World

KYIV — Pierre, 28, says he spent four years as a volunteer fighter in Syria. Now he is preparing to return to a foreign front again, this time in Ukraine.

The construction worker, who declines to give his full name, was at home in France when Russia invaded its neighbour on February 24.

What he saw on his TV screen made him so angry, he says, he decided to set off for Ukraine the very next day.

“I couldn’t just sit on my settee and watch what was going on,” he tells AFP.

It took him 10 days, by car and train, to reach Ukraine.

At the border, local troops directed him to the Georgian foreign legion, a military unit set up in 2014 by former soldiers from the Caucasus to help Kyiv fight Moscow.

Now Pierre is cooling his heels in Kyiv, waiting to be posted somewhere. It’ll probably be near the capital, a city he doesn’t know, and which Russian forces are trying to encircle.

He hopes to be deployed “where I’ll be most useful — on the front line” so he can use the skills he picked up in Syria, like “firing 12.7 mms and 14.5 mms [machine guns], Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers”.

‘To the very end’ 

Brown-haired, lean, of middling height, Pierre strolls calmly into the discrete park in Kyiv where he has agreed to talk to AFP.

He is dressed in beige sneakers and a military-style khaki sweatshirt, with a khaki scarf hiding half his face.

He is one of a string of foreigners to respond to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appeal for volunteers to come and repel the Russian forces.

The Ukrainian government puts their number at 20,000, though that figure has not been independently verified.

Pierre expects to be in for the long haul.

“I’ll stick around right until the end of the war if need be,” he says, out of a sense of “commitment” and “solidarity” with Ukrainians who are “fighting for their freedom against the Russian oppressor”.

In Syria, Pierre says, he fought other “oppressors” — Daesh group and Turkish forces battling the Syrian Kurds.

Between 2014 and 2018, Pierre says he spent a total of four years fighting in Syria, in three separate stints.

He reels off the names of northern Syria’s ferocious battles — “Manbij, Raqqa, Deir Ezzor” — and says he came close to death there on more than one occasion.

Raqqa, former “capital” of the Daesh group’s self-declared caliphate, was the worst, he recalls.

When Kurdish forces backed by NATO air power retook Raqa in 2017, the retreating Daesh fighters mined entire neighbourhoods.

Pierre says he and his unit were searching a building when one of his comrades stepped on a mine hidden under debris in a staircase.

Pierre was in a sheltered corner of the stairwell and escaped unharmed. But he saw four men die in front of his eyes.

“It shakes you up a bit,” he acknowledges.

‘A political football’ 

According to one inside source, the Georgian foreign legion in Ukraine comprises between several dozen and several hundred foreign fighters.

As in Syria, Pierre says volunteers combatants are joining from all over — “Italians, Germans, Norwegians, Spaniards, people from pretty much everywhere in Europe. Even from India”.

Pierre admires the Ukrainians for their courage and unity.

“Every single civilian is prepared to fight,” he says, forgetting that in Kyiv alone, half the city’s population is estimated to have left since the start of the invasion.

He sees Ukraine as “a political football” in a high-stakes game between Russia and the United States.

“At the end, it’s the Ukrainians who end up in the shit,” he says contemptuously.

“When all hell lets loose, there’s no-one there to help them. Other countries just fall over themselves to send in weapons.”

He says France is just as “hypocritical” as the other European nations, making outraged noises but “letting massacres happen” in Ukraine, just like in “Kurdistan, Yemen and Myanmar”.

When he was younger, Pierre wanted to join the French army. But he “did a few stupid things”, he explains without going into details, and that was no longer an option.

He knows his long stints in Syria look suspicious to the French authorities and they won’t help open any barracks gates on his behalf.

But now he says he is grateful he was prevented from going into the forces. “It’s better to go to Kurdistan or here [in Ukraine] on your own than play the politicians’ hypocritical game.”

MALMÖ, Sweden — Police in Sweden were Ton uesday attempting to determine why an 18-year-old student allegedly killed two teachers at a high school a day earlier in an attack that has shaken the country.

The two victims, both women in their 50s, were teachers at Malmo Latin, a creative arts high school with more than 1,000 students in Sweden’s third-biggest city, police said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Media reports said the suspect, whose name has not been disclosed, was armed with a knife and an axe, though police have not confirmed that information.

Police chief Petra Stenkula said police had seized “several weapons that are not firearms” at the scene.

Investigators were now trying to determine whether the suspect specifically targetted his victims or chose them at random, and whether he had planned to attack more people.

“We don’t know yet if he had any connection to these employees,” Stenkula told reporters.

The student “has no criminal record”, she said, adding that police were looking into his background and movements prior to the attack.

Investigators were on Tuesday searching the suspect’s home in the nearby town of Trelleborg, she added.

Police were alerted to the attack at 5:12pm (16:12 GMT) and a first patrol was able to enter the school minutes later.

About 50 students and teachers were inside at the time, and news footage showed heavily equipped and armed police inspecting the interior of the building.

Recent attacks 

The suspect was arrested on the third floor just 10 minutes after the first alert, putting up no resistance, Stenkula said.

His two victims were lying on the floor nearby, she added.

The teachers were rushed to hospital for treatment but their deaths were announced later in the evening.

According to daily Aftonbladet, the alleged attacker called emergency services to say where he was and that he had laid down his weapons, and confessed to the killings.

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson on Tuesday expressed her “sadness” and “consternation” over the attack.

At the high school, which was closed on Tuesday with the Swedish flag flying at half-mast, a support group has been set up for teachers and students, local authorities said.

“Everyone is deeply shocked. Devastated,” a teacher at the school who didn’t want to be identified told AFP on Tuesday.

“It’s an awful crime, it’s impossible to take it all in,” she said, standing outside the school where a group of about 20 students stood hugging and crying, some with flowers to lay down on the ground.

“It’s so sad that it happened here, in the place where I and many other students feel safest. It’s a warm and loving school,” 18-year-old student Lydia Cronberg told AFP.

“It’s not like before... It will be hard to come back, to have a memorial ceremony. We’re going to take it one day at a time,” she said.

School attacks are relatively rare in Sweden, which has in recent years grown more accustomed to shootings and bombings in underworld settlings of scores that kill dozens of people each year.

But several serious incidents have taken place at schools in southern Sweden in recent months.

In January, a 16-year-old was arrested after wounding another student and a teacher with a knife at a school in the small town of Kristianstad.

That incident was linked to a similar knife attack in August 2021 in the town of Eslov, about 50 kilometres away, when a student attacked a 45-year-old school employee.

No link has been established between those two events and the Malmo attack.

GUANGZHOU — China Eastern confirmed there had been fatalities after a jet carrying 132 people crashed into a mountain in southern China on Monday, shortly after losing contact with air traffic control and dropping thousands of metres in just three minutes.

The Boeing 737-800 flight from the city of Kunming to the southern hub of Guangzhou "lost airborne contact over Wuzhou" city in the Guangxi region on Monday afternoon, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).

The jet was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew members.

China Eastern confirmed late Monday that at least some people involved in the crash had been killed, without providing more information or giving details on any survivors.

"The company expresses its deep condolences for the passengers and crew members who died in the plane crash," the airline said in a statement.

The disaster prompted an unusually swift public reaction from President Xi Jinping, who said he was "shocked" and ordered an immediate investigation into its cause.

Hundreds of firefighters were dispatched to the scene in Teng county near Wuzhou, state media reported, as nearby villagers rushed to help the rescue effort.

"Everyone went to the mountains," Tang Min, who runs a restaurant a few kilometres from the crash site, told AFP by telephone.

Fears for the fate of the jet spread on Monday afternoon as local media reported that China Eastern flight MU5735 had not arrived as planned in Guangzhou after taking off from Kunming shortly after 1:00 pm (0500 GMT).

Flight tracking website FlightRadar24 showed no data for the flight after 2:22 pm.

The tracker showed the plane sharply dropped from an altitude of 8,870 to 982 metresin three minutes, before flight information ceased.

One villager told a local news site that the plane had "completely fallen apart" and he had seen forest areas destroyed by the fire it caused when crashing into the mountainside.

China Eastern changed its website to black and white only on Monday afternoon.

A January company report said China Eastern had 289 Boeing 737-series aircraft in its 751-strong fleet. 

State broadcaster CCTV said it had learned that China Eastern will ground all its 787-800 jets as a precaution after the crash.

Boeing said in a statement that it was “aware of the initial media reports and... working to gather more information”.

Xi called for “all efforts” towards the rescue and to find out the “cause of the accident as soon as possible”, according to CCTV.

“We are shocked to learn of the China Eastern MU5735 accident,” he said, calling for “the absolute safety of the sector and people’s lives”.

The arrivals board at Guangzhou airport showed the jet’s flight information for hours after it had crashed, as staff in full PPE held up signs to direct distraught relatives to a separate area that had been set up to receive them. 

One relative waiting in Guangzhou airport told local media that she had been due to board the flight, but had changed her booking at the last minute to an earlier plane.

Her sister and four friends had taken the crashed plane, she added.

Now she was just “waiting for news”, she said. “I feel very sad.”

A villager near the crash site surnamed Liu told state-run China News Service that he had driven a motorbike to the scene after hearing a loud explosion.

He said he saw debris on the ground, including an aircraft wing and fragments of clothing hanging from trees.

China had enjoyed an enviable air safety record in recent years as the country was crisscrossed by newly built airports and serviced by new airlines established to match breakneck growth over the last few decades.

A Henan Airlines flight crashed in north-eastern Heilongjiang province in 2010, killing at least 42 out of 92 people on board, although the final toll was never confirmed. It was the last Chinese commercial flight crash that caused civilian casualties. 

The deadliest Chinese commercial flight crash was a China Northwest Airlines crash in 1994, which killed all 160 onboard.

Jean-Paul Troadec, former director of the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety, told AFP it was “far too early” to draw conclusions, but added that the Flightradar data was “very unusual”.

ISTANBUL/ KYIV — Turkey on Sunday said Russia and Ukraine made progress on their negotiations to halt the invasion and the two warring sides were close to an agreement.

"Of course, it is not an easy thing to come to terms with while the war is going on, while civilians are killed, but we would like to say that momentum is still gained," Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in live comments from the southern Turkish province of Antalya.

"We see that the parties are close to an agreement."

Cavusoglu this week visited Russia and Ukraine as Turkey, which has strong bonds with the two sides, has tried to position itself as a mediator.

Ankara hosted the foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine in Antalya last week.

Cavusoglu said Turkey was in contact with the negotiating teams from the two countries but he refused to divulge the details of the talks as "we play an honest mediator and facilitator role".

In an interview with daily Hurriyet, presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said the sides were negotiating six points: Ukraine's neutrality, disarmament and security guarantees, the so-called "de-Nazification", removal of obstacles on the use of the Russian language in Ukraine, the status of the breakaway Donbass region and the status of Crimea annexed by Russia in 2014.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly appealed for peace, urging Russia to accept "meaningful" talks for an end to the invasion.

"This is the time to meet, to talk, time for renewing territorial integrity and fairness for Ukraine," he said, in his latest video posted on social media on Saturday.

Turkey said it was ready to host a meeting between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities claimed on Sunday that Russia had bombed a school sheltering 400 people in the besieged port of Mariupol, as Moscow said that it had again fired hypersonic missiles in Ukraine, the second time it had used the next-generation weapon on its neighbour.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the siege of Mariupol, a strategic mostly Russian-speaking port in the southeast where utilities and communications have been cut for days, would go down as a war crime.

The war in Ukraine, which Russian President Vladimir Putin launched on February 24 to stamp out the pro-Western leanings in the ex-Soviet country, has sparked the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, felled Russia-West relations to Cold War-era lows, and is wreaking havoc in the world economy still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic.

“Yesterday, the Russian occupiers dropped bombs on art school No 12,” the Mariupol city council said on Telegram on Sunday, adding that around 400 women, children and elderly people had been sheltering there from bombardments.

“Peaceful civilians are still under the rubble,” it said, adding that the building had been destroyed.

City authorities also claimed that some residents of Mariupol were being forcibly taken to Russia and stripped of their Ukrainian passports.

Hypersonic missile 

used again 

Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that Moscow had again fired its newest Kinzhal [Dagger] hypersonic missile, destroying a fuel storage site in the southern Mykolaiv region.

The strike would mark the second time the sophisticated weapon was used in combat, a day after Russia said it used it to destroy an underground arms storage site in western Ukraine close to the border with NATO member Romania.

Humanitarian conditions continued to deteriorate in the mostly Russian-speaking south and east of the country, where Russian forces have been pressing their advance, as well as in the north around the capital Kyiv.

Aid agencies have warned they are struggling to reach hundreds of thousands of people trapped by the invading Russian forces.

10 million flee homes 

Aid agencies are struggling to reach people trapped in cities ringed by Russian forces where the UN says the situation is “dire”.

Some 10 million people inside Ukraine have fled their homes to escape the fighting, the head of the UN refugee agency said on Sunday.

More than 3.3 million of them have fled abroad, sparking Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II, while a further estimated 6.5 million have been displaced inside the country, according to the UN.

SHANGHAI — China reported two COVID-19 deaths on Saturday, its first in more than a year, underlining the threat posed by an Omicron outbreak that has triggered the country's highest case count since the pandemic's onset.

The National Health Commission said both deaths occurred in Jilin, the northeastern province which has been hardest hit by a nationwide rise in cases that has prompted lockdowns or tight restrictions in several cities.

The deaths were the first reported in mainland China since January 2021, and bring the country's death toll from the pandemic to 4,638.

China reported 4,051 new infections on Saturday, down from 4,365 the day before, the health commission said, with more than half of the new cases in Jilin.

The two new deaths were buried in the health commission's daily report, and state-controlled media made little mention of them.

Officials in Jilin later said both victims were male, 65 and 87 years old, and both had a range of underlying health problems associated with advanced age.

The coronavirus emerged in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019 but China has largely kept it under control through strict border controls, lengthy quarantines and targeted lockdowns.

But the highly transmissible Omicron variant is posing a challenge to the effectiveness and long-term viability of the government’s zero-COVID strategy.

In recent weeks some official sources have suggested China may at some point need to co-exist with COVID-19 as other countries are doing, warning of the economic impact of mass lockdowns.

President Xi Jinping said on Thursday that China would stick with its zero-COVID strategy but allow for a more “targeted” approach.

While in the past full lockdowns could be expected for any outbreak, authorities around the country have responded with varying measures to the latest viral spread.

Some cities have been closed off, including the southern tech hub of Shenzhen, home to 17.5 million people. But Shenzhen’s measures were partially eased following Xi’s comments.

Shanghai, meanwhile, has moved schooling online and rolled out mass testing, but has avoided a full lockdown.

Authorities have said people with mild cases can isolate at central quarantine facilities, having previously sent all patients with any symptoms to specialist hospitals.

But tens of millions of people remain under stay-at-home orders across China due to the outbreak, which has sent daily reported new cases soaring from less than 100 just three weeks ago to several thousand per day.

Beijing also has watched nervously as Hong Kong has struggled to contain an Omicron outbreak that has sent deaths in the semi-autonomous southern Chinese city soaring into the thousands.

Mainland China officials have moved to create new hospital beds over fears the virus could put the health system under strain.

Jilin has built eight “makeshift hospitals” and two quarantine centres.

State news outlets this week broadcast footage of dozens of giant cranes assembling temporary medical facilities in Jilin, which has only around 23,000 hospital beds for 24 million residents.

Long queues have formed outside mass testing sites across China and controls have been tightened at ports, raising fears of trade disruption.

KYIV — Russia said Saturday that it had unleashed hypersonic missiles against an arms depot in Ukraine, the first use of the next-generation weapons in combat, after Kyiv's embattled leader pressed for "meaningful" talks to end a conflict now in its fourth week.

Moscow also said its troops had broken Ukrainian defences to enter the strategic southern port city of Mariupol, and destroyed radio and intelligence sites just outside Odessa.

If confirmed, the use of Russia's new Kinzhal (Dagger) hypersonic missiles, which can elude most defence systems, would mark a new escalation in Russia's campaign to force Ukraine to abandon hopes of closer ties with the West.

Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuri Ignat told AFP that the weapons depot in Deliatyn, a village near the border with Romania, had indeed been hit but "we have no information of the type of missile".

"There has been damage, destruction and the detonation of munitions," he said. "They are using all the missiles in their arsenal against us."

Ukraine officials also admitted they had "temporarily" lost access to the Sea of Azov, though Russia has effectively controlled the coastline for weeks after surrounding Mariupol.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who unveiled the Kinzhal missile in 2018, has termed it "an ideal weapon" that flies at 10 times the speed of sound, analysts say Russia is leading the hypersonics race, followed by China and the US.

Moscow’s announcement came hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky again appealed for peace, urging Russia to accept “meaningful” talks in his latest Facebook video.

“This is the time to meet, to talk, time for renewing territorial integrity and fairness for Ukraine,” he said.

“Otherwise, Russia’s losses will be such that several generations will not recover.”

Ukraine claimed Saturday that a Russian general had been killed by strikes on an airfield outside Kherson, just north of Crimea, saying he was the fifth top-ranking officer killed since the invasion began on February 24.

Fierce resistance has managed to stall Russian forces outside Kviv and several other cities in the east, making them vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks against supply lines.

Britain’s defence ministry said Saturday that Russia has been forced to “change its operational approach and is now pursuing a strategy of attrition”.

“This is likely to involve the indiscriminate use of firepower resulting in increased civilian casualties,” it warned.

But as in previous negotiations there appeared to be little progress in reaching a ceasefire, with Putin accusing Ukraine of “numerous war crimes” during a call late Friday with French President Emmanuel Macron.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss accused Moscow of using the talks as a “smokescreen” as it carried out “appalling atrocities”, saying she was “very sceptical” they would produce a breakthrough.

Fighting rages 

Friday’s attack on the arms depot was the latest strike in western Ukraine, which until a few days ago had remained relatively unscathed by Russia’s push toward key cities from the north and east.

On Friday, Russian forces destroyed an aircraft repair plant near the airport of Lviv, where millions of people have fled as rockets and shelling continue to rain down on Kyiv.

In Mariupol, rescuers were still searching for hundreds of people trapped under the wreckage of a bombed theatre where over 1,000 people had been seeking shelter when it was struck on Wednesday.

There was still no information about potential fatalities, Zelensky said, but 130 people had been saved so far, some “heavily injured”.

“This is no longer Mariupol, it’s hell,” said resident Tamara Kavunenko, 58. “The streets are full with the bodies of civilians.”

Russian forces also carried out a large-scale air strike on Mykolaiv in the south on Friday, killing dozens of young Ukrainian ensigns at their brigade headquarters.

“No fewer than 200 soldiers were sleeping in the barracks” at the time of the attack, a Ukrainian serviceman on the ground, 22-year-old Maxim, told AFP.

“At least 50 bodies have been recovered, but we do not know how many others are in the rubble,” he said.

‘Trapped’ 

More than 3.25 million refugees have fled Ukraine and countless others have sought havens in the country’s west, though Putin said his forces were doing “everything possible” to avoid civilian casualties during his latest call with Macron, according to the Kremlin.

But Zelensky accused Russian forces of blocking aid around hotspot areas.

“I escaped war to reach stability, only to find myself trapped in another war,” said Mazen Dammag, a Yemeni who fled his war-torn homeland nearly six years ago for Ukraine.

He and several friends hired taxis to take them from Odessa to Poland, some 1,000 kilometres north, and eventually Bremen in Germany, where he spoke with AFP by video.

Russia’s ally China told US President Joe Biden on Friday that the war “in no one’s interest”, but showed no sign of giving in to US pressure to join Western condemnation of Russia.

Biden warned his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping of “consequences” for any financial or military aid for Russia, a move that could turn the stand-off into a global confrontation.

Putin appears undeterred by further threats or sanctions, holding a triumphalist rally in Moscow on Friday to mark eight years since Russia’s seizure of Crimea, saying his goal in Ukraine was “to rid these people from their suffering and genocide”.

Talks stall 

In a call to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Putin accused Ukrainian authorities of stalling talks by “putting forward more and more unrealistic proposals”.

Russia wants Ukraine to disarm and disavow all Western alliances, in particular by joining NATO or seeking closer integration with the European Union, steps that Kyiv says would turn it into a vassal state of Moscow.

Russia’s top negotiator said Friday that Moscow and Kyiv had brought their positions “as close as possible” on a proposal for Ukraine to become a neutral state.

But Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky taking part in the negotiations, said his country’s position had not budged.

Switzerland said Saturday that despite its longstanding neutrality, it would impose the same sanctions against Russia as the EU.

President Ignazio Cassis said his country would not stand by in the “confrontation between democracy and barbarism”, saying the war was being driven by “a devastating madness which shatters all the principles and values of our civilisation”.