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U.S. authorities allowed a Ukrainian woman and her three children to seek asylum Thursday, a reversal from a day earlier when she was denied entry under the Biden administration's sweeping restrictions for seeking humanitarian protection. The Associated Press has the story.
VOA's Margaret Besheer reports that the United National Security Council will have a special meeting at 11 a.m. Friday, at Russia's request.
Desperate Ukrainians seek asylum.
Ukrainians fleeing Russia's invasion refuse to leave their pets behind. ABC News has the story.
Facebook is easing its rules against violent speech in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Agence France-Press reports.
U.S. troops have deployed in the forested mountains of eastern Poland, just a few kilometers from the Ukrainian border. This puts them in close proximity to recent Russian airstrikes on targets in western Ukraine – and could make them a target if NATO were to become involved in the war. Henry Ridgwell reports from Arlamów in Poland.
Russian planes have bombed the Institute of Physics and Technology in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, a Ukrainian official said, according to Reuters.
The institute houses an experimental nuclear reactor, said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the minister of internal affairs, and it contained "sources of radiation used for scientific purposes."
A neighboring hostel caught fire but that has been extinguished.
The head of the International Monetary Fund says the rebuilding of Ukraine, physically and economically will be massive. The top economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy estimated the cost at a minimum of $100 billion.
Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, acknowledged it could be close to that amount. She spoke one day after approving $1.4 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine.
Georgieva added that the sanctions placed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine are likely to bring a deep recession
Afghans who fled the war in their country have had their lives uprooted again by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
VOA’s Jeff Seldin reports that praise for the way U.S. agencies secured and shared intelligence on Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine are being tempered by growing concern that one of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns is starting to take hold in the United States and the West.
For days, officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon have been pushing back against Moscow’s claims — increasingly repeated by far-right and far-left social media channels, as well as by some mainstream media in the United States — that Russian forces have found, and in some cases destroyed, Ukrainian biological weapons labs funded by the U.S.
“I'm fearful that this could be the new direction of a Russian false flag operation,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, Democrat Mark Warner told top U.S. intelligence officials at a hearing Thursday.
Russia has requested a United Nations Security Council meeting Friday on biological weapons in Ukraine.
The United States denied again Wednesday a Russian accusation that the U.S. operates biological warfare labs in Ukraine, calling them laughable.
However, Ukraine does have research facilities, U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Tuesday.
“In fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of,” she said.
Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers met at a Turkish Mediterranean Sea resort Thursday but failed to end the fighting in Ukraine, with mutual recriminations. Both ministers indicated the diplomatic door remained open. .
As health care facilities are increasingly being targeted in Russia’s war on Ukraine, the U.N. Population Fund said Thursday that in the coming three months and must be protected, VOA’s United Nations correspondent Margaret Besheer reports.
“All these women who are giving birth in makeshift shelters, in subway stations, in the basements of buildings — oftentimes without skilled attendants — all of these women are also casualties of war,” said Jaime Nadal, the U.N. Population Fund’s representative in Ukraine.
Nadal said that since Russia’s invasion began, 4,311 women are known to have given birth. He spoke from inside the country, where UNFPA is continuing to assist women and girls through its network of community-based facilities.
VOA’s Eastern Europe Chief Myroslava Gongadze reports on a recent opinion poll in Ukraine that shows a surge in optimism as the country fights Russia’s two-week-old invasion.