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Tens of thousands of people rallied Sunday in cities across Europe to protest against Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, with small vigils taking place in Russia as well despite a crackdown by authorities against such demonstrations.
German trade unions called a protest in Berlin, where sunny weather boosted the turnout. The march led from the city’s Alexanderplatz — a large square named after Russian Czar Alexander I — to a site near the Brandenburg Gate.

Many participants carried flags in the blue and yellow colors of Ukraine, while others bore banners reading “Stop the War” and “Peace and Solidarity for the people in Ukraine.”

Norbert Herring, who held up a sign that read “What are you doing to your neighbor?” as the crowds filed past the Russian Embassy, said the images from Ukraine reminded him of the bombing of cities during World War II.

Several participants at the Berlin protest said they were Russians ashamed about what their country was doing.

“We’re against this war so we wanted to show our solidarity,” said Aleksandra Belozerova, a Russian studying in Germany. “It’s the least we can do in this situation.”

Her friend, Aliia Biktagirova, held a sign with letters for the Russian phrase for “No War” represented as asterisks to reflect the censorship she said is taking place in Russia concerning the conflict.

In Russia, where demonstrations against the war in Ukraine have been typically met with a heavy police response, rights group OVD-Info said more than 668 people had been detained in 36 cities as of late afternoon Moscow time.

There was a heavy police presence at central locations including Manezhnaya Square near the Kremlin, with officers carrying demonstrators away to waiting police vans, in footage posted by Russian media. The number of people protesting nationwide appeared to be far fewer than the last major protests a week ago, when OVD-Info listed more than 5,000 people who were detained.

Anti-war protests were also staged in Warsaw, London and the German cities of Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart.

A small far-right party organized a protest in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The occupants of dozens of cars waved Russian and Serbian flags, honked horns and chanted slogans in favor of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some cars had “Z” painted on them — the letter is used on Russian armored vehicles in Ukraine and is now a symbol of support for Russian troops.

Despite formally seeking European Union membership, Serbia has refused to join international sanctions against its ally Russia despite voting in favor of the U.N. resolution condemning Moscow’s aggression. The country’s dominant state-controlled media carry frequent pro-Russia reports about the war.

One day after rallies in Florence and Naples, Italians and Ukrainians who live in Italy turned out for protests in Milan and Rome on Sunday against the war in Ukraine.

In the first row of a march in Milan, Italy’s financial capital, protesters held bloodied cloth bundles to represent children killed in Russian attacks on Ukrainians. Some children held drawings, and many marchers streaked their cheeks in the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

Before the march, protesters stretched out an enormous, rainbow-colored peace flag in a Milan square.

In Rome’s march, one of the participants held a cardboard sign that read, “Close the Sky,” an apparent reference to Ukraine’s plea to NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine against Russian warplanes. Italy’s government, like that of fellow NATO allies, have ruled out a no-fly zone option, contending such a move would risk vastly widening the conflict in Europe.

Pope Francis decried the “barbarianism” of the killing of children and other defenseless civilians in Ukraine. He told a crowd estimated by the Vatican to number 25,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his customary Sunday noon appearance that the attacks must stop “before cities are reduced to cemeteries.”

In Cyprus, dozens of Russian nationals joined Ukrainians in the coastal resort town of Limassol Sunday to protest the war in Ukraine. About 50 Russians converged on Limassol’s promenade before joining with other protesters to chant slogans such as “Stop the war, stop Putin” and waving blue and white flags they said where the Russian national flag without the red stripe that represented “blood and violence.”

Protester Evgeniya Shlykova, who has been living and working in Cyprus for five years, told The Associated Press that despite Russian propaganda, Ukraine “didn’t deserve this action from our government” and that protesters demand an immediate end to the war “that we don’t support.”

“I do believe that the person who did the most to make Russia weak and not united is Putin himself,” said Shlykova who faulted the Russian president and his supporters for bringing the world’s wrath on Russia that is proud of its humanistic values and culture. “But now Russia is the aggressor for the whole world, and we protest it.”

Earlier Sunday, Ukrainian nationals in Taiwan and supporters also staged a march in Taipei to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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President Joe Biden is sending his national security adviser for talks with a senior Chinese official in Rome on Monday as concerns grow that China is amplifying Russian disinformation in the Ukraine war and may help Russia evade punishment from economic sanctions.

The talks between National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Yang Jiechi will center on “efforts to manage the competition between our two countries and discuss the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine on regional and global security,” said Emily Horne, speaking for the White House National Security Council.

The White House has accused Beijing of spreading false Russian claims that Ukraine was running chemical and biological weapons labs with U.S. support. U.S. officials said China was attempting to provide cover for a potential biological or chemical weapons attack on Ukrainians by the Russian military.

Sullivan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that when Russia starts accusing other countries of preparing to launch biological or chemical attacks, “it’s a good tell that they may be on the cusp of doing it themselves.”

He also said China and other countries should not try to help Russia work around the sanctions and the U.S. has made it clear that other countries should not bail out the Russian economy. “We will ensure that neither China nor anyone else can compensate Russia for these losses,” Sullivan said.

The striking accusations about Russian disinformation and Chinese complicity came after Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova alleged with no evidence that the U.S. was financing Ukrainian chemical and biological weapons labs.

The Russian claim was echoed by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who claimed there were 26 bio-labs and related facilities in “which the U.S. Department of Defense has absolute control.” The United Nations has said it has received no information backing up such accusations.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki last week called the claims “preposterous.”

“Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them,” Psaki tweeted Wednesday night. “It’s a clear pattern.”

Sullivan, who appeared on several of the Sunday news shows before his trip, told “Face the Nation” on CBS that the Russian rhetoric on chemical and biological warfare is an indicator that in fact the Russians are getting ready to do it and try and pin the blame elsewhere and nobody should fall for that.”

The international community for years has assessed that Russia has used chemical weapons in carrying out assassination attempts against Putin detractors such as Alexei Navalny and former spy Sergei Skripal. Russia also supports the Assad government in Syria, which has used chemical weapons against its people in a decade-long civil war.

Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, CIA Director William Burns also noted grave concern that Russia might be laying the groundwork for a chemical or biological attack of its own, which it would then blame on the U.S. or Ukraine in a false flag operation.

“This is something, as all of you know very well, is very much a part of Russia’s playbook,” he said. “They’ve used these weapons against their own citizens, they’ve at least encouraged the use in Syria and elsewhere, so it’s something we take very seriously.”

China has been one of few countries to avoid criticizing the Russians for its invasion of Ukraine. China’s Xi Jinping hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin for the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, just weeks before Russia launched the Feb. 24 invasion.

During Putin’s visit to China last month, the two leaders issued a 5,000-word statement declaring “no limits” in the friendship between the two countries.

The Chinese abstained on U.N. votes censuring Russia and has criticized economic sanctions against Moscow. It has expressed its support for peace talks and offered its services as a mediator, despite questions about its neutrality and scant experience mediating international conflict.

Chinese officials have also said Washington shouldn’t be able to complain about Russia’s actions because the U.S. invaded Iraq under false pretenses. The U.S. claimed to have evidence Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction though none was ever found.

For Russia, China could be a crucial economic partner in mitigating the severe sanctions levied by the U.S, Britain, the 27-national European Union and other countries, though there are questions as to how far Beijing will go to alienate the alliance and put its own economy at risk.

The Biden administration is looking to impress on China that any efforts to ease sanctions for Russia could have ramifications for its relations with the United States and Western allies.

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sullivan said Sunday that the administration believes China knew that Putin “was planning something” before the invasion of Ukraine. But Sullivan said the Chinese government “may not have understood the full extent of it because it’s very possible that Putin lied to them the same way that he lied to Europeans and others.”

Sullivan and Yang last met for face-to-face talks in Switzerland, where Sullivan raised the Biden administration’s concerns about China’s military provocations against Taiwan, human rights abuses against ethnic minorities and efforts to squelch pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong.

That meeting set the stage for a three-hour long virtual meeting in November between Biden and Xi.

Sullivan is also to meet Luigi Mattiolo, diplomatic adviser to Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, while in Rome.
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For many Ukrainians, staying online has been daunting as Russia attacks telecoms and power supplies, but some people, like Oleg Kutkov, a software and communications engineer, are testing out a new way to stay connected.

In a FaceTime interview with VOA Mandarin from Kyiv, Kutkov held up the components of the two-part terminal needed to connect via Starlink, an internet constellation of some 2,000 satellites operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s private firm SpaceX, one of a growing number of enterprises supporting Ukraine.

The Starlink dish and modem setup is easy to use, according to Kutkov, who is in his mid-30s.

“You just place the receptor outside, power on, wait a few minutes, and then you can go online without any additional tuning,” he told VOA Mandarin on Monday.

Kutkov said, “Our government is communicating with citizens using social (media) channels, and we are getting all the information from them on the internet. Not from TV or radio, but the internet. So [having connectivity] is very important.”

Skylink arrived in Ukraine with next-generation speed. On Feb. 26, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, tweeted to Musk, “while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.”

Hours later, Musk tweeted that Ukraine would soon have Starlink service and despite criticism that he was using the crisis as a marketing stunt, the hardware began arriving there on Feb. 28.

Fedorov tweeted on March 9 that a second shipment of Starlink equipment had arrived as the situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate.

According to NetBlocks, a London-based organization tracking internet outages around the world, several major cities in southern Ukraine, including Kherson and Mariupol, have experienced severe internet disruption due to attacks on infrastructure and power supplies.

In other areas, including Kharkiv and Kyiv, internet connections were disrupted as Russian troops launched cyber assaults targeting financial and government websites in Ukraine.

And even though Musk has cautioned the Skylink connection is being used by Russia to target users, Kutkov has been sharing his experiences with the service on Twitter. He told VOA Mandarin that he has received requests for support from across the country, including from ordinary citizens, companies and even those in the military.

“Ukraine is a highly digitized country,” Kutlov said. “We have everything online.”

SpaceX is one of a growing number of private companies that began taking an active role in supporting Ukraine in the fight against Russia almost as soon as Russia began missile and artillery attacks on Feb. 24.

Mobile phone carriers including T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon have waived charges for calls and texts to and from Ukraine.

Tesla is allowing any electric vehicles to use its charging stations along the borders of Ukraine with Poland and Hungary.

Airbnb, the online marketplace for lodging, stepped up to organize free short-term accommodation for 100,000 refugees from Ukraine.

Google and Facebook have banned Russian state media from their European platforms while working with European governments to combat the spread of disinformation from the Kremlin. Twitter began labeling all tweets containing content from Russian state-affiliated media outlets on Feb. 28.

As of Friday, more than 340 companies have announced their withdrawal from Russia’s economy in protest of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the Yale School of Management.

Russia has threatened to counter that exodus by nationalizing foreign-owned businesses that have decided to flee the country in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, told VOA Mandarin the reason that so many private companies have taken action is that Russia’s invasion has “shocked and disgusted much of the world.”

He said the circumstances of the conflict have left a lot of people feeling that “it’s almost pure good versus evil.”

Abishur Prakash, co-founder and geopolitical futurist at the Center for Innovating the Future, a Toronto-based advisory firm, said one of the reasons Western corporations, especially tech companies, are taking sides is “because the global landscape has now permanently shifted.”

“The West is trying to permanently decouple from Russia, and Western tech firms are more than complying,” said Prakash, author of The World Is Vertical: How Technology Is Remaking Globalization, in an emailed response to VOA Mandarin. “There is a tacit acceptance in the boardrooms of technology companies that Russia has become ‘off limits.'”
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Demonstrations are taking place in many locations across Russia on Sunday to protest Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine with more than 700 detained by police so far. 

OVD-Info, which monitors arrests during protests, said that, by 6:30 p.m. Moscow time, police had detained 745 people during demonstrations in 37 Russian cities. At least 353 of them had been arrested in Moscow, the independent monitor said. . 

An AFP journalist present at a protest in the capital Moscow witnessed at least a dozen arrests and said police were taking away anybody without press papers. 

A young woman was shouting “peace to the world” as she was taken away by two policemen, AFP reported. 

In Russia’s second city, Saint Petersburg, AFP saw multiple arrests, including a protester being dragged across the ground. 

The city’s central Nevsky Avenue was closed off by police with a dozen police vans parked along the road. 

Last weekend, police arrested more than 5,000 protesters across Russia. 

Protesters risk fines and possible prison sentences by taking to the streets. 

Since Russia launched its invasion on February 24, more than 14,200 people have been arrested in Russia for taking part in anti-war protests. 

Information from AP and AFP was used in this report.
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From the three-light traffic signal, refrigerated trucks, automatic elevator doors, color monitors for desktop computers, to the shape of the modern ironing board, the clothes wringer, blood banks, laser treatment for cataracts, home security systems and the super-soaker children’s toy, many objects and services Americans use every day were invented by Black men and women.

These innovators were recognized for their inventions, but countless other inventors of color have gone largely unrecognized. Others are completely lost to history.

“There were some instances where Black inventors would compete with Alexander Graham Bell, with Thomas Edison, where their inventions were really just as good and just as transformative, but they just did not have access to the capital,” says Shontavia Johnson, an entrepreneur and associate vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation at Clemson University in South Carolina. “They did not have access to all these different systems that the United States puts in place to support inventors.”

Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the lightbulb, but it was Lewis Latimer, the son of formerly enslaved people, who patented a new filament that extended the lifespan of lightbulbs so they wouldn’t die out after a few days. Latimer got a patent for his invention in 1882, something countless Black innovators in the generations before him were unable to do.

Free Black citizens could obtain patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but enslaved Black people could not. Slavery wasn’t abolished until 1865, with the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Prior to that, the inventions of Black innovators were often claimed by their enslavers or other white people.

Modern-day research suggests that was the case with the technology behind the cotton gin — a device that separated cotton seeds from their fibers. It was largely innovated by enslaved Black people, but a white man named Eli Whitney obtained the patent for the invention.

“We often count our country as being this place where innovation and entrepreneurship thrive,” Johnson says. “But when you completely exclude a group of people from access to the patent system, … exploiting their invention, then the natural result of that is, you look at the most important inventors and innovators in American history … and they pretty much are your stereotypical white male inventor, not because other people have not been innovative, too, it’s just these folks have been excluded from the patent system.”

This deliberate early exclusion of Black inventors from the patent system and, in large part, the pantheon of great American inventors, was rooted in racist assumptions about the intellectual inferiority of Black people, according to Rayvon Fouché, a professor of American studies at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.

“Invention was seen as this God-given ability. So, as you can imagine, all the perceptions, ideas about masculinity, maleness, power [and] authority are all wrapped into this vision of inventiveness,” says Fouché, who also leads the National Science Foundation’s Social and Economic Sciences Division. “The inherent understanding of what an inventor is and was and could be — the framing of that term — eliminated the possibility for all Black folks and all marginalized people.”

Other barriers Black inventors historically faced included less access to equal education, systematic exclusion from professional scientific and engineering

societies, limited access to wealthy investors and mainstream banks for start-up capital to commercialize their inventions, and racial violence.

Black inventors were also less involved in patenting activity between 1870 and 1940, during times of lynchings, race riots and segregation laws in the United States.

There were also the Black creators who came up with innovations that didn’t necessarily fit the traditional ideas of inventiveness.

“For much of our history, when we think about the word ‘invention,’ it’s sort of freighted with these white, Eurocentric notions of what that means,” says Eric Hintz, a historian with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Often, the traditional definition of ‘invention’ is something like a machine that saves human labor or animal labor, that does some task more efficiently.”

That kept certain innovations by Black people from being recognized by the patent system.

“[The patent system] is built on this model that basically assumes innovation is desirable when it’s tied to commercial benefit. But if it is rooted in community survival or the needs of society, that is not worthy of protection, and we see that in the law,” Johnson says. “There are certain types of things that are patentable, and certain things that are not patentable, and that is a distinction that I do think leaves a lot of people out of the ecosystem.”

A New York DJ known as Grandmaster Flash pioneered the use of record turntables as an instrument by using his fingers to manipulate the sounds backward and forward or to slow it down. He had an innovative style of mixing records and blending beats that pioneered the art of deejaying, but he holds no patents.

“Black people have been doing lots of creative, innovative things,” Fouché says. “We can think about all kinds of technological creative things within the context of hip-hop and music production and art in other ways. But of course, the patent office is driven by techno-scientific innovation. And I think part of it is, for me, to open up the conversation of what inventiveness is and can be.”

Museum collections have historically excluded the contributions of marginalized people, a failing the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center readily acknowledges.

“Definitely the Smithsonian and other libraries and museums have been complicit over the decades, over the centuries, of privileging white inventors in the things that we collect,” says Hintz. “We have a ton of stuff on Edison and Tesla [electricity] and Steve Jobs [innovator of Apple products and devices] and whomever, but it’s incumbent on us now to make sure that we’re preserving the stories of Madam C.J. Walker, Grandmaster Flash, Lonnie Johnson — who invented the Super Soaker, of Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist who invented a way of eradicating cataracts.”

Walker, America’s first self-made female millionaire, built her fortune with a line of hair care products for Black women. Black people also invented the clothes dryer, the automatic gear shift in vehicles, the modern toilet, lawn sprinkler, peanut butter and potato chips.

But the innovation gap persists. African Americans and women still participate at each stage of the innovation process at lower rates than their male and white counterparts.

“How do you get more Black kids, girls [and] marginalized people into these pathways that have been traditionally white, middle class and male?” Fouché says, emphasizing the importance of sparking children’s imaginations, despite any obstacles.

“I’m more interested in saying, ‘Well, what do you want to do? How do you want to change the world? What are the things that are meaningful to you?’ and just impressing upon people the limitless opportunities. … So, don’t limit the possibilities.”
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A dozen ballistic missiles launched from outside Iraq struck the country’s northern Kurdish regional capital, Irbil, on Sunday, Kurdish officials said, adding there were no casualties.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility or further details available. A U.S. State Department spokesperson called it an “outrageous attack” but said no Americans were hurt and there was no damage to U.S. government facilities in Irbil.

Iraqi state TV quoted the Kurdistan region’s counterterrorism force as saying 12 missiles launched from outside Iraq hit Irbil. It was not immediately clear where they landed.

U.S. forces stationed at Irbil’s international airport complex have in the past come under fire from rocket and drone attacks that U.S. officials blame on Iran-aligned militia groups, but no such attacks have occurred for several months.

The last time ballistic missiles were directed at U.S. forces was in January 2020, an Iranian retaliation for the U.S. killing earlier that month of its military commander Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad airport.

No U.S. personnel were killed in the 2020 attack, but many suffered head injuries.

Iraq and neighboring Syria are regularly the scene of violence between the United States and Iran. Iran-backed Shi’ite Islamist militias have attacked U.S. forces in both countries and Washington has on occasion retaliated with air strikes.

An Israeli air strike in Syria on Monday killed two members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Iranian state media said this week. The IRGC vowed to retaliate, it said.

Kurdish officials did not immediately say where the missiles struck. A spokesperson for the regional authorities said there were no flight interruptions at Irbil airport.

Iraq has been rocked by chronic instability since the defeat of the Sunni Islamist group Islamic State in 2017 by a loose coalition of Iraqi, U.S.-led and Iran-backed forces.

Since then, Iran-aligned militias have regularly attacked U.S. military and diplomatic sites in Iraq, U.S. and many Iraqi officials say. Iran denies involvement in those attacks.
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Full developments of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine   
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