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There are few children left in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, but there are many elderly people, trapped by their health in their homes. Their fate is a mirror of the tragic fate of a nation that was already aging before the war.
Worker helping an elderly resident at a care center in Toretsk, Ukraine, on April 13.
KYIV— "When I hear the bombs I get under the table and I cry like when I was a child during World War II," laments Eiludgarda Miroshnychenko.
To get to her house in the heart of the old center of Kyiv, just ten minutes by car from Maidan Square in normal circumstances, we had to pass through 15 checkpoints.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
But Eiludgarda doesn't know this because since the Russian invasion began, more than a month ago, she has only left home to go down to the neighborhood grocer a handful of times. She is 85 years old, has heart problems and is terrified that something will happen to her and that it will take her daughters hours to realize that something is wrong.
So, a small red suitcase and a cloth bag have been prepared in her bedroom for weeks. In them, she only carries a change of clothes, her documents and medicines.
Due to her health problems and her age, Eiludgarda is afraid of getting on a train with hundreds of people crammed into a wagon, standing for hours, with no one to pick her up at the destination and accompany her to an airport in Poland. From there, she could finally fly to Barcelona, where one of her two daughters lives.
“When we lived in the Soviet Union, we went to Moscow or other cities and no one asked us where we were from, we all got along. I don't understand how they can be doing this to us," she explains, sitting next to two blooming orchids that she offers to give to the journalist.
She doesn't think she'll ever see this apartment again, where she raised her daughters, retired from her job as a physicist-mathematician at the Automatic Engineering Institute, and where she became a widow.
"I once heard that ten years of negotiations are better than one day of war," she says, sitting in her worn pale leather chair, with a glass window behind her whose possible shattering is itself a daily risk of war.
It's been days since Miroshnychenko stopped turning on the TV to protect her health: watching the news raises her blood pressure and since the war began she needs to take more medicines to lower it. She is outraged that she is not young enough to stay to “defend her country as a volunteer”, explains this woman who used to coordinate a rolled aluminum program in a factory of more than 3,000 workers.
“My daughter studied in Moscow, my husband was a Soviet soldier. And now the whole family relationship that we had with our neighbors has been broken," she explains, surrounded by the photographs that define the milestones of her life: her grandmother, a young woman with a round face and crystalline eyes looking at the future from Estonia, where the name Eliudgarda comes from; her parents, daughters, grandchildren smiling at the camera … A family tree of faces that look at us from the walls and that will stay here when she finally changes her house slippers for padded ankle boots and locks the two doors that the houses of the old Soviet buildings still have.
About 80% of her neighbors have left. Only she and a man are left in this building. And in the one next door, a couple of families. "It hurts me that my neighbors didn't ask me if I wanted to go with them," she adds. "They left without a word."
Photo of an elderly resident at a care center, waiting to be evacuated from Toretsk, Ukraine, on April 13.
Helen Kuchma's mother had been battling neck and bone cancer for four years when Russia invaded Ukraine. And then not only her life but also that of her daughter became much more complicated. “We couldn't take her down to the basements when the alarms sounded because she was bedridden, there was no way to transport her, nor to be able to keep her in decent conditions for hours in a shelter. Also, there isn't anyone in our building so we would have had to go to the buildings across the street. So we stayed on the eighth floor of her apartment, my father, her, and I, not knowing if they were going to bomb us at any moment,” explains this secondary school teacher in the Ukrainian capital.
Specialized medical clinics closed in the first days of the invasion, and Helen spent hours running from one pharmacy to another to get the morphine that would ease her mother's pain. Most of them suffered shortages and the queues were endless, though she finally ended up getting it. Still, her mother died shortly after.
Since then, she has been a volunteer in a support network that has been created in the center of Kyiv, dedicated to collecting medicine and buying food for the elderly who are trapped in their flats due to mobility problems or, also, for fear of something happening to them.
One of the couples she visits daily is Dimitrii and Lera. They live in a rusty four-story building that the Soviet regime earmarked for geologists. When Helen informs them that she is with a journalist, Lera goes back inside her house and asks her husband not to speak. Fear grips everything these days in Ukraine: that someone could be a Russian agent, or an agent of the Ukrainian state who could end up accusing them of being a Russian agent, or that their words will one day end up as evidence to imprison them. Hardly anyone wants to speak out these days in this country for fear of ending up in jail in the middle of a war.
Yet Dimitrii insists on speaking. Even from the doorstep. “How can our older brothers do this to us? Well, because they weren't our brothers. That is what we have discovered with this war. They accuse us of being Nazis and they kill us like the real German Nazis did,” he says.
As Dimitrii shares his anguish, his wife yells at him from the living room to shut up, to go have some tea, to close the door on us. Helen seems surprised by Lera's reaction: like so many other people in the neighborhood, she brings her food and medicine every day that she gets after standing for hours in line.
She is surprised how she yells at her that the volunteers are not doing enough and that she shouldn't bring foreigners into her building again. A month of war has exacerbated the nerves and mistrust of Ukraine's elderly.
An elderly woman with her dogs walk past a damaged residential building by a Russian airstrike in Borodyanka, Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government's ban on men between the ages of 18 and 60 leaving the country has, on the one hand, accentuated gender roles by causing a mass exodus from the country of women who are left in charge of caring for minors and of dependent elderly people. But it has also caused many men to be left in charge of their fathers and mothers, as well as their in-laws.
This is the case of Anastasia Zavalo, who left with her two children to live in the southwest, near Mukachevo, two weeks after the war began. Her mother and her husband stayed in the capital, who thus became the caretaker of her mother-in-law, who was dependent due to mobility problems.
“If she felt better, she would have come with us. But she didn't want to because she can only move from her room to the kitchen, by holding on to the wall, ”explains her daughter on the telephone. “Our apartment is in an area that is not being bombed, but she watches the news and it upsets her a lot. And we don't want to leave the country. We don't know what's going to happen,” explains Dilo, an information technology worker.
On Feb. 13, Olena Chekushyna's father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Getting the treatment he needed from the public health system would have taken him months. So she decided to wait until she received her March salary from the Israeli occupational risk prevention company she works for and then spend the 300 euros that would cost her the cheapest pack of pills for the following quarter.
But nine days later the invasion began, and Chekushyna realized then that she had to get the medicine right away if she didn't want things to get more complicated in the days to come. Without her own car, she had to go through various neighborhoods of the capital while the sirens sounded, until she found the medicines.
A woman rests before being transported to a train station in Pokrovsk, Ukraine, on April 13, 2022.
The Ukrainian public health system was already in dire straits before the war. In fact, in 2021 there was a children's outbreak of polio, a disease that had been eradicated, and against which a massive vaccination campaign was launched. In fact, Ukraine is at the bottom of the countries for health spending: 7.42% of its GDP in 2017, the last year for which figures have been made public. This investment places it at 122 of the 192 published.
But with the invasion, the situation of the health system has become critical. The World Health Organization (WHO) has verified 16 Russian attacks on health care attention and has warned that essential medicines such as oxygen and insulin, surgical supplies, anesthetics and personal protective equipment are in short supply.
And then there is confusion among the aging generation. Chekushyna's father continues to watch Russian television, as he had done all his life. And when his daughter goes to visit him, he tells her that what she was telling him were lies.
“All their lives they have been informed only by the Russian media. So they live in their parallel reality being in Kyiv," she explains. "He thinks that me and my brother were abducted by Ukrainian nationalists.”
Yes, these are some of the voices left in Kyiv, where it is rarer and rarer to see children. Instead, you see plenty of elderly women walking alone through empty neighborhoods, carrying a plastic bag, their head covered with a scarf.
Ukraine was already an aging nations because of the massive emigration of the youth to countries of the European Union since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But until the war, the precarious conditions in which many elderly people lived in Ukraine was largely hidden.
That has all changed when the bombs started striking: elderly people forced to stay are plain to see everywhere, left behind with a fate that seemed to say that this was how it all ends, as if it doesn't matter if death comes to them from disease, or basic medicines they can't find, or from the war itself.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
• Mariupol update: Satellite photos seem to confirm the presence of mass graves in a village near Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine. The Russian military continues to shell the Azovstal steel plant, a day after President Putin claimed Russia had “liberated” Mariupol, and vowed to “seal off” the facility. Meanwhile, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said U.S. naval troops were not planning on intervening to free Ukrainians still trapped in Mariupol.
• More U.S. military help to Ukraine: President Biden pledged $800 million in more weapons for Ukraine. Paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt, Biden said the United States would “speak softly and carry a large Javelin,” a reference to the antitank weapon that the Ukrainians have used effectively against Russian armor.
— Read all the latest at War in Ukraine, Day 58 —
• Former Honduran president extradited to the U.S. on drug charges: Juan Orlando Hernández, who was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, was extradited to the United States late Thursday. The American government accuses him of having abused his position to help drug traffickers smuggle cocaine to the U.S. Hernández denies the allegations.
• Russian soldiers accused of staging French mass graves in Mali: The French army claims it recorded Russian soldiers burying corpses near the Gossi base in Mali, where 300 French soldiers were stationed until this Tuesday. As France is withdrawing its troops from Mali, an anonymous Twitter account has accused French soldiers of leaving mass graves behind.
• Rare friendly exchange between North and South Korea leaders: Earlier this week, South Korea’s outgoing President Moon Jae-in wrote to North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un that he would continue to work towards a Korean unification. Kim Jong-un replied by thanking him and saying he hopes the relations between North and South will improve, in spite of a context of tense relations due to missile testing in North Korea.
• New suspect in Madeleine McCann case: Portuguese authorities have declared a new formal suspect in the case of the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann in 2007. German police have gathered evidence against 45-year-old Christian B., who was in the same area as the McCann family when Madeleine went missing.
• International arrest warrant against Carlos Ghosn: A French court issued an international arrest warrant against Renault-Nissan’s former CEO Carlos Ghosn over 15 million euros of suspicious payments. In 2019, Ghosn fled Japan where he was wanted for financial misconduct and is now living in Lebanon.
“How is the blue planet becoming greener?,” asks German daily Die Welt, dedicating its front page to Earth Day, a global annual event to demonstrate the importance of protecting the environment.
In the last year, the number of British nationals living in Spain has increased by 176%. This surge is partly due to Brexit, as the transition period of the UK officially leaving the European Union ended on January 1, 2021.
At the head of Match Group, the online dating empire composed of Tinder, Meetic and Hinge, this CEO of Indian origin decides millions of people’s love lives on every continent. It's a unique talent for turning digital relationship building into gold, writes Anaïs Moutot in French daily Les Echos.
♀️ Match Group’s CEO doesn't hesitate to share her career history and the obstacles she faced because of her gender. Raised in Jamshedpur, northeastern India, by her father — an engineering school professor — and her stay-at-home mother, this brilliant highschooler was the only woman to be accepted at the Indian Institute of Technology (ITT) among a hundred male students. “My father was delighted that I got into the ITT, but in my distant family the first reaction was to tell me no one would marry me,” Dubey says.
📱💰 Tinder has become Match Group’s driving force: the app generates 55% of its sales revenue against 31% five years ago, thanks to a threefold increase in the number of users — now more than 10 millions. Dubey strongly contributed to the transformation of the startup into a cash machine. In 2017, she traveled every week to Los Angeles to launch Tinder Gold, a paid feature that allows users to know who swiped right on you, inspired by Who Likes You on OkCupid.
💑 “In the post-COVID world, the places where you’d meet people physically have disappeared. After #MeToo, it has also become harder to meet people at university and at the workplace,” Dubey says. Jessica Pidoux is a postdoctoral researcher who wrote a thesis about dating apps. She feels that the Tinder mindset is exporting itself beyond smartphones: “People evaluate others in an algorithmic manner, saying whether they like someone or not very early on.”
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
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At the head of Match Group, the online dating empire composed of Tinder, Meetic and Hinge, this CEO of Indian origin decides millions of people’s love lives on every continent. It's a unique talent for turning digital relationship building into gold.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/Ukrinform via ZUMA Press Wire
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.