Ella Lee|USA TODAY
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This is a recap of news from June 18. For the latest, click here.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visitedtroops andhealth care workers on the frontlines in south Ukraine on Saturday during a trip tothe Mykolaiv and Odesa regions.
Inpictures and videos posted on Telegram, Zelenskyy shook hands and took selfies with health workers and troops in the regions.
Other media shows the Ukrainian president examining nearly destroyed buildings in the area. In one building, eight people, including a 3-month-old baby, were killed in an act Zelenskyy described as a “terrible crime.”
More than 900 kids have been killed or injured since Russia began its war against Ukraine in March, Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office saidSaturday.
Some 323 children were killed and 583 injured, with most casualties occurring in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions.
Shelling by Russian forces has damaged some 2,028 educational institutions, of which more than 200 were “completely destroyed.”
June 17 recap: Ukraine moves closer to EU candidacy; Families of 2 missing American veterans speak out: Latest updates
Latest developments:
►A third American who traveled to Ukraine to lend assistance in the war against Russia appears to be missingamid growing indications two othershave been captured, State Departmentspokesman Ned Price said.
► Ukraine will not host Eurovision Song Contest in 2023, organizers announced Friday. In May, the Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra won the contest with "Stefania'' and the right to host next year's event.
►Hundreds of mourners gathered Saturday for Roman Ratushnyi, 24, a Ukrainian soldier and activist killed in the war, including friends who had protested with him during months of demonstrations that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russia leader in 2014 and who, like him, took up arms when Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbor this February.
►Six Republican senators on Friday sought information from TikTok regarding “dangerous pro-war propaganda” from Russian state media on the app, while allowing no content from outside the country to balance it out, in a letter to CEO Shou Zi Chew.
Invasion prevents grain from leaving Ukraine, making food more expensive
Russian hostilities in Ukraineare preventing grain from leaving the“breadbasket of the world”and making food more expensive across the globe, threatening to worsen shortages, hunger and political instability in developing countries.
Together, Russia and Ukraine export nearly a third of the world’s wheat and barley andmore than 70% of its sunflower oil and are big suppliers of corn.Russia is the top global fertilizer producer.
World food prices were already climbing, and the war made things worse, preventing some 20 million tons of Ukrainian grain from getting to the Middle East,North Africaand parts of Asia.
Weeks of negotiations on safe corridorsto get grain out of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports have made little progress, with urgency rising as the summer harvest season arrives.
“This needs to happen in the next couple of months (or) it’s going to be horrific,” said Anna Nagurney, who studies crisis management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is on the board of the Kyiv School of Economics.
UN warns of ‘hell on earth’ without immediate response to food crisis
UN World Food Programme director David Beasley described “frightening” food shortages worldwide due to Russia’s war in Ukraine while speaking in Ethiopia’s capital Thursday, theGuardian reported.
“Even before the Ukraine crisis, we were facing an unprecedented global food crisis because of Covid and fuel price increases,” Beasley said, according to the Guardian. “Then, we thought it couldn’t get any worse, but this war has been devastating.”
Russia and Ukraine together export some 30 percent of the world’s wheat, Beasley wrote in aMarch op-ed for the Washington Post. Plus, the two countries account for about one-fifth of global maize and barley, and nearly two-thirds of traded sunflower oil – of which Ukraine alone holds almost half of global exports,according to Our World in Data.
“It is a very, very frightening time,” Beasley said, according to the Guardian. “We are facing hell on earth if we do not respond immediately.”
As the US sends aid to Ukraine, some say it's not flowing fast enough
The day after Russia invaded Ukraine, World Central Kitchen was dishing up hot meals to the war's refugees.
Jose Andrés, the celebrity chief who founded the privately funded non-profit, assumed “the big guys” would show up soon after.
“But it took weeks for them to establish any presence,”Andrés recently told a congressional committeeoverseeing the billions of dollars the United States has committed to relief efforts in and around Ukraine.
Biden administration officials say there arevexing challenges to delivering those billions of dollars to those in need– from bureaucratic obstacles in Washington to treacherous conditions in a deadly conflict zone.
– Maureen Groppe and Anna Nemtsova
'People are starving and thirsty': As the US sends aid to Ukraine, some say it's not flowing fast enough
These are the two US military veterans captured by Russia in Ukraine
Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh knew he might not come back. So the 27-year-old former Marine drew up a will, said goodbye to his fiancée and left Hartselle, Alabama, in April to help Ukrainians repel Russian forces.
That same month, not far away in Tuscaloosa, former Army Sgt. Alexander Drueke, a 39-year-old Iraq war veteran, had deliberated for a month before deciding to pack his gear for Ukraine.
The families of the two Alabama men –who went missing near Kharkiv in a battle last week– told USA TODAY they are holding out hope that the men could be released by Russian-backed separatist forces.
“We’re just hoping for good news,” said Huynh’s fiancée, Joy Black, 21.
– Chris Kenning
Read the whole story here: Two US military veterans felt compelled to fight Russia. They've been captured in Ukraine.
37 million children displaced in 2021, highest figure since WWII
Nearly 37 million children were displaced in 2021, the highest number of kids oustedfrom their homes since World War II,according to UNICEF.
Some 22.8 million of those children were displaced within their countries due to conflict and violence, and 13.7 million of the children are refugees and seeking asylum, the statement reads.
"We can't ignore the evidence: The number of children being displaced by conflict and crises is rapidly growing – and so is our responsibility to reach them," said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
The figures don’t include children displaced by climate or environmental disasters, or kids displaced by the war in Ukraine, according to UNICEF. In March, UNICEF said that4.3 million children were displaced due to the war– more than half of the country’s estimated 7.5 million child population.
LGBTQ Ukrainians face hurdles entering US under humanitarian programs
When Sergiy Astahof, 31, a Ukrainian migrant,fled for the United States with his partner after Russia invaded his home country,they were excited to finally live openly as a gay couple.
Instead, Astahof, who traveled through the U.S.-Mexico border on April 11, was taken in by kind community members of a conservative Texan church that opposes gay relationships. The church put him and his partner up in a spare room, providing food and shelter in exchange for volunteer work. The couple pretended to be merely friends – as they had in Ukraine and with their families – so as not to insult their hosts.
"We had uncomfortable feelings about this, but at the same time, it's better than feeling unsafe in Ukraine or Eastern Europe," Astahof said, speaking through an interpreter. "I know it's a temporary solution. And right now, the first priority is to survive."
Astahof and his partner are among the many LGBTQ Ukrainian migrants struggling to find their footing under U.S. humanitarian programs. The Biden administration has pledged to allow 100,000 Ukrainiansfleeing war with Russia into the United States, but many LGBTQ migrants are finding it difficult to get into the country because they lack social support and the necessary connections, according to immigration experts.
– Tami Abdollah
Read the whole story here: Many LGBTQ Ukrainians face hurdles entering US under humanitarian programs
Russia frees captive medic who filmed Mariupol’s horror
A celebrated Ukrainian medic whose footage was smuggled out of the besieged city of Mariupol by an Associated Press team was freed by Russian forces on Friday, three months after she was taken captive on the streets of the city.
Yuliia Paievska isknown in Ukraine as Taira,a nickname she chose in the World of Warcraft video game. Using a body camera, she recorded 256 gigabytes of her team’s efforts over two weeks to save the wounded, including both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers.
She transferred the clips to an Associated Press team, thelast international journalistsin the Ukrainian city of Mariupol,one of whom fledwith it embedded in a tampon on March 15. Taira and a colleague were taken prisoner by Russian forces on March 16, the same day a Russian airstrike hit a theater in the city center, killing around 600 people, according toan Associated Press investigation.
“It was such a great sense of relief. Those sound like such ordinary words, and I don’t even know what to say,” her husband, Vadim Puzanov, told The Associated Press late Friday
Contributing: The Associated Press
