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The city of Kremenchuk is looking for blood. Last week, two Russian missiles blew apart a large shopping and entertainment centre where around a thousand people were spending the afternoon. The exact number of those killed is still not known, but hundreds of people were at the epicentre of the explosion and of some of them, not even fragments are left. The number of wounded is known, though. The survivors were left without arms, without legs. And they need blood.

This tragedy has given a new impetus to blood donation efforts. Blood is needed everywhere in Ukraine wherever Russian missiles and shells explode, wherever wounded soldiers are brought from the frontlines.

In Lviv, they are waiting for blood at the military hospital, which is located on a street named after the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, as well as in the regional hospital on a street named after the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy.

Waves of hatred are sweeping Ukraine and pushing Ukrainians to look for internal enemies. They are out for blood. Plenty of real internal enemies exist. Someone apparently shared the coordinates of Ukrainian military training centres with the Russian military, and barracks were destroyed by missiles.

Someone is spreading pro-Russian propaganda on Ukrainian corridors of the internet. At the same time, more and more distrust, and sometimes even hatred, is being shown towards Russian-speaking authors and intellectuals, who must now show themselves to be three times more patriotic than their Ukrainian-speaking counterparts. And even this does not save them from accusations that it is they who are to blame for the war because they speak, think and write in Russian. It is in their blood.

Despite the vehemence of young Ukrainians and Ukraines official demand that other countries boycott Russian culture, older Ukrainians remain conservative and do not want to go that far. They quietly oppose the total boycott of Russian culture. An opera-loving friend of ours shed tears at the thought of not being able to hear Eugene Onegin at the Kyiv opera house ever again.

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are almost used to these constant accusations, just as the country is almost used to war. This does not mean that people are accustomed to rocket explosions in cities, but we have got used to the idea that this war will last a long time.

Experts constantly predict the date of the end of the war. Some of them say September. The president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, says that the war will end before the frosts set in before winter. Other politicians think spring 2023 is more likely.

The relatives of Ukrainian prisoners of war are loudly and very publicly demanding an early exchange of prisoners between Russia and Ukraine, while another process is going on quite quietly and non-publicly: the exchange of the dead.

Bodies are said to be exchanged on a one-to-one basis one dead Ukrainian soldier for one dead Russian soldier. In an attempt to obtain as many bodies as possible, the Russians resort to tricks. They are said to have put the corpses of dead civilians in black bags. As a result, the work with bags begins with a general sorting process. Civilian remains are also processed, but this is a longer and more complicated matter because it is not known where the Russians brought these remains from. They are kept for some time in the refrigerator of the morgue, and then they are transferred to other regional morgues for further identification and the search for relatives.

I dont know where this exchange takes place, but it is somewhere near the frontline. A refrigerated truck with the number 200 on the windscreen regularly arrives at the regional morgue on Oranzhereinaya Street near the botanical garden in Kyiv. 200 this is how the dead are designated in military terminology. Accompanying soldiers bring black bags with the remains of the dead into the morgue. Pathologists work with these remains.

The main task is to try to find out the soldiers data in order to transfer the remains to relatives for burial. If the deceased had tattoos, this is much easier to do. But the black bags do not always contain the whole body of a soldier. Often there are only bones and a skull, sometimes fragments of a body. Relatives of the missing donate their DNA to make it easier and faster to find their dead loved ones.

The DNA database of Ukrainians whose relatives have gone missing in the war is constantly growing. Anyone near the centre of the explosion in Kremenchuk last Monday disappeared completely; nothing remains. No traces or fragments. He or she has gone missing forever. We dont know exactly how many they are. DNA wont help.

While residents of the city donated blood for the wounded, local authorities declared three days of mourning for the dead. During the time of mourning, entertainment events, concerts and circus performances are usually not held, but I cannot imagine inhabitants of Kremenchuk planning to have fun for a long time afterwards. One of the most popular entertainments for Ukrainians, even now, is fishing. Fishing is not prohibited during mourning. Periods of mourning could be declared in dozens of cities and towns in Ukraine after the shelling and massacres of Ukrainian citizens by the Russian army.

But it seems strange to go into mourning in the middle of a war. After all, usually after the end of the mourning period life should return to normal. Comedies can be shown on TV again, theatres and circuses can open their doors. Now there is only one TV news channel in Ukraine, which unites all previously existing TV news channels.

It is possible to go to the theatre in some cities, but there is no guarantee that the siren announcing an air raid will not interrupt the performance. It would, of course, be better if some strong, dramatic performance interrupted the war. Or even stopped it altogether. But alas, the drama of a real war remains unstoppable. The director and producer of the war, Vladimir Putin, wants to shed as much Ukrainian blood as possible.

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In Ukraine, this summer means blood and sirens but fishing and the theatre go on - The Guardian

July 4 (Reuters) - Ukraine is holding talks with Turkey and the United Nations to secure guarantees for grain exports from Ukrainian ports, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday.

"Talks are in fact going on now with Turkey and the U.N. (and) our representatives who are responsible for the security of the grain that leaves our ports," Zelenskiy told a news conference alongside Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.

"This is a very important thing that someone guarantees the security of ships for this or that country - apart from Russia, which we do not trust. We therefore need security for those ships which will come here to load foodstuffs."

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Zelenskiy said Ukraine was working "directly" with U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres on the issue and that the organization was "playing a leading role, not as a moderator."

News reports have suggested in recent weeks that such talks would soon be taking place in Turkey.

Ukraine, one of the world's leading grain exporters, accuses Russia of blocking the movement of its ships, and Zelenskiy said 22 million tonnes of grain was stuck at the moment with a further harvest of about 60 million tonnes expected in the autumn.

Russia denies it is blocking any movement of grain and says Ukraine is to blame for the lack of movement, partly because of what it says are mining operations in its ports.

Ukraine has also accused Russia of stealing grain from its warehouses and taking it out of the country - either to Russian-occupied areas, Russia itself or other countries.

A Turkish official on Monday said Turkey had halted a Russian-flagged cargo ship off its Black Sea coast and was investigating a Ukrainian claim that it was carrying stolen grain.

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Reporting by Ronald PopeskiEditing by Bill Berkrot

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Zelenskiy says Ukraine is in talks with Turkey, UN on grain exports - Reuters

SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. In a room dimly lit by television screens, dozens of airmen tapped away at computers and worked the phones. Some were keeping watch over a high-priority mission to move a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter from a base in Arizona to a destination near Ukraines border.

Earlier that day, a civilian colleague had checked a spreadsheet and found a C-17 transport plane in Washington state that was available to pick up the helicopter and begin a daylong trip.

It was up to the airmen to give the planes crew its orders, make sure the plane took off and landed on time and handle any problems along the way.

The C-17 would fly from McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson, where the helicopter was parked in a repository for retired military airplanes known as the boneyard.

So its two and a half hours from McChord to Davis-Monthan, said Col. Bob Buente, reviewing the first leg of the journey. Then four hours to load, then theyll take off about 7:30 tonight. Then five hours to Bangor, then well put them to bed because of the size of the next leg.

From Bangor, Maine, the cargo flight call sign: Reach 140 would leave for Europe, the colonel said.

Since the war in Ukraine began four months ago, the Biden administration has contributed billions of dollars in military aid to the Ukrainian government, including American-made machine guns, howitzers and artillery rocket launchers, as well as Russian-designed weaponry that the countrys military still uses, like the Mi-17 helicopter.

The Pentagon has drawn many of the items from its own inventory. But how they reach Ukraine often involves behind-the-scenes coordination by teams at a military base in Illinois, about 25 miles east of St. Louis.

There at Scott Air Force Base, where a half-dozen retired transport planes are on display just outside the main gate, several thousand logisticians from each branch of the armed forces work at the United States Transportation Command or Transcom. In military parlance, it is a combatant command, equal to better-known units that are responsible for parts of the globe like Central Command and Indo-Pacific Command and takes its orders directly from the secretary of defense.

Transcom has worked out the flow of every shipment of military aid from the United States to Ukraine, which began in August and kicked into high gear after the Russian invasion.

The process begins when the government in Kyiv sends a request to a call center on an American base in Stuttgart, Germany, where a coalition of more than 40 nations coordinates the aid. Some of the orders are filled by a U.S. partner or ally, and the rest are handled by the United States routed through U.S. European Command, which is also in Stuttgart, to Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who discuss them in weekly meetings with the service chiefs and combatant commanders.

If the desired items are available, and the combatant commanders decide that giving them to Ukraine will not unduly harm their own war plans, General Milley makes a recommendation to Mr. Austin, who in turn makes a recommendation to President Biden. If the president signs off, Transcom figures out how to move the aid to an airfield or port near Ukraine.

The order to move the Russian helicopter zipped across the base in Illinois from Transcoms headquarters to a one-story brick building housing the 618th Air Operations Center, where red-lit clocks offered the local time at major military aviation bases in California, Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, Qatar and Germany.

Colonel Buente runs the day-to-day operations at the 618th Air Operations Center, where about 850 active-duty airmen, reservists and civilians spend their days planning missions like the helicopters trip, he said. Making sure those plans are carried out falls to a smaller group working in shifts of 60 people, 24 hours a day, every day of the year that follows the stream of missions posted on a constantly updated screen centered on the back wall all the way to completion.

It is the same center that orchestrated the mass evacuation of Americans and Afghans from Afghanistans capital in August. On the busiest day then, 21,000 passengers were flown out of the Kabul airport, with planes taking off or landing every 90 minutes, officials said.

That was a busy time for Transcom, which on an average day not only plans and coordinates about 450 cargo flights but also oversees about 20 cargo ships, along with a network of transcontinental railroads and more than a thousand trucks all of which routinely carry war matriel.

July 4, 2022, 7:36 p.m. ET

The flights also transport humanitarian assistance and other supplies when needed, including shipments of baby formula in May to alleviate a shortage in the United States.

Commanding all of it is Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost of the Air Force, who is just the second female officer to lead one of the Pentagons 11 combatant commands.

For the aid shipments to Ukraine, the planning begins long before the White House announces a new aid package, she said.

We cannot wait until the president signs or the secretary gives an order before we do the necessary planning, General Van Ovost said in an interview in her office, where a photo of Amelia Earhart hung on the wall. Were watching it evolve, the general said of the discussions about aid, and we create plans that are sitting at the ready.

Mr. Biden authorized the first U.S. military equipment and weapons for Ukraine a $60 million package on Aug. 27. At the time, it took about a month to get the items onto a plane after they were approved, according to General Van Ovost, a test pilot who flew cargo planes.

The White House has announced 13 subsequent aid packages for Ukraine, and the planning process has advanced enough that it now takes less than a day from the president approving a shipment to having the first items loaded onto a plane, she said. Three of the packages in the wars first 29 days totaled $1.35 billion. As of Friday, the United States has committed $6.9 billion in military aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded.

Transcoms operations center decides whether to send aid via cargo plane or by ship based on how quickly European Command needs it to arrive. Though military cargo planes like C-17s offer the fastest delivery option, they incur the highest costs. About half of Transcoms airfreight is handled by a fleet of contracted, commercially owned aircraft, including 747s, each of which can carry double the weight a C-17 can.

Whenever possible, though, military planners send goods on cargo ships, a less expensive option.

Weve activated two vessels and used multiple liner service vessels to deliver cargo bound for Ukraine, said Scott Ross, a spokesman for the command. The vessels and more than 220 flights had delivered just over 19,000 tons of military aid to Ukraine since August, he said.

On one of the large screens in Colonel Buentes operations center, about a dozen missions were listed in order of importance. At the top were two 1A1 missions supporting some of the commands most important customers: the president, vice president, the secretaries of state and defense as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Immediately below those missions was Reach 140, the C-17 flying to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Thousands of aircraft have baked there in the sun, including 13 Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters that the United States had bought for Afghanistan before Kabul fell to the Taliban.

In recent months, 12 of the helicopters were shipped to countries near Ukraine, returned to flying condition and handed over to Ukrainian pilots for the fight with Russia.

As the airmen tracked the C-17, a handful of soldiers and civilians in a small Army-run section of Transcom monitored a separate mission: four cargo trains moving across the United States as well as several cargo ships, some of which were owned by the Navy.

One of the Navy vessels was heading from Norfolk, Va., to a military port in North Carolina, where it would be loaded with ammunition for M142 HIMARS rocket launchers long desired by the Ukrainian military. The rockets, packed in bundles of six and loaded into 20-foot shipping containers, were also en route to the port. Cranes would soon lift the metal boxes off tractor-trailers and rail cars, stack them aboard the ship and lock them into place for a journey at sea lasting about two weeks.

Most of the Pentagons military aid sent to Ukraine on ships goes to two German ports one on the North Sea and the other on the Baltic.

To keep potential adversaries from closing off routes for Ukraine military aid, Army planners can set up operations at any one of dozens of ports on the two seas. Russian warships have largely shut down the most direct routes for resupply missions Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea.

At the 618th, where presidents and secretaries of defense can reassign planes in a heartbeat for emergencies around the world, a screen that usually displays a classified map of global threats to military air and sea shipments was blacked out for security reasons while a reporter was in the room.

And three of the televisions were set to cable news because, as Colonel Buente explained, we usually end up reacting to breaking news.

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How a Military Base in Illinois Helps Keep Weapons Flowing to Ukraine - The New York Times

IN THE EARLY days of the war in Ukraine, a rapid Russian advance plunged Kherson province into darkness. What little is known about life there comes from refugees who dare to escape, reaching relative safety in front-line towns like Zelenodolsk. They come any way they can: by foot, bike, boat, in wheelchairs. One woman was dragged by her son on a carpet. At one point, nearly 1,000 a day were arriving. Destroyed bridges and increased risks mean the daily count has dwindled to single digits. But a vast yard of abandoned bicycles, wheelchairs and baskets on the edge of Zelenodolsk stands as a memorial to the lives left behindtemporarily, so those who have fled hope.

The most recent arrivals talk of intense fighting as Ukraine readies itself to counter-attack from the west, near Mykolaiv, and the north, from towns like Zelenodolsk. Vlad Milin, 31, and Olha Shelemba, 26, said that shelling had become so relentless in their village, Dovhove, they decided to risk everything and travel with their five young children in a boat, then navigate country fields and mined roads to safety. There was little point in watching the battle unfold further, they said. Neither side is going to give up.

Kherson, a gateway to Crimea, is the only regional capital that Russia has managed to capture since the war began on February 24th. Just as important to Russias southern strategy is its occupation of neighbouring Kakhovka, on the left bank of the Dnipro, where a dam provides the annexed peninsulas water. The whole region is an agricultural powerhouse, providing tomatoes, watermelons, sunflowers and soyabeans. For these reasons and more, Ukraine is prioritising efforts to retake it. The countrys forces can already boast tactical successes. A military-intelligence officer says that forward units are now within sniper range (a kilometre or so) of Chornobaivka, an outer suburb of Kherson. The next week or two will be even more interesting, he promises.

Whatever is under way does not yet appear to be a full-fledged counter-offensive. Ukraine remains focussed on halting Russias steady advance in the easton July 2nd, its troops retreated from Lysychansk in Luhansk provinceand its southern grouping does not enjoy the three-to-one advantage strategists recommend for a successful offensive. Soldiers complain of a critical shortage of ammunition and infantry. There is a tendency by our bosses to overstate success on the battlefield, says Banderas, the nom de guerre of a Ukrainian reconnaissance commander. That could change only if more Western rocket systems are used in the southern theatre, he added. Currently only a handful of M777 howitzers are deployed there.

Where the Ukrainians are pushing, the Russians are fighting back hard. Serhiy, a Ukrainian territorial-defence soldier working behind Russian lines in Vysokopillya, just across from Zelenodolsk, says the enemy has built reinforced bunkers under the ground. When they try to push the Russians out, they return in greater numbers. Their ten becomes a hundred, he says. One village base has four air-defence units defending it. Ukraines task has been hindered, the soldier complains, by locals who did not flee the occupation and are being used by Russian troops as human shields: We cant shoot at our own people.

A handful of locals are collaborating with the enemy, he says. Girls as young as 15 have been recruited by the Russians. In early June, Serhiys company discovered a 40-year-old artillery spotter during a random search. The mans near-clean mobile phone gave him away. The phone had just one computer-game app installed. Closer inspection revealed the game was, in fact, a tool to record co-ordinates and receive cryptocurrency payments. The bastard had mapped out our hardware movements over the last month, he says.

The exposed lowlands of Kherson mean that any Ukrainian advance there feels the full force of Russian artillery. There is already talk of serious losses in the areas immediately south of Zelenodolsk. An attempt to cross the Inhulets river at the village of Davydiv Brid in Mayessential for a second-prong attack on Kakhovkawas particularly costly. They were baited into the line of fire, says Victoria, a farmer who lived in Davydiv Brid until it became impossible in mid-May. A lot of our men lost their lives.

The 38-year-old fidgets as she recounts her own escape. The cue to leave came when Grad rockets landed in the farmyard. She jumped in a car and joined a convoy of a hundred vehicles that had been waiting to pass over the bridge, which has since been destroyed. Russian soldiers gave the go-ahead to cross, but as the convoy approached Ukrainian positions on the other side, it was shelled. To this day, it is unclear who fired. Ukrainian authorities say between 20 and 50 people died. Their bodies have not been recovered.

Lucky to be alive, Victoria has not moved far from danger. She is again living near the front line in Zelenodolsk, housed there by local volunteers. Like many of Khersons mostly poor refugees, she has no money for anything else. She left everything behind in the village: her house, her cows, her chickens.

But she insists that not all the Russian soldiers were villains, and she even felt sorry for the youngest ones. Some were fellow Ukrainians, conscripted after going out to buy bread in occupied Luhansk, in the east. Those boys paid for everything they took from the village shop, she saysfirst in hryvnia, later in roublesand even said thank you in Ukrainian. But when Russian positions came under serious attack, the Luhansk units were fortified with angrier colleagues from Russia itself.

The shifting attitudes in Davydiv Brid offer a warning of what may happen in Kherson if Ukraines counter-offensive gathers pace. Anton, the pseudonym of a former official who fled to Krivyi Rih in late May after being asked to head a collaborationist authority, says Russia has generally tried not to upset locals too much. This was a conscious decision to co-opt the population, he said. But if that changes and the occupiers are forced out of Kherson, there is little to hold them back. Things will turn nasty, and quickly. The Russians will be angry as hell, and lash out, but the partisan resistance will be just as fierce, he said. The locals will simply tear the Russians apart.

Clarification (July 4th 2022): The sentence about the location of Ukraines forward units has been edited for clarity since publication, to avoid any possible misreadings.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

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Ukraine prepares a counter-offensive to retake Kherson province - The Economist

As of late May, in the three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, 6.8 million refugees had fled the war into other countries. The majority, some 3.6 million people, headed to Poland, while another million went to Romania. European Union nations and others began offering visa waivers and other schemes to help Ukrainians. The UK, for example, is currently home to about 60,000 refugees from Ukraine.

Further east of Europe, the people of Afghanistan are experiencing conflict which has lasted for over 40 years. More than 2.6 million Afghan refugees are registered with the UNs refugee agency alone, with an increasing number of people fleeing the country in the wake of the Taliban takeover.

Do people think that refugees from one of these two countries deserve more help than the other? Are peoples views mirroring the racist double standards that characterised much of the coverage of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East? We set out to find out what the British public believes. Caught between their desire to show solidarity for people affected by war and their evergreen concerns that too many people are coming to the UK, legally or illegally, we wanted to know how recent events have shaped their views.

To do this, we conducted an online survey, as part of ongoing research, with a representative sample of 1,690 adults in Great Britain contacted via YouGov. Among other questions, we asked respondents:

do you agree or disagree that we should let refugees fleeing conflict-affected areas come and stay in the UK?

To get to the core of the matter, however, we actually deployed three slightly different versions of this question, with each respondent only seeing one. In one version, we asked the question as it is, in one further version, we added a reference to Ukraine as the conflict-afflicted area, and in a third version, Afghanistan was used as the example.

For people receiving the neutral version of the question, levels of support for helping refugees were high, with 71% agreeing that the refugees should be allowed to come and stay in the UK. We found similar levels of agreement when we ask about Ukrainian refugees, with 70% of respondents agreeing we should help.

However, in the version where we ask about Afghan refugees, the proportion of respondents agreeing that we should help dropped by a staggering 21% to 50%. The difference is statistically significant and shows a specific, rather than universal, feeling of responsibility among the UK public.

We investigated this interesting gap by comparing the responses we got for a series of political and demographic groups. The gap between support for helping refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan is at its largest for those respondents who voted Conservative at the last general election. Of all Conservative voters, 67% thought we should let refugees come and stay in the UK, compared with 65% when we used the Ukraine frame, and only 36% with the Afghanistan frame.

This is not to say we didnt find a gap with Labour voters, but it was much smaller. In this group, 81% said that the UK should let refugees come and stay, compared to 82% for those who received the Ukraine question, and 76% with the Afghanistan frame.

Overall, there is a 21% gap for the general population, which grows to 31% for Conservative voters, and shrinks to 5% for Labour voters.

The smallest gap is observed among young respondents aged 18 to 24. In this group, 58% thought we should help when asked with the neutral frame, 60% with the Ukraine frame, and 59% with the Afghanistan frame. So, while the gap is almost gone, support levels for helping refugees, in general, were also lower than for older groups in our sample.

For all those optimist proponents of a reawakening public spirit favouring international cooperation and solidarity in the face of conflicts, pandemics or perhaps even climate change, these results are a reminder that there are limits beyond surface shifts in the public mood.

The war in Ukraine has clearly prompted British people to think about their role in helping those who suffer and to build a fairer world. But charities, NGOs, and governments, through their efforts, are apparently still not able to bridge the gap in the publics mind between the specific case of Ukraine and the broader cause of helping all those afflicted by conflicts worldwide.

To better understand what is driving the sense of exceptionalism regarding Ukraine, we might look to the higher levels of media attention that are currently being given to the crisis there. Another factor may be a perceived cultural or social nearness to Ukrainians (or, conversely, a sense of distance from or even racism towards Afghan refugees). Its also possible that British people are more open to helping Ukrainians because their plight leaves them with a stronger sense that something similar could happen to them.

Thinking it could be me will move many to take action, but it wont give us the chance to engender the radical change in our care for all people around the world. Once the emergency is over in Ukraine, the work to make the world a place without suffering will still go on.

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Ukraine: survey shows British people, and especially Tory voters, feel very differently about some refugees than others - The Conversation