Media Port

Kyiv:  A number of Ukrainian cities plan to rename streets and squares associated with Russia under a process of "derussification" following Moscow's invasion. A day after the dismantling of a huge Soviet-era monument in Kyiv that was meant to symbolise friendship between Russia and Ukraine, the city council said on Wednesday it had compiled a list of 467 locations that could be considered for renaming. They included a central square named after 19th century writer Leo Tolstoy and a street named Russia's Lake Baikal. A road named after Minsk, the capital of close Russian ally Belarus, was also on the list. Since Ukraine declared independence of the Soviet Union in 1991, the names of some cities have been changed to erase the legacy of hated Soviet officials. Some officials now want to remove the names of Russian authors, poets and mountain ranges. Ihor Terekhov, mayor of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, said on Wednesday that as soon as the war with Russia was o...

  Jenin, Palestine:  Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man in the West Bank flashpoint city of Jenin Wednesday, in what the army called its latest "counterterrorism" raid following a series of attacks in Israel since late March. The army said that during the operation at Jenin's refugee camp, troops used "live ammunition" after being targeted with gunfire and explosives by Palestinian "rioters". The Palestinian health ministry identified the man killed as Ahmad Massad, 18, from Burqin village in the north of the occupied West Bank. He was shot in the head, a hospital official told the official Palestinian news agency WAFA. The army said 12 people were arrested in the overnight raids at several West Bank locations. The Palestinian Prisoner's Club group put the number of arrests at 17. More than a thousand people gathered for Massad's funeral in Burqin, and masked gunmen fired volleys into the air as his body was taken from his family home. A b...

  Kyiv:  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday welcomed EU plans to suspend import duties on Ukrainian goods, saying the move will help "maintain" Kyiv's economy, hard-hit by Russia's devastating invasion. "It will allow us to maintain our economic activity in Ukraine to the maximum and preserve our national production," Zelensky said in a video on his Telegram channel as the war with Russia entered its third month. The proposed EU plan to suspend import duties was announced earlier on Wednesday and still needs to be approved in a vote by the bloc's 27 members. Zelensky said he had discussed the initiative with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen. "I am grateful to her personally and to all our European friends for this step," the Ukrainian leader said. He accused Russia of "trying to provoke a global price crisis" and stir "chaos" in the world's food market. Zelensky said the EU's plan would be a "signi...

Washington:  A handful of hacker groups aligned with the Russian government have carried out hundreds of cyberattacks against Ukraine since Moscow invaded, US tech giant Microsoft said in a report Wednesday. It added that in "hybrid" warfare tactics, Russia often matches cyberattacks with military assaults on the battlefield. "Starting just before the invasion, we have seen at least six separate Russia-aligned nation-state actors launch more than 237 operations against Ukraine," said Microsoft, which is working with Ukrainian cybersecurity experts and private companies to counter such attacks. It said the cyber-warfare included "destructive attacks that are ongoing and threaten civilian welfare." In the first week of the invasion, the report said Russian hackers attacked a major Ukrainian media broadcaster on "the same day the Russian military announced its intention to destroy Ukrainian 'disinformation' targets and directed a missile strike a...