👋 Anyeong haseyo!*
Welcome to Friday, where Gaza ceasefire talks have collapsed, Zelensky fires his personal security unit and Xi Jinping wraps up his European tour with a friendly face in Budapest. We also hear from a surgeon and emergency medic from the town of Chasiv Yar, where Ukrainians are trying to hold off Russian advances.
*\[\*Korean\]*
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🗞️ FRONT PAGE
Argentine daily La Nación features on its front page an image of Buenos Aires’s Retiro train station, which is an “image of total paralysis.” On Thursday, workers began a general strike against the austerity policy of President Javier Milei. The strike has affected most of Argentina, with schools, banks, shops and transport services all being affected. Milei, who came into power in December, has started to implement spending cuts he says are necessary to reduce public deficit and control Argentina’s inflation rate, which is the highest in the world.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Israeli forces bombarded areas of Rafah as ceasefire talks have broken down. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also dismissed U.S. President Joe Biden's threat to withhold weapons from Israel if it assaults the southern Gaza city. Meanwhile, the UN General Assembly is set to back a Palestinian bid to become a full member, with the prospect of recognizing Palestine as qualified to join the United Nations.
• Volodymyr Zelensky has fired the head of his personal protection unit. This comes after two of the unit’s top officials were detained over an alleged assassination plot against the Ukrainian president. Serhiy Rud has led the president's security detail since 2019.
• The Philippines' national security adviser calls for Chinese diplomats to be expelled. This comes amid an alleged leak of a phone conversation with a Filipino admiral in a significant escalation of a longstanding row over territorial rights in the South China Sea. China's embassy in Manila had orchestrated "repeated acts of engaging and dissemination of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation," with the objective of spreading division, the national security advisor, Eduardo Ano, said in a statement.
• Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced a cabinet reshuffle. The changes announced Friday include the coordinator of special services Tomasz Siemoniak taking on the additional post of interior minister. The reshuffle was forced as four ministers in the pro-European coalition government led by Tusk's Civic Coalition (KO) are stepping down to run in European Parliament elections in June. Tusk said a major task of his government was to make state-owned enterprises more efficient.
• Military leader Mahamat Idriss Deby has won a closely watched presidential election in Chad. Deby secured more than 61% of the vote, eliminating the need for a run-off with his closest rival, Prime Minister Succès Masra, who received 18.5%.
• Greece will start bringing in workers from Egypt to tackle a labor shortage. This deal between the two countries should help the Greek economy, already forecast to grow nearly 3% this year, far outpacing the euro zone average of 0.8%. But an exodus of workers during Greece's economic crisis, a shrinking population and strict migration rules have left the country struggling to find tens of thousands of workers to fill vacancies in farming, tourism, construction and other sectors.
• Israeli singer Eden Golan has qualified for the final of the Eurovision Song Contest after protests. Her victory in an online vote of the public came hours after thousands of pro-Palestinian protestors gathered in the streets of Malmö, Sweden, where the contest is being held, protesting Israel’s participation in the competition over the war in Gaza. The night before, the 20-year-old singer had been booed during dress rehearsals.
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
104,000
Some 104,00 packs of sliced white bread have been pulled from shelves in Japan. The bread, made by the Pasco Shikishima Corporation, one of Japan’s most popular and well-known bread brands, has been recalled after remains of a rat were found in at least two packets. There have been no reports of illness because of the contamination and the company has apologized and issued refunds.
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
Chasiv Yar Diary: A Ukrainian Surgeon's 10 Years On The Front Line
After going on humanitarian missions in Kenya and Rwanda, Ukrainian surgeon Evgeniy Tkachev returned home in 2014 when the Donbas war broke out. For Russian independent media Important Stories, Katya Alexander recounts his experiences as a medical volunteer then and now, as his hometown of Chasiv Yar is being stormed by Russian troops.
⛪️ I was born, baptized and married all in Chasiv Yar. Two of my children and four grandchildren were born here. We are a family of believers, Pentecostal Christians, and it is important for us to help others. I chose this profession. I worked as a veterinarian. I then retrained in human purulent surgery and went on humanitarian missions in Kenya and Rwanda. I spent thousands of dollars to go to Africa to help people, but in 2014 what was happening in Africa came to us in the East of Ukraine. I evacuated my family to Kyiv and began to transport the wounded from front-line zones.
🇺🇦 On February 15, 2015, I joined up with the Ukrainian military and slipped into Debaltseve. As I drove up to the village of Lohvynove, there were cars burning, corpses on the ground and Russians walking around with white bandages on their shoulders. They slowed me down, but I had on a white T-shirt with a red cross, and there were also medical stickers on my car. The Russians asked me: “Are you from the Red Cross?” I mumbled something incomprehensible, they opened the car and inside there were wounded, sick and disabled people. A soldier waved his hand and said: “Go on and get through quickly!”
⛑ I can’t even tell you how many people I have evacuated over 10 years. Thousands? Tens of thousands? From the very beginning I came to a decision for myself, and I continue to do this thanks to that decision. But seeing your hometown like this and knowing that it could be captured hurts. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I never allowed myself to even think that Chasiv Yar could be occupied, and I firmly held the position that we must recapture our territories to the last. I have since changed my mind.
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📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
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📣 VERBATIM
“If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone. If we need to, we will fight with our fingernails. But we have much more than fingernails.”
— Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement last Thursday that a U.S. threat to withhold arms would not prevent Israel from continuing its Gaza offensive, indicating that Israel may proceed with an all-out invasion of Rafah despite opposition from its biggest ally. U.S. President Joe Biden has urged Israel not to go ahead with the operation over fears of it exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and has said certain weapons will be cut off if the Rafah assault happens.
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✍️ Newsletter by *mma Albright and Ione Gildroy ***
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