades.
Haitians saw rounds of foreign interventions throughout the 1900s, often a response by nations like the U.S. to political instability in Haiti. In some cases, such missions helped ease chaos and in the 1990s led to the creation of the Haitian National Police.
But successes are often overshadowed by scars that Haitians carry with them from abuses that came with those missions.
A U.N. peacekeeping mission from 2004 to 2017 was plagued with allegations of mass sexual abuse, including claims that peacekeepers raped and impregnated girls as young as 11. Investigations by The Associated Press found evidence of high levels of impunity.
In 2010, sewage runoff from a U.N. peacekeeper camp into the country’s biggest river started a cholera epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 people.
“They left a bitter taste in the mouths of the Haitian people,” said Valdo Cenè, who sells cooking gas. “Bringing in international forces could mean repeating our history.”
This international police force would not be a U.N. force. So if deployed, Kenyan police would be in charge rather than answer to a U.N. force commander as they would be required to do in a U.N. peacekeeping mission.
Haiti’s prime minister said Tuesday that he spoke with Kenyan President William Ruto to thank Kenya for the “demonstration of fraternal solidarity.” Henry said Kenya plans to send a task force in the coming weeks to assess the mission’s operational requirements.
Haitians aren’t the only ones questioning the plan. Watch dog groups are raising alarms about the human rights track record of police in Kenya, saying the force may export their abuse.
Police in the East African nation have been long accused of killings and torture, including gunning down civilians during Kenya’s COVID-19 curfew. One local group said officers fatally shot more than 30 people during protests in July, all of them in Kenya’s poorest neighborhoods.
Louis-Henri Mars, head of the Haitian grassroots peacekeeping organization Lakou Lapè, echoed those concerns.
“People are puzzled about this,” Mars said. “It may just become just another big mess.”
While Mars is among many who say a Kenyan force would be an important step to stabilizing Haiti, he expressed hope its deployment will be a temporary effort that paves the way to a longer process of untangling rampant violence in Haiti, such as the kidnapping of an American nurse and her daughter.
Haiti needs to build a stable and trustworthy police force and provide a pathway to restorative justice for victims and former gang members, often young men pulled into the violence around them, Mars said.
Others, like Jerthro Antoine, say Kenya’s police can’t come soon enough.
The cellphone repairman said he dreams of once again setting foot on one of Haiti’s beaches, but violence in his country has gotten so bad that even walking on the street is a risk.
“I feel trapped in my home. Any foreign force in support of Haitian police is more than welcome,” Antoine said. “The Haitian people need it, we need a break and to have a life again.”
___
Janetsky reported from Mexico City. Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
A Georgia man who is considered a fugitive has been indicted on accusations that he “misdirected” $30 million from Christians who thought they were buying Bibles for China, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Instead, Jason Gerald Shenk used $1 million in payments to an online gambling site; bought diamonds, gold, and life insurance policies; and made payments to the company running his family farm among other purchases, officials say.
Jill Steinberg, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, in a statement called the case “an egregious breach” of trust.
Jason Gerald Shenk.U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Georgia
Shenk, 45, got the money from groups and individuals in Ohio and North Carolina who believed the money would buy Bibles and religious literature for people in China, prosecutors said.
The former Dublin, Georgia, resident presented himself as a missionary, according to the indictment.
He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2016, and the Justice Department says warrants have been issued for his arrest, according to the indictment and prosecutors.
Shenk has been indicted on four counts of wire fraud and 37 counts of money laundering, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
There is no attorney for him listed in online court records. Prosecutors said he is being sought internationally.
