Good morning, this is Michelle and today we have another story from international Geneva’s wide array of organisations conducting operations to tend to the plight of Ukraine’s war victims.
Freshly returned from Mariupol, the ICRC’s head of evacuation efforts tells us how the rescue operation in the besieged Azovstal steelworks went down – as he packs his bags for his next mission in a refugee camp in Bangladesh.
From our Ukraine Stories project, one of our Russian journalists brings you the first-person accounts of her exiled compatriots who are against the war. |
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Evacuating a besieged plant
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Gregory Brissonneau, ICRC head of evacuation operations in Mariupol. (Credit: Geneva Solutions/KD)
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Gregory Brissonneau, head of Dnipro sub delegation, just came back from a five week-long emergency mission in Ukraine. His task: exfiltrate the last civilians entrenched in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where Ukrainian fighters and civilians had withdrawn as Russian forces pushed into the south-eastern port city. Geneva Solutions debriefed him two days only after his return at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) headquarters in Geneva.
Evacuation missions are dangerous, sometimes deadly. They take place beyond front lines in areas at the mercy of the belligerent parties. French TV reporter Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff was killed on 30 May, as he was covering an evacuation operation near the eastern Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk, when a piece of shrapnel perforated the armoured car he was travelling in, fatally wounding his neck.
Gregory Brissonneau has already returned several times alive from such operations and has become some sort of “evacuation expert” in spite of himself.
Read more on Geneva Solutions (EN)
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Here’s what else is happening
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Russians living in Switzerland hold a protest against the war in Ukraine in Zurich, on 4 May 2022. (Credit: Keystone/Michael Buholzer)
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‘I cried about Bucha’.
Russians in exile express their anger, shame and incomprehension at the war in Ukraine in a series of first-person accounts gathered by Russian journalist Nigina Beroeva.
Geneva Solutions (EN)
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Cleaning up Irpin.
When the city of Irpin in the Kyiv region was liberated from the Russians, the Mountain Rescue Team volunteers were among the first ones to help clean up the town.
Geneva Solutions (EN)
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Have a good day!
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