gedaliyah

Noticed this in 148.0 for desktop

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/48254733

Ksenia Koldin, having just turned 18, managed to recover her brother Sergii after he had been in a re-education camp and was taken in by a Russian family

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Ksenia and Sergii’s journey is similar to that of thousands of other Ukrainian children following the start of the Russian occupation. The difference is that their case had a happy ending. The Ukrainian government has identified more than 19,500 children deported or forcibly removed from their homes by Russian authorities since February 2022, although it estimates the number is much higher — Yale University puts the figure as high as 35,000. Kyiv accuses Moscow of kidnapping these children and brainwashing them as part of a systematic campaign to destroy the country’s future. It is for this practice that the International Criminal Court is seeking the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for the rights of the child, Maria Lvova-Belova.

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According to records from the Ukrainian presidential program Bring Kids Back, only 2,003 children have managed to return. The effort is a combined one: Ukrainian authorities are working on it, but so are non-profit organizations, private individuals, lawyers, and even third countries that mediate to recover the children. In Sergii’s case, his sister’s tenacity was fundamental. By the time she left her training course in Shebekino, the boy was in foster care with a Russian family in Abinsk, in the Krasnodar region. As soon as these new parents learned that Koldin wanted to take him, they tried to sever all communication between the two siblings.

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“I was able to hug him, but he was very distant, he seemed nervous, as if he were hiding something from me,” Koldin recounts. The adoptive family was present. It was May 2023. When the social services officer asked Sergii if he wanted to return, he said no. Koldin asked to see her brother alone. The blow was devastating. “He told me he wouldn’t go back because the Nazis ruled Ukraine and there was a war, it was a dangerous country,” she relates. But she stayed with him; they talked for more than three hours. She told him she missed him, that they had to be together. Finally, she offered him a month with her as a sort of trial period, and if he decided he wanted to return to Russia, she would let him. The boy agreed.

More than two years later, the two siblings are living in Kyiv. He, at 14, lives with a Ukrainian family and is continuing his studies at high school. She is in her third year of a journalism degree. “Sergii doesn’t talk about Russia anymore,” says Koldin, “I think he’s happy because he’s always smiling.”

— And you?

— Me too.

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Crowds of Iranian-Americans took to the streets of Westwood on Saturday to celebrate the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran and the reported formation of a provisional government by opposition groups, marking a moment many said they never expected to witness in their lifetimes.

Celebrations spilled into the streets near Persian Square with people waving Iranian flags, honking car horns and chanting in joy. Some danced in the streets, expressing hope for a freer Iran.

This week, the Atlantic staff writer Elaine Godfrey was covering a campaign rally in Texas when she was ushered out. Elaine has been covering national politics for years, and has been turned away before—but, she says that has usually happened to her at Trump rallies. This time, she was turned away by a Democrat running in a Senate primary.

Representative Jasmine Crockett is known for her confrontational style, and it serves her well with her constituents, voters, and Democrats who are tired of playing nice when Republicans don’t. Last year, Godfrey profiled Crockett for The Atlantic, a story that Crockett tried to “shut down” when she found out her House colleagues were being interviewed. “Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there,” Godfrey wrote at the time. Is that where the rest of the party might be heading? We talked to Godfrey about her experience at the rally and the upcoming primary election in Texas.

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"The assistance that the President of the United States had promised to the brave people of Iran has now arrived," Pahlavi posted in a video statement. "This is a humanitarian intervention, and its target is the Islamic Republic, its apparatus of repression, and its machinery of killing—not the country and great nation of Iran."

The U.S. and Iran have launched a massive joint military operation in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime, which has been in power since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

"The goal is to create all the conditions for the downfall of the Iranian regime, but developments will also depend on the extent to which the Iranian people rise up," an Israeli official said.

The FBI subpoenaed records of phone calls made by Kash Patel and Susie Wiles, now the FBI director and White House Chief of Staff, when they were both private citizens in 2022 and 2023 during the federal probe of Donald Trump, Patel told Reuters on Wednesday.

Reuters is the first to report on the FBI’s actions that took place during the Biden administration, largely when Special Counsel Jack Smith was investigating whether Trump had interfered with the 2020 election and had hidden classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, according to Patel. Smith was appointed to take over that probe in November 2022.

Four armed Cubans aboard a Florida-registered speedboat died in a gunfight with Cuban border troops near the island nation’s coast on Wednesday, the local authorities said.

The gunfight also wounded six others on the speedboat after it entered Cuba’s territorial waters, Cuba’s Interior Ministry said.

The 10 men on the speedboat were Cuban citizens living in the United States, according to a Cuban state media report, citing a statement from the Interior Ministry. The report said that “preliminary declarations” by men detained from the boat indicated that they were intent on “an infiltration with terrorist ends.” The statement did not specify how the government arrived at that conclusion.