Global News Podcast - Six killed in 'massive' Russian air attack on Ukraine

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

At least six people were killed and dozens wounded in Russia's biggest air attack on Ukraine of the war so far. Missiles and drones were fired into more than half of Ukraine's regions. Also, the WHO sets out plans to curb the spread of mpox and, four privately trained astronauts prepare to test a new type of space suit.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson and in the early hours of Tuesday the 27th of August, these are our main stories. As Russia again pounds Ukraine with missiles and drones,

we report on Kiev's fight back. The UN says it's been forced to halt its humanitarian operations in Gaza after Israel ordered the evacuation of the area where aid workers are based. The World Health Organization is optimistic that MPOCs outbreaks in Central Africa can be controlled. Also in this podcast, we hear how AI is being used to develop treatments for dementia. If we can reduce the cost to identify people at higher risk using artificial intelligence like this project, we'll hope to speed up the testing of treatments.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a war of attrition, and its latest barrage of 100 or so missiles and as many drones again targeted energy infrastructure. President Zelensky has called for allied assistance in shooting down Russian missiles. Here's our international correspondent, Paul Adams. This is not like the way it was two winters ago when essentially the Russians were targeting the energy grid, but not so much the power generating facilities themselves. Once you knock out a power station, that takes years to repair if it can be repaired at all. And now the country is limping along on a handful of

its remaining power generation facilities. One of those, the hydroelectric plant just north of Kiev, was, it seems, one of the targets today. So it does seem as though this is part of a consistent pattern, which frankly has been going on since the start of the war, which is to steadily degrade Ukraine of its energy infrastructure and force the Ukrainians to live through yet another miserable winter in the hope that that breaks the morale of the country. And one of the ironies is that when you're in Kyiv, you have access to all of these alert systems and messages which tell you that there is a plane taking off from somewhere deep inside Russia. And you know that it's got missiles on board designed to target the infrastructure of Ukraine. But Ukraine is not currently able to deal with those threats at source.

The other thing, and perhaps this is the area where the West might be more amenable to a kind of short term solution, is to make sure that those remaining power generation facilities, and as I say, there's really only a handful of them, are properly defended with air defence missiles. The Ukrainians have had to use huge quantities of them, both their own existing stocks and Western-supplied equipment, to protect themselves so far. There's only so much they can do,

but if they can ensure that those power plants are properly defended with Patriot missiles and other systems, then at least they can weather the storm this coming winter, which everyone is anticipating is going to be possibly the hardest so far. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces are still in Russia, but it's a high-risk gamble, and it's getting tougher to sustain resistance against Russian forces there and on the front lines in eastern Ukraine. Our Europe correspondent Nick Beek reports from Kyiv. We're used to it, and it's awful that we live in this dangerous situation. They can kill us, but they cannot make us scared. Yulia is a 19-year-old student. What are your feelings today on Ukraine's Independence Day? Because clearly it's been two and a half years of a

brutal war now. I was like watching the TV and I saw our president Zelensky and honestly I was crying. Ukrainian forces have actually gone into Russia, into the Kursk region. What do you think of that? And has that given people a boost? It's like a miracle for us. We are so happy with it. As many as 10,000 elite Ukrainian troops are said to have burst across the border and seized in a matter of days more land than Russia has taken in Ukraine so far this year. Three weeks into the incursion and we're still in contact with one of the Ukrainian soldiers who went in. Let's call him Sergei. This is his latest message and he writes, at the beginning of the operation we were on the rise. We had a minimum of losses. Now because of the Russians fire we're losing a lot of losses. Now, because of the Russians' fire, we're losing a lot of guys.

Moreover, the Russians here are fighting for their land, just as we are fighting for ours. Many of us do not understand the meaning of this operation. It's one thing to fight for Kharkiv or Zaporizhia. It's another matter for the Kursk region, which we don't need. So it seems that after the initial enthusiasm, for Sergei at least, there is some scepticism about where this goes next. The gains of the Kursk incursion need to be tempered against continuing losses in the east of Ukraine itself, where Russia continues to make ground in a nutritional battle.

As Moscow's troops draw nearer, many families have been fleeing the city of Pokrovsk, including Lyudmila, carrying her possessions. It's loud here. Constant explosions for the past days. Ban, ban. Everyone is in panic. People are running away.

It's difficult all the time. We got through to 23-year-old Nazar Voitenkov, a volunteer with the 33rd Mechanised Brigade, defending Pokrovsk. Have you seen the Russians moving away from where you are? Has it become easier? No, I don't feel. I think Russians have a resource of troops in Kursk region and also in Russia, because Russians use a lot of weapons to cover our towns with missiles and bombs, shells, and destroy our cities. President Zelensky attended a solemn ceremony outside the Golden Domes of St. Sophia's Cathedral in Kiev. But for his pre-recorded speech, he appeared near the border with Russia,

hailing the recent seizure of Russian land. Russia waged war on us. It violated not only sovereign borders, but also the limits of cruelty and common sense. It was endlessly seeking one thing, to destroy us. And what the enemy brought to our land has now returned to its own home. President Zelensky ending that report by Nick Beek in Kiev. The UN says it's been forced to halt its humanitarian operations in Gaza after Israel ordered the evacuation of the area where aid workers are based. An UNRWA spokesman, Sam Rose, said they were being driven into even narrower spaces in Gaza. It's a particularly fragile moment. We've seen a slew of evacuation orders over the first weeks

of August, a couple of hundred thousand people on the move yet again. And just like them, we are being squeezed into ever smaller areas. Our Middle East analyst Sebastian Usher told me more about why the UN has stopped its operations. Well basically this is because where the UN has now established itself in the middle of Gaza in Deir el-Balab has been another evacuation order there have been many of these from the Israeli army recently. And what we're hearing from a UN official who is speaking anonymously is that they don't know where to go now, essentially. There's only around 10%, maybe 11% of Gaza, which is still like a humanitarian area. They moved up from Rafah down in the south, which is where the aid comes in. And I mean, they haven't said that they are stopping the operations, but they're suspending for now, hopefully maybe for 24 hours, 48 hours to try and reassess the

situation, see where they can move it to. And this has happened, you know, many times before the UN has complained many times of the difficulty that it has once it's got the aid in to be able to distribute it, particularly as they take it up towards the north. And this comes as there's a great deal of concern, isn't there, about polio in Gaza? Absolutely. I mean, that comes from a couple of weeks ago when there were traces of a polio virus detected from earth samples. And then after that, the first polio case in 25 years in Gaza was confirmed, a 10-month-old baby whose leg is paralysed from it. So what the UN, the three UN aid agencies working there, are doing is preparing for a mass vaccination campaign for the children of Gaza, around 640,000. They brought in around a million vaccinations just this weekend. But obviously, this is going to complicate that further. They already said

that it was going to be very difficult. They set up a distribution centre. How do people come to them? They had asked for two seven-day pauses in the fighting, asked Hamas and Israel for that, saying that's the only way we can really do this properly. That hasn't happened, of course. And with the bigger picture, what about prospects for a ceasefire? They've dimmed. There's no doubt about that. The process hasn't finished. The US is still very much talking it up. It's really pushing it hard. The US sees this as the one way to stop the conflict really widening, bringing in Iran, bringing in Hezbollah. And we saw Hezbollah fire a large number of rockets into Israel on Sunday. Now, that wasn't as bad as people had perhaps expected. So in a sense, that particular concern has slightly subsided about how bad that confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel could

become. But the Gaza ceasefire talks, they've again kind of founded on major obstacles. I mean, the big obstacle at the moment is two strategic zones in Gaza, in the south and in the centre, where Israel wants to maintain some troops. And Hamas said, look, what we have agreed to is a complete pullout of Israeli troops. And if that doesn't happen, then there's no deal. Sebastian Usher. The World Health Organization has laid out a six-point plan to curb the spread of MPOCs, a viral disease that's already claimed the lives of almost 600 people in Africa. The WHO says numbers of health care staff should be boosted and surveillance should be increased. Twelve African countries have already been affected, with nearly 19,000 suspected cases, most in the Democratic Republic of Congo,

where the majority of those being treated are children. Vaccines are on their way to the DRC from the US and from Japan, but health professionals warn that much more is needed. Our correspondent Mercy Juma is in another of the continent's most affected countries, Burundi. She spoke to Anita, a woman who lives in a crowded compound in Bujambura, which is experiencing an mpox outbreak. A month ago the first person in this compound started getting blisters. We took care of him, we touched him, he held the children. We didn't know what it was. Then he went to hospital and later five of his kids got it and they play with our children. They share clothes and sleep in the same bed.

Some of us have had mild symptoms and a blister or two. We're worried. What happens to us now? I asked Mercy Juma how people in Bujumbura are responding to the spread of mpox. More than 170 cases have been confirmed here. But, you know, walking into this town, the feeling that I have gotten the last few days being here is that there are extremes when it comes to the understanding of mOX. I have had a chance to visit one of the treatment facilities here, and there's a lot of concern and a lot of care that is going to help those who recover. I saw about the center that has 61 patients all showing, you know, the blisters and they are bedridden and they are confined to their rooms and their spaces. On the other side of town, when you go to Bujumbura town, life is going on as usual. People are scuffling to get into public transport. There's very little social distancing, so to say.

And most of those I spoke to do not even know what mpox is. And the few that understand it have either seen it on social media or had people talk about it. So they describe symptoms that they have seen. And one of the key doctors here, who's the head of the National Emergency Response Plan, is not only concerned about how containment is going to be difficult, also about the capability of this country to handle testing because they only have one testing laboratory, issues around water because water is a bit limited here and people need to wash their hands all the time.

And she says they really need support when it comes to, you know, funding and getting vaccines and all that's down here. And do you think the key to containment is vaccination? Vaccination plays an important role, you know, especially for this disease that we are being told that, you know, the symptoms show at a way later stage. You wouldn't know or they cannot really test until they get to the lesions and they pick the samples and test it. Yet somebody could be having it, you know, for so many days. So vaccination is really important, and especially for a country like this that borders the Democratic Republic of Congo. Congo is just, you know, less than 26 miles from Bujumbura town. It is the epicenter of mp Congo is just, you know, less than 26 miles from Bujumbura town. It is the epicenter of MPOCs here in Africa. So vaccination is really important. And countries like DRC, you know, Bujumbura and other countries that are seeing an increase in these cases

should really be considered as the first African countries to receive these vaccines. Mercy Juma, the captain of a super yacht which sank in a storm off Sicily a week ago, killing the British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch and six other people, has been placed under investigation. Reports in the Italian media suggest prosecutors are looking at manslaughter and negligence charges against James Cutfield, who's 51 years old and who's from New Zealand. Our correspondent Bethany Bell has just returned from Porticello, where the Bayesian sank. James Cutfield was first questioned last week. At a press conference on Saturday, the prosecutor, Raffaele Camerano,

said he'd been extremely cooperative. According to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, the authorities interviewed him again for more than two hours yesterday. The investigation is currently focusing on whether manslaughter or negligence in causing a shipwreck may have occurred. Naval experts are perplexed as to why the superyacht sank so quickly while other smaller boats nearby survived the storm. The vessel, which is lying on its side on the seabed, will be retrieved as part of the investigation. Meanwhile, reports in the Italian media say that post-mortem examinations of the seven victims will take place this week. Bethany Bell. Data scientists and clinical

researchers in Scotland are hoping to use AI to predict a person's risk of dementia. The team will use AI and machine learning to match the image data with linked health records to find patterns that could help doctors better determine a person's risk of developing the disease. Professor Will Whiteley is the co-lead of the project at the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences. As we're developing new treatments for dementia, we really need to identify people at risk. Currently that's very intensive and the scans used are quite costly. So if we can reduce the cost to identify people at higher risk using artificial intelligence like this project, we'll hope to speed up the testing of treatments over the years to come to really face what's going to be a major challenge

for us as a country, the challenge of the number of people developing dementia. What we'd like to do is to find those people who are at highest risk and then invite them to take part in studies of new treatments. So there's hope for new treatments. There's 127 drugs currently in clinical trials, but we need to get those trials to work as quickly as possible. So if we can identify people at risk using scans they have as part of their routine care in the NHS, we hope that we'll be able to deliver those drugs to patients. And hopefully some of them will work to prevent or treat dementia. What we hope to do is to make this as cheap and widely available as possible by integrating this artificial intelligence into the usual care of brain scans taken in clinical practice. The reading and analysing of scans is a really important part where artificial intelligence

might be able to contribute to care. So I think over the coming years, we'll really see it coming into routine practice in the NHS in many areas. Professor Will Whiteley, a deepfake pornography scandal is causing concern across South Korea. The content, created by manipulating digital photos and videos, is believed to be circulating on telegram chat groups. Jason Lee reports. South Korean police say more Koreans are falling victim to deepfake sex crimes, including women and minors, as images and videos combining photos of individuals with explicit content are circulated in Telegram chat groups. Officials say 10 teenagers have been arrested so far this year for such crimes in the capital's whole alone. Last year, the British cybersecurity firm Security Hero analyzed nearly 100,000 deepfake pornography videos online and found more than

half featured South Korean actors and singers. Jay Seung Lee. Still to come in this podcast. I've always been good at sport. I've always loved sport. Sport has been my saviour. And when people tell me I can't do something in life, I like proving them wrong. As the Paralympic Games get underway this week in Paris, we hear from an archer preparing to compete for the third time. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads?

Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. Severe flooding in Bangladesh has left 5 million people without electricity.

Many are also without clean water and food and some remain stranded. Kavita Bose, the director of Plan International in Bangladesh, gave Rob Young this update. The situation in Bangladesh, especially around the flood, is serious and is devastated. The monsoon rains have triggered extensively and that has caused flooding, leaving almost 5 million people stranded,

including 1.4 million children and adolescents, and around 2 million are women. Many families have lost their homes and are in urgent need of safe shelter, clean and safe water, food, hygiene supplies, and many more. The most affected areas are the southeast part of Bangladesh and the districts called Feni, Molobi Bazar, Hauvi, Gonch, Kumila, Kagra, Chidagong. And if you look at that, these people are totally traumatized and surprised because they have never faced such flood in their lives. And some of the old people have witnessed that in the last 40 years, they didn't witness or they didn't experience such kind of flooding. What are other aid agencies doing then to try to help people,

particularly those who are short of clean water and food? The needs are serious. The government, the chief advisor for the country, you know, the interim government chief, he has already declared a collective action for this one. And it needs at least for the immediate needs, $100 million. And then he has appealed to work everybody to respond this one. So Plan International Bangladesh, along with the local NGO, international NGO, have been trying to support as much as possible for them. However, compared to the needs, the capacity on the ground,

and especially for Plan International Bangladesh, are very, very limited in terms of financial resources. So it needs a huge, huge collective effort to meet all the needs, especially for life-saving. Khabita Bose. North Korea claims to have successfully tested exploding drones for the first time. Photos published by state media show the country's leader, Kim Jong-un, watching them in action and ordering his military to speed up their development.

Russia reportedly gave him five drones when he visited the country last year. Here's our Seoul correspondent, Jean McKenzie. In one of the photographs, a small white drone is shown crashing into what resembles a South Korean battle tank and destroying it. The images are blurred, making it difficult to see how sophisticated they are. But South Korea's military is now trying to work out whether these are the drones given by Russia last year or whether North Korea has used that technology to build its own. Drones are a priority for Mr. Kim,

who is seeking to modernise his military and build up an array of weapons that threaten not only the US, but South Korea too. Seoul has spent the past year trying to counter this. It's developed a system which it says can detect small drones and jam their signals. Both Koreas need only glance at Ukraine to realise what a massive role these weapons would play if a north-south conflict were to break out. Gene McKenzie. A few hours after we record this podcast, a rocket from Elon Musk's SpaceX company will launch four people into space on a private mission called Polaris Dawn. The four astronauts, led by the billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, will become the first privately trained individuals to take part in a spacewalk during which they'll test a new type of spacesuit. One man who knows what it's like up there is former astronaut and commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield. James Kurumasame asked him about the significance of the SpaceX Polaris Dawn

mission. I think the real difference of this spaceflight is the fact that it's going to be a privately funded spacewalk. And they're doing it extremely professionally, years of training, years of preparation, but it still boils down to the very first time that anyone has ever put on this spacesuit and gone out into the empty vacuum of space. And they're going to have to open the door on the spaceship. There is no airlock. So they're going to have to depressurize the entire spaceship down to zero. So all four astronauts will essentially be hooked up to umbilicals and doing spacewalks while a couple of them go outside. It's a big risk, but to have another spacesuit that works, you know, rather than just the Russian one and the American NASA one, I think that's a terrific boon.

Yes. Tell us about this new spacesuit. How is it different from previous ones? The one that I did my spacewalks in was really like the granddaughter of the ones that they walked on the moon in. The same sort of technology, the same manufacturers. It was very much old tech. And this is now a clean sheet design where SpaceX has said, okay, we're going to do spacewalks. Let's start over. Let's use the best of new materials, new technologies, and try and make this as form-fitting, as not bulky, as useful as we can think of. But it's still, you know, like any spacesuit, it's going to be hot and clunky and motion-constraining and not a comfortable suit of clothing. But one of the cool things it has is rather than this ancient sort of display that you

could barely see strapped to your chest like a tiny little computer, this has a projected display on the inside of the visor that's showing you all the key information, pressure and humidity and how well the suit's doing. So they've made some advances, but the real test will come about three or four days from now when the crew depressurises and goes outside. Retired astronaut, former commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield. The 2024 Paralympic Games get underway on Wednesday in Paris, where South African Sean Anderson will again attempt to prove that anything is possible. The 51-year-old, who's competing in the sport of archery, first lost his arm in a motorbike accident back in 2004, and then, 13 years later, became paralysed from the waist down

following a boating accident. Despite these life-changing events and the impact on his mental health, Anderson is now preparing to compete in his third Paralympic Games, and BBC Sport Africa's Echelon Vedden has been to meet him. Here on the practice range on his farm in Pretoria, Sean Anderson is shooting arrows as he prepares to compete in the sport of archery in his third Paralympics. Having lost his left arm in a motorcycle accident in 2004, Anderson made his debut at the Rio Games in 2016 but a year later he was involved in another accident losing the ability to walk after very nearly losing his life. I was involved

in a boating accident where myself and my family were on a chartered boat to go out deep sea fishing and we ended up getting hit by a wave with the boat coming down on me. I basically started drowning. I was under the boat they say for about four and a half minutes. I don't remember much after that. I remember waking up and not having feeling in my legs. Anderson's love affair with bow and arrow began before that boating accident. In 2011, when already an amputee, he took his son to a local range in Johannesburg.

I said to the owner, I want to shoot as well and they said I can't. There's two words I don't believe in and the word can't is one of them. As an arm amputee without the use of his legs, Anderson found a way to compete. With the help of an assistant to get kitted up for the sport, he uses a trigger system which allows him to shoot the bow with his mouth. I've always been good at sport. I've always loved sport. Sport has been my savior and when people tell me I can't do something in life, I like proving them wrong. Before his boating accident, Anderson won the world indoor championships. By 2016, he had competed at his first Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. But a year later, his life changed when he lost the use of his legs. I got PTSD,

post-traumatic stress. I haven't put my head underwater since my accident. I haven't been on a boat since my accident. I don't like water whatsoever, you know. Again, he fought back to make a second Paralympics. It came in the midst of the pandemic when Anderson lost his father to COVID just weeks before the Games. After competing in Tokyo, his mental health took another toll and he spiraled into depression. I just felt like I wasn't worthy of anything anymore and I wasn't good enough. And I felt like I was a burden to my family. I literally took my own life. I realized that I loved my life and I loved my family too much. So I was able that day to get close to saying goodbye that I stopped and I realized that I need to ask for help and I got help.

Now the 51-year-old is training for his third Paralympics on his remote farm in Pretoria. Three years ago, Anderson decided to go off-grid. I'm on full solar. My borehole's on full solar. So I grow my own vegetables. I have my own fruit trees. We're basically self-sustainable on our properties. Anderson is also now coaching, looking to introduce youngsters to his chosen sport. He believes people don't appreciate the challenges faced by para-athletes. Before I can even start training,

I have to go through a whole ritual every morning. I've got to get up, I've got to do a bowel program, I've got to clean my bladder, I've got to do this, this, this, and this. Then I finally get down. Then you see what it takes to just get me set up. Then I've got to have a guy with me the whole time to collect my arrows and bring my arrows back. Anderson hasn't decided yet if Paris will be his last games,

where he'll be competing in the men's individual W1. And despite having to draw on all his strength down the years, Anderson now seems at peace with life. I'm a religious person. I don't think I was cursed. I just believe that things happen for a reason. I don't always know what are the reasons and what is the big guy's plan with me. But if people can learn out of what I've achieved and what I've overcome through all my obstacles, then I've done the right thing. South African Paralympian Sean Anderson ending that report by BBC Sport Africa's Eshlyn Veeden. And if you are suffering distress or despair and need support,

you can speak to a health professional or an organisation that offers support. Details of help available in many countries can be found at Befrienders Worldwide. That's at www.befrienders.org. And if you're in the UK, help is available via the BBC Action Line. And that's it from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. And you can also find us on X at Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll. The producer was Stephanie Tillotson. The editor, as ever, is Karen Martin. I'm Valerie Sanderson. Until next time, bye-bye. global news, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free.

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