The International Atomic Energy Agency said on August 12 that its representatives inspected a damaged cooling tower at the Russia-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant in Ukraine.  But the question remains: Who did the damage? Mariia Prus has the story.
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Ukrainians are reacting with skepticism to the latest claims that Ukraine may be linked to the attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022. The allegations are also raising concerns about Ukraine’s relations with Western allies. Anna Chernikova reports from Kyiv. Videographers: Serhii Rozov, Vladyslav Smilianets
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PORTICELLO, Italy — Search efforts off the coast of Sicily for two remaining bodies missing from the sunken yacht belonging to the wife of British tech magnate Mike Lynch were due to resume early on Thursday.

On Wednesday four bodies were retrieved from the wreck and transported to nearby hospitals, in the city of Palermo.

A source said a fifth body might have been located late on Wednesday, but the fire brigade and the coast guard, overseeing the operations, did not confirm this.

Italian authorities did not officially identify the corpses, but Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported that two of the dead were Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter. Italy’s Corriere della Sera said the only bodies identified so far were Morgan Stanley banker Jonathan Bloomer and U.S. lawyer Chris Morvillo.

The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-meter-long superyacht carrying 22 passengers and crew, was anchored off the port of Porticello, near Palermo, when it disappeared beneath the waves in a matter of minutes after a fierce storm struck.

Fifteen people, including Lynch’s wife, managed to escape the boat before it capsized, while the body of the onboard chef, Canadian-Antiguan national Recaldo Thomas, was found near the wreck hours after the disaster.

Operations have been challenging due to the depth and the narrowness of the places that the divers are scouring, the fire brigade said in a statement.

It compared the efforts to those carried out, on a larger scale, for the Costa Concordia, the luxury cruise liner that capsized off the Italian island of Giglio in January 2012, killing 32 people.

Unsinkable

The disaster has baffled naval marine experts who said such a vessel, built by Italian high-end yacht manufacturer Perini and presumed to have top-class fittings and safety features, should have been able to withstand such weather.

Prosecutors in the nearby town of Termini Imerese have opened an investigation and authorities have started questioning passengers and witnesses.

The captain and crew have made no official comment on the disaster.

Giovanni Constantino, CEO of the Italian Sea Group TISGR.MI, which includes Perini, said the Bayesian was “one of the safest boats in the world” and basically unsinkable.

He added that he believed the disaster was caused by a chain of human mistakes and that the storm had been expected, in interviews with Italian media.

“The ship sank because it took on water, from where investigators will have to say,” Costantino told television news program TG1 late on Wednesday.

Citing data from the yacht’s automatic tracking and based on available footage, Costantino said it took 16 minutes from when the wind began buffeting the yacht and it began taking on water for it to sink.

Costantino said the Milan-listed group had suffered “enormous damage” to its reputation, with shares falling 2.5% since the disaster.
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WASHINGTON — A new Ukrainian law aimed at removing the influence of the pro-Moscow Russian Orthodox Church enjoys broad popular support in Ukraine but is being viewed with reservations by international advocates for religious freedom.

Passed on Tuesday by Ukraine’s parliament, the law banning religious organizations that maintain ties to Moscow follows years of controversy over ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The law empowers a government office, the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience, to scrutinize religious organizations for possible connections with Russia. If connections are found, the SSU will first issue a prescription to eliminate the violations. If the ties remain, the office will go to court to stop the religious organization’s activities.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to sign the law. He congratulated lawmakers for passing the legislation “regarding our spiritual independence,” saying that they will “continue strengthening Ukraine and our society.”

The Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations, which represents more than 90% of Ukrainian religious communities, welcomed the law’s adoption.

“We categorically condemn activities of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has become an accomplice to the Russian invaders’ bloody crimes against humanity, which sanctifies weapons of mass destruction and openly declares the need to destroy Ukrainian statehood, culture, identity, and, more recently, Ukrainians themselves,” it said in a statement.

The Russian Orthodox Church operates only in Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine and in some monasteries directly subordinated to it. So, the ban will mostly apply to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which, according to the Ukrainian authorities, still maintains its ties to the ROC. After the Russian invasion in 2022, the UOC claimed that it broke those ties.

According to a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology conducted in May, 83% of Ukrainian citizens believe that the state should intervene in the activities of the UOC; 63% of respondents want it to be banned.

Religious freedom critics

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent agency responsible for reviewing possible violations of religious freedom abroad and making policy recommendations to the U.S. administration and Congress, has expressed concern about the law’s impact on Ukraine’s regular faithful.

“The most recent version of the law does not fully address prior concerns about the law’s potential to impose collective punishments on entire religious communities. It also introduced new problematic aspects that could compromise the protection of freedom of religion or belief and freedom of expression,” says a statement that USCIRF Chair Stephen Schneck sent to VOA.

The commission said it will monitor the law’s implementation after it goes into effect and urged Ukrainian authorities “to ensure that the legislation complies with Ukraine’s commitments under international law.”

Mónika Palotai, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Religious Freedom Institute, called the legislation “divisive.”

“It divides people. It divides the international community. There will be questions about what will happen to those people who belong to this church. What choices do they have?”

Viktor Yelensky, head of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience, told VOA that Ukraine will adhere to its laws and international obligations.

“Ukraine is not North Korea,” Yelensky said. “The procedure established by this law is quite democratic. The organization in question can challenge our demands in court at various stages. Only the court can stop the activities of the structures of the UOC if it does not want to sever ties with the Russian Orthodox Church.”

Most Ukrainian Orthodox Christians belong to parishes with no affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church.

After centuries in which the Russian Orthodox Church was the predominant Christian denomination in Ukraine, represented by the Ukrainian Exarchate, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church established itself as a separate entity in 1990 while maintaining relations with the Russian church.

In May 2022, its leaders announced their complete independence from the Moscow-based church, which has been a strong supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy of conquering Ukraine.

According to a survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, only 4% of Ukraine’s population identifies with the UOC. UOC claims that the true number is higher.

There is another Orthodox Christian church in the country — the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which was granted independence by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 2019. Since then, many parishes and individuals have switched their affiliation from UOC to OCU, and the process continues.

The UOC spokesperson, Metropolitan Kliment, insisted that the new law will deny Ukrainian citizens and UOC believers the freedom of conscience and religious beliefs. He said that lawmakers ignored appeals from Ukrainian soldiers faithful to this church and targeted the UOC for ties with Moscow that do not exist.

“There are no Moscow churches in Ukraine. Our Church has been operating in Ukraine since time immemorial, and its priests and millions of believers are conscious citizens of Ukraine, not imported from abroad. We did not elect this Verkhovna Rada [parliament] so that it would take away our churches during the war, as the Russians do in the occupied territories,” he wrote to VOA.

In March 2024, the Moscow Patriarchate officially declared the war in Ukraine “holy.” The “World Russian People’s Council” issued a decree which said that “the entire territory of modern Ukraine should fall under the exclusive influence of Russia.”

The UOC, in its statement published the next day categorically rejected and condemned that declaration: “Instead of providing ideological support and justification for Russia’s military aggression and intervention in Ukraine, we believe that the Orthodox Church in Russia should have raised her voice against this war of aggression.”

However, since the beginning of the Russian invasion, Ukrainian authorities have opened criminal cases against more than 100 clergy members of the UOC for such crimes as treason, collaborationism, aiding and abetting the aggressor country and the sale of firearms.

Ukrainian MP Mykyta Poturaiev, the chairman of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, which worked on this legislation, told VOA that the law doesn’t ban the UOC. Its latest version, adopted this week, established an extended grace period of nine months for Ukrainian organizations that still have ties with Russia to sever them and decide on their future.

“They can establish a dialogue with Istanbul, with the Patriarch of Constantinople, or they can establish a dialogue with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine,” he said.

He insisted that the law doesn’t target religious customs or beliefs but only collaboration with the enemy. “It would be strange if we allowed the FSB or another Russian state body to operate in Ukraine now because they are enemies,” he said.

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian theologian and professor at University College Stockholm, says the challenge posed by the Russian Orthodox Church is not unique to Ukraine but is more urgent there than elsewhere.

“All European countries with a sizeable presence of the Moscow Patriarchate face the same dilemma: how to neutralize its influence without violating human rights.”

He said no single country, including Ukraine, has come up with an ideal solution.

“Nevertheless, the adopted law features mechanisms that help contain the damaging Russian influence without damaging the freedom of religion in the country,” he told VOA. 
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kyiv, ukraine — Ukraine said Wednesday that it had destroyed Russian pontoon bridges with U.S.-made weapons to defend its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, while Moscow said its forces had halted Kyiv’s advance there and had gained ground in eastern Ukraine. 

Kyiv has announced a string of battlefield successes since it crossed unexpectedly into the Kursk region on August 6. Moscow has steadily inched forward in eastern Ukraine, pressuring troops worn down by 2½ years of fighting. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s military was responding to the Russian push by strengthening its forces around Pokrovsk, the focus of Russian advances in eastern Ukraine. 

Speaking in one of his regular televised addresses, he also urged Kyiv’s allies to honor commitments to send munitions for use by the Ukrainian armed forces. 

“This is fundamental for defense,” he said. 

Ukraine has closely guarded its overarching aims in the Kursk region but said it had carved out a buffer zone from an area Russia has used to pound targets in Ukraine with cross-border strikes. 

A video posted by Ukrainian special forces showed strikes on several pontoon crossings in the Kursk region, where Russia has reported that Ukraine has destroyed at least three bridges over the Seym River as it seeks to hold the captured land. 

“Where do Russian pontoon bridges ‘disappear’ in the Kursk region? Operators … accurately destroy them,” Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said on the Telegram messenger. 

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry has said Kyiv has made bigger territorial gains in the Kursk region than Moscow has made in Ukraine this year. Russia has called the incursion an escalation. 

Ukraine smashed through the Russian border in the Kursk region on August 6 in an attempt to force Moscow to divert troops from the rest of the front, though Russian forces have continued to advance in recent days. 

Russia took the settlement of Zhelanne, which lies less than 20 km to the east of the transport hub Pokrovsk, according to the Russian defense ministry.  

Both sides reported being targeted by major drone attacks. Ukraine said it intercepted 50 of 69 drones launched by Russia; Moscow said its air defenses destroyed 45 drones over Russian territory, including 11 over the Moscow region. 

Reporting back to Moscow, Major General Apti Alaudinov, commander of Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces and the deputy head of the defense ministry’s military-political department, said Russia had stalled the Ukrainian incursion. 

“We halted them and started pushing them back,” Alaudinov told Rossiya state television. He said Ukrainian forces were regrouping and could soon launch a new attack, though he gave no further details. 

Russia has repeatedly said the Ukrainian offensive has been halted. Ukraine has kept touting gains, saying it has captured 92 settlements over an area of more than 1,250 square km. 

The Ukrainian military, which has not made significant gains on its own soil since late 2022, has gotten a much needed morale boost from the incursion. 

Roman Kostenko, secretary of the Ukrainian parliament’s national defense committee, said Russia’s priority remained to capture the Donetsk region despite the incursion and that it was not pulling forces from near Pokrovsk to act as reinforcements.  

Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank in Kyiv, said attacks on bridges and pontoons would help Ukraine build a defensive line along the river. 

“This is an opportunity to make it more stable, systemic, ready to repel Russian attacks,” he said in remarks on national television.  

Reuters confirmed that all of the strike locations of pontoon bridges shown in the video were on or near the Seym River in the Kursk region.  

The video also showed drone strikes on military trucks and other locations described as a Russian munitions warehouse and an electronic warfare complex in the region. Other locations or the date when the video was filmed could not be independently verified. 

Separately, Reuters was able to verify that at least one pontoon crossing was apparently destroyed.  

The Ukrainian statement said U.S.-manufactured HIMARS rocket systems had been used as part of operations to disrupt Russian logistics in the Kursk region, Kyiv’s first official statement acknowledging its use of the weapon during its incursion. 

Washington has not commented directly on the use of U.S.-made weapons in the Kursk region, while saying U.S. policies have not changed and Ukraine was defending itself from Russia’s ongoing all-out invasion. 

While allies have barred Ukraine from conducting long-range strikes with Western weapons inside Russia, they have allowed Kyiv to use them to hit border areas since Russia’s new offensive on Kharkiv region this spring.
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A Greek-flagged oil tanker traveling through the Red Sea came under repeated attack Wednesday, leaving the vessel “not under command” and drifting ablaze after an assault suspected to have been carried out by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, the British military said.

The attack, the most serious in the Red Sea in weeks, comes during a monthslong campaign by Houthis targeting ships over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip that has disrupted a trade route through which $1 trillion in cargo typically passes each year.

In the attack, men on small boats first opened fire with small arms about 140 kilometers (90 miles) west of the rebel-held Yemeni port city of Hodeida, the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said.

Four projectiles also hit the ship, it added. It wasn’t immediately clear if that meant drones or missiles.

“The vessel reports being not under command,” the UKMTO said, likely meaning it lost all power. “No casualties reported.”

Later, the UKMTO warned the ship was drifting while on fire in the Red Sea.

The Greek shipping ministry later identified the vessel as the tanker Sounion, which had 25 crew members on board at the time of the attack as it traveled from Iraq to Cyprus.

The Houthis did not immediately claim responsibility for the attack, though it can take them hours or even days before they acknowledge their assaults.

The Houthis have targeted more than 80 vessels with missiles and drones since the war in Gaza started in October. They seized one vessel and sank two in the campaign that also killed four sailors.

Other missiles and drones have either been intercepted by a U.S.-led coalition in the Red Sea or failed to reach their targets.

The rebels maintain that they target ships linked to Israel, the United States or the U.K. to force an end to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the conflict, including some bound for Iran.

The Houthis have also launched drones and missiles toward Israel, including an attack on July 19 that killed one person and wounded 10 others in Tel Aviv. Israel responded the next day with airstrikes on Hodeida that hit fuel depots and electrical stations, killing and wounding a number of people, the rebels say.

After the strikes, the Houthis paused their attacks until Aug. 3, when they hit a Liberian-flagged container ship traveling through the Gulf of Aden. A Liberian-flagged oil tanker came under a particularly intense series of attacks beginning Aug. 8, likely carried out by the rebels. A similar attack happened Aug. 13 as well.

The last three recent attacks, including Wednesday’s, targeted vessels associated with Delta Tankers, a Greek company.

As Iran threatens to retaliate against Israel over the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, the U.S. military told the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to sail more quickly to the area. America also has ordered the USS Georgia guided missile submarine into the Mideast, while the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier strike group was in the Gulf of Oman.

Additional F-22 fighter jets have flown into the region and the USS Wasp, a large amphibious assault ship carrying F-35 fighter jets, is in the Mediterranean Sea.
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New Delhi — Ahead of a visit to Ukraine, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for an early return to peace and stability and said he will “share perspectives” on a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Modi will travel to Kyiv on Friday after visiting Poland. He will hold talks with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy weeks after a visit by the Indian prime minister to its longstanding partner Moscow drew sharp criticism from the Ukrainian leader.

Modi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July on a day when Russian missiles struck multiple targets including a children’s hospital in Kyiv killing many civilians.

The Indian leader had called the death of children heart-wrenching, but images of Modi hugging Putin were embarrassing, according to analysts.

“The optics of the Russia visit were not good. So, the effort by going to Ukraine is to show that India is not just taking a passive position on the conflict but wants to actively help in a settlement,” said Manoj Joshi, distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

Zelenskyy had said that it was a “huge disappointment and a devastating blow to peace efforts” to see Modi hug “the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day.”

Modi will be the first Indian prime minister to visit Ukraine since the two countries established diplomatic ties.

“As a friend and partner, we hope for an early return of peace and stability in the region,” Modi said in a statement on Wednesday before leaving New Delhi. He said his trip will be a “natural continuation of extensive contacts” between India and Ukraine.

Modi met Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit held in Italy in June. In March this year, Ukraine’s foreign minister visited the Indian capital in a bid to give momentum to their political and economic ties.

India has not joined its Western allies in directly holding the Kremlin responsible for the war, but it has been urging the two nations to resolve their conflict through dialogue and diplomacy.

The Indian foreign ministry said on Monday that India has “substantive and independent ties” with both Russia and Ukraine and was ready to support the negotiation of a peace settlement.

“India has high credibility with Russia,’’ analyst Joshi told VOA. ‘’So the hope is that it can play some kind of a mediatory role and can raise issues with Moscow directly.’’

The visit is also seen as an effort by India to balance its growing ties with Western countries with its refusal to join them in isolating its decades-long partner Russia.

Following the Modi-Putin summit, the United States State Department said it had raised concerns with India about its relationship with Russia and hoped it would use its ties with Moscow to firmly encourage the Kremlin to adhere to the United Nations charter.

Since the conflict began more than two years ago, India has abstained from all U.N. votes against Russia and become one of the biggest buyers of Russian oil as it continues to trade with Moscow.

Analysts say New Delhi’s big challenge is to convince the West and Kyiv that its friendship with Russia is not an endorsement of Putin’s Ukraine policy.

“India is walking the tightrope,’’ Joshi said. ‘’As the war continues and even becomes more intense, it brings more pressure on New Delhi and the Indian position stands out starkly, especially as the Western position on Russia hardens.”

Modi’s visit to Poland, the first by an Indian Prime Minister to the country in 40 years, is expected to focus on strengthening economic and political cooperation. He will meet both Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Andrzej Duda, according to the foreign ministry.

Analysts say Modi’s visit to the two countries – Poland and Ukraine – is also part of India’s efforts to increase its engagement with countries in central and eastern Europe as it tries to raise its global profile.
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