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Partly cloudy. Low 56F. Winds light and variable.
Smoke rises from the Metallurgical Combine Azovstal in Mariupol during shelling, in Mariupol, in territory under the government of the Donetsk People's Republic on Saturday eastern Ukraine.
Smoke rises from the Metallurgical Combine Azovstal in Mariupol during shelling, in Mariupol, in territory under the government of the Donetsk People's Republic on Saturday eastern Ukraine.
Russia, Ukraine trade blame for deadly attack on POW prison
KYIV, Ukraine | Russia and Ukraine accused each other Friday of shelling a prison in a separatist region of eastern Ukraine, an attack that reportedly killed dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war captured after the fall of Mariupol, the city where troops famously held out against a monthslong Russian siege.
Both sides said the assault was premeditated with the aim of covering up atrocities.
Russia claimed that Ukraine's military used U.S.-supplied rocket launchers to strike the prison in Olenivka, a settlement controlled by the Moscow-backed Donetsk People's Republic. Separatist authorities and Russian officials said the attack killed 53 Ukrainian POWs and wounded another 75.
Moscow opened a probe into the attack, sending a team to the site from Russia's Investigative Committee, the country's main criminal investigation agency. The state RIA Novosti agency reported that fragments of U.S.-supplied precision High Mobility Artillery Rocket System rockets were found at the site.
The Ukrainian military denied making any rocket or artillery strikes in Olenivka, and it accused the Russians of shelling the prison to cover up the alleged torture and execution of Ukrainians there. An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the shelling as "a deliberate, cynical, calculated mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners."
Neither claim could be independently verified.
Video shot by The Associated Press showed charred, twisted bed frames in the wrecked barracks, as well as burned bodies and metal sheets hanging from the destroyed roof. The footage also included bodies lined up on the ground next to a barbed-wire fence and an array of what was claimed to be metal rocket fragments on a wooden bench.
Denis Pushilin, the leader of the internationally unrecognized Donetsk republic, said the prison held 193 inmates. He did not specify how many were Ukrainian POWs.
The deputy commander of the Donetsk separatist forces, Eduard Basurin, suggested that Ukraine decided to strike the prison to prevent captives from revealing key military information.
Ukraine "knew exactly where they were being held and in what place," he said. "After the Ukrainian prisoners of war began to talk about the crimes they committed, and orders they received from Kyiv, a decision was made by the political leadership of Ukraine: carry out a strike here."
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak called for a "strict investigation" into the attack and urged the United Nations and other international organizations to condemn it. He said the Russians had transferred some Ukrainian prisoners to the barracks just a few days before the strike, suggesting that it was planned.
"The purpose — to discredit Ukraine in front of our partners and disrupt weapons supply," he tweeted.
Ukrainian officials alleged that Russia's Wagner Group, mercenaries Russia has used in other armed conflicts and reportedly elsewhere in Ukraine, carried out the assault.
Ukraine's security agencies issued a statement citing evidence that Russia was responsible, including the transfer of prisoners, analysis of injuries and the blast wave, intercepted phone conversations and the absence of shelling at the site.
"All this leaves no doubt: The explosion in Olenivka was a Russian terrorist act and a gross violation of international agreements," the statement said.
A Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson, Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, described the strike as a "bloody provocation" aimed at discouraging Ukrainian soldiers from surrendering. He too claimed that U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets were used, and said eight guards were among the wounded.
Ukrainian forces are fighting to hold on to the remaining territory under their control in Donetsk. Together with the neighboring Luhansk province, they make up Ukraine's mostly Russian-speaking industrial Donbas region.
For several months, Moscow has focused on trying to seize parts of the Donbas not already held by the separatists.
Holding POWs in an area with active fighting appeared to defy the Geneva Convention, which requires that prisoners be evacuated as soon as possible after capture to camps away from combat zones.
The Ukrainian POWS at the Donetsk prison included troops captured during the fall of Mariupol. They spent months holed up with civilians at a giant steel mill in the southern port city. Their resistance during a relentless Russian bombardment became a symbol of Ukrainian defiance against Russia's aggression.
More than 2,400 soldiers from the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian national guard and other military units gave up their fight and surrendered under orders from Ukraine's military in May.
Scores of Ukrainian soldiers have been taken to prisons in Russian-controlled areas. Some have returned to Ukraine as part of prisoner exchanges with Russia, but the families of other POWs have no idea whether their loved ones are still alive, or if they will ever come home.
Pope visits Nunavut for final apology of his Canadian tour
IQALUIT, Nunavut — Pope Francis traveled to the edge of the Arctic on Friday to deliver an apology to the Inuit people for the "evil" of Canada's residential schools, wrapping up his week-long "penitential pilgrimage" to Canada with a dramatic visit to the remote territory of Nunavut to meet with school survivors.
Francis landed in Iqaluit, population 7,500, and met with former students at a primary school to hear first-hand their experiences of being torn from their families and forced to attend church-run, government funded boarding schools. The aim of the policy, which was in effect from the late 1800s to the 1970s, was to sever children from their Native cultures and assimilate them into Canadian, Christian society.
"How evil it is to break the bonds uniting parents and children, to damage our closest relationships, to harm and scandalize the little ones!" Francis told a gathering of Inuit youths and elders outside the school.
He thanked the school survivors for their courage in sharing their suffering, which he had heard for the first time this past spring when delegations of First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples traveled to the Vatican to seek an apology.
"This only renewed in me the indignation and shame that I have felt for months," Francis said. "I want to tell you how very sorry I am and to ask for forgiveness for the evil perpetrated by not a few Catholics who contributed to the policies of cultural assimilation and enfranchisement in those schools."
Before his speech, the pope — seated in a chair covered in seal skin — watched Inuit throat singers perform.
The visit capped an unusual tour designed specifically to give the pope opportunities to apologize to generations of Native peoples for the abuses and injustices they suffered and to assure them that he was committed to helping them reconcile their relationship with the Catholic Church. After stops in Edmonton, Alberta, and Quebec City, Francis ended his pilgrimage in Nunavut, a vast territory straddling the Arctic Circle that represents the farthest north the Argentine pope has ever traveled.
Ahead of his arrival, organizers readied scores of hats with mesh face protection to guard against the mosquitoes that sometimes abound in the mild summer temperatures of Iqaluit, which is some 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
The Canadian government has said physical and sexual abuse were rampant at the residential schools, and Francis on Thursday begged forgiveness for the "evil" of clergy sexual abuse, vowing an "irreversible commitment" to prevent it from happening again. His vow came after he omitted a reference to sexual abuse in his initial apology this week, upsetting some survivors and earning a complaint from the Canadian government.
Francis' apologies have received a mixed response, with some school survivors welcoming them as helpful to their healing and others saying far more needs to be done to correct past wrongs and pursue justice.
The Inuit community, for example, is seeking Vatican assistance to extradite an Oblate priest, the Rev. Joannes Rivoire, who ministered to Inuit communities until he left in the 1990s and returned to France. Canadian authorities issued an arrest warrant for him in 1998 on accusations of several counts of sexual abuse, but it has never been served.
The Canadian government said this week that it had asked France to extradite Rivoire, but did not say when. Rivoire has denied wrongdoing.
Francis heard from survivors in a private meeting, including one woman whose daughter died at a residential school; the woman and her husband have been searching for her grave for years. Another speaker was the daughter of one of Rivoire's victims, who died after years of alcohol abuse, said Lieve Halsberghe, an advocate for clergy abuse victims who has fought for years to bring Rivoire to justice.
The Inuit warmly welcomed Francis to their homeland and lit a ceremonial lamp, or qulliq, for the occasion.
Francis referred to its symbolic significance in his remarks, saying it dispelled the darkness and brought warmth.
"We are here with the desire to pursue together a journey of healing and reconciliation that, with the help of the Creator, can help us shed light on what happened and move beyond that dark past," Francis said
Directing himself to younger generations, Francis urged them, too, to choose light rather than dark, to keep hopes alive, aim high and protect the environment. He stressed the value of teamwork, recalling the successes of Canada's beloved national sport of ice hockey.
Jimmy Lucassi, an Inuit from Iqaluit, was at the school grounds for Francis' visit along with his wife and children. "It probably means a lot to a lot of people," he said. "It's all we've been talking about. They closed the stores to celebrate."
The trip was the first in which the 85-year-old pope was forced to use a wheelchair, walker and cane because of painful strained knee ligaments that forced him to cancel a trip to Africa earlier this month. Even with a reduced schedule, the trip was clearly uncomfortable for Francis and he has said he felt "limited" by his inability to freely move about as he pleases.
Future travel is not clear. Francis has said he wants to visit Kyiv, Ukraine, but no trip is immediately on the horizon. He is also expected in Kazakhstan in mid September for an inter-religious meeting that might provide an opportunity to meet with the Russian Patriarch Kirill, who has justified Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Reaction to Francis' visit to Canada has been mixed, with even the government saying his apology didn't go far enough in accepting blame for the institutional role the Catholic Church played in supporting the school policy.
Some school survivors have accepted his apology as genuine and helpful to their process of healing from trauma. Others have found it still wanting, angered that it took the discovery of presumed unmarked graves outside some residential schools for the pope to apologize after Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 specifically called for a papal apology to be delivered on Canadian soil.
Still others have demanded the church provide further information about the fate of children who never returned home from the schools and repudiating the 15th century papal bulls that informed the so-called "Doctrine of Discovery" which legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands for the sake of spreading Christianity.
It is unlikely that the Vatican itself would hold records concerning the fate of Indigenous children who died at the schools, though it would have documentation on any priests who faced canonical penalties after 2001, and possibly some before then. If the documents about the children exist, they would likely be in the archives of individual religious orders.
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