Blog entry by Myles Towle
Daniel Kebede (centre) has been outspoken on his political stances - including a statement after threats from Russian president Vladimir Putin against Ukraine where he criticised Nato involvement in the conflict
"Now the fifth rescue mission is nearing its completion. It was special regarding the number of children we managed to return and also because of its complexity," said Mykola Kuleba, the founder of the Save Ukraine humanitarian organisation that helped arrange the rescue mission.
He had initially vowed to stay put in Kyiv despite the constant blaring of air raid sirens and attacks on residential buildings, but decided to leave after hearing reports of Russian soldiers 'raping' Ukrainian women.
Earlier, the corpses were transported by ambulances and loaded on Russian trains. After someone made a video about it and it went on the Internet, the bodies were loaded at night so as not to attract attention.'
'I realise I hadn't had an education, and I tried some side jobs, 9-5 jobs and none of it worked. So I did a bit of study on how to work in something you love. That was social media, and it's really started to take off in the last year.'
The country's despot Alexander Lukashenko supports Putin's war and allowed a deployment of major Russian military units in the country. An unknown number of Russian troops moved south towards Ukraine's capital Kyiv from Homel.
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Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer from a Ukrainian NGO called Regional Centre for Human Rights, told the briefing they were collecting evidence to build a case that Russian officials deliberately prevented return of the Ukrainian children.
The estimated Russian death toll is of a scale similar to that of the Battle of Iwo Jima, where 6,852 US troops were killed and 19,000 were wounded during five weeks of fighting Japanese forces in the most intense phase of the Pacific theatre of World War Two
Now Belarusian medical staff in Homel, in southeastern Belarus, have described ‘overflowing' morgues, online english language lessons with one resident of the city Mazyr claiming: ‘Passengers at the Mazyr train station were shocked by the number of corpses being loaded on the train. After people started shooting video, the military caught them and ordered them to remove it.'
Video posted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty shows military ambulances driving through the Belarusian city of Homel, with employees at the region's clinical hospital alleging more than 2,500 bodies have been shipped back to Russia
Video posted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty shows military ambulances driving through the Belarusian city of Homel in early March, with employees at the region's clinical hospital claiming more than 2,500 bodies have already been shipped back to Russia as of March 13.
According to one US intelligence estimate, 7,000 Russian troops including four generals have already been killed - more than the number of American troops killed in either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars at 4,825 and 3,576 respectively - and between 14,000 and 21,000 troops have been injured in the fighting.
UKRAINE/BELARUS BORDER, April 8 (Reuters) - More than 30 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this weekend after a long operation to bring them back home from Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea, where they had been taken from areas occupied by Russian forces during the war.
The three said they had been separated from their parents who were pressured by Russian authorities to send their children to Russian summer camps for what was billed as two weeks, from occupied parts of Kherson and Kharkiv regions.
The International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant for online math for 6th grade Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
Lvova-Belova said earlier this week that her commission acted on humanitarian grounds to protect the interests of children in an area where military action was taking place and had not moved anyone against their will or that of their parents or legal guardians, whose consent was always sought unless they were missing.
Moscow has not concealed a programme under which it has taken thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied areas, but presents this it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.