TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — For decades, preventing dengue fever in Honduras has meant teaching people to fear mosquitoes and avoid their bites. Now, Hondurans are being educated about a potentially more effective way to control the disease — and it goes against everything they’ve learned.

Which explains why a dozen people cheered last month as Tegucigalpa resident Hector Enriquez held a glass jar filled with mosquitoes above his head, and then freed the buzzing insects into the air. Enriquez, a 52-year-old mason, had volunteered to help publicize a plan to suppress dengue by releasing millions of special mosquitoes in the Honduran capital.

The mosquitoes Enriquez unleashed in his El Manchen neighborhood — an area rife with dengue — were bred by scientists to carry bacteria called Wolbachia that interrupt transmission of the disease. When these mosquitoes reproduce, they pass the bacteria to their offspring, reducing future outbreaks.

This emerging strategy for battling dengue was pioneered over the last decade by the nonprofit World Mosquito Program, and it is being tested in more than a dozen countries. With more than half the world’s population at risk of contracting dengue, the World Health Organization is paying close attention to the mosquito releases in Honduras, and elsewhere, and it is poised to promote the strategy globally.

In Honduras, where 10,000 people are known to be sickened by dengue each year, Doctors Without Borders is partnering with the mosquito program over the next six months to release close to 9 million mosquitoes carrying the Wolbachia bacteria.

“There is a desperate need for new approaches,” said Scott O’Neill, founder of the mosquito program.

DENGUE DEFIES TYPICAL PREVENTION

Scientists have made great strides in recent decades in reducing the threat of mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria. But dengue is the exception: Its rate of infection keeps going up.

Models estimate that around 400 million people across some 130 countries are infected each year with dengue. Mortality rates from dengue are low – an estimated 40,000 people die each year from it – but outbreaks can overwhelm health systems and force many people to miss work or school.

“When you come down with a case of dengue fever, it’s often akin to getting the worst case of influenza you can imagine,” said Conor McMeniman, a mosquito researcher at Johns Hopkins University. It’s commonly known as “breakbone fever” for a reason, McMeniman said.

Traditional methods of preventing mosquito-borne illnesses haven’t been nearly as effective against dengue.

The Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that most commonly spread dengue have been resistant to insecticides, which have fleeting results even in the best-case scenario. And because dengue virus comes in four different forms, it is harder to control through vaccines.

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are also a challenging foe because they are most active during the day – meaning that’s when they bite – so bed nets aren’t much help against them. Because these mosquitoes thrive in warm and wet environments, and in dense cities, climate change and urbanization are expected to make the fight against dengue even harder.

“We need better tools,” said Raman Velayudhan, a researcher from the WHO’s Global Neglected Tropical Diseases Program. “Wolbachia is definitely a long-term, sustainable solution.”

Velayudhan and other experts from the WHO plan to publish a recommendation as early as this month to promote further testing of the Wolbachia strategy in other parts of the world.

SCIENTISTS SURPRISED BY BACTERIA

The Wolbachia strategy has been decades in the making.

The bacteria exist naturally in about 60% of insect species, just not in the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

“We worked for years on this,” said O’Neill, 61, who with help from his students in Australia eventually figured out how to transfer the bacteria from fruit flies into Aedes aegypti mosquito embryos by using microscopic glass needles.

Around 40 years ago, scientists aimed to use Wolbachia in a different way: to drive down mosquito populations. Because male mosquitoes carrying the bacteria only produce offspring with females that also have it, scientists would release infected male mosquitoes into the wild to breed with uninfected females, whose eggs would not hatch.

But along the way, O’Neill’s team made a surprising discovery: Mosquitoes carrying Wolbachia didn’t spread dengue — or other related diseases, including yellow fever, Zika and chikungunya.

And since infected females pass Wolbachia to their offspring, they will eventually “replace” a local mosquito population with one that carries the virus-blocking bacteria.

The replacement strategy has required a major shift in thinking about mosquito control, said Oliver Brady, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“Everything in the past has been about killing mosquitoes, or at the very least, preventing mosquitoes from biting humans,” Brady said.

Since O’Neill’s lab first tested the replacement strategy in Australia in 2011, the World Mosquito Program has run trials affecting 11 million people across 14 countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Fiji and Vietnam.

The results are promising. In 2019, a large-scale field trial in Indonesia showed a 76% drop in reported dengue cases after Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes were released.

Still, questions remain about whether the replacement strategy will be effective – and cost effective – on a global scale, O’Neill said. The three-year Tegucigalpa trial will cost $900,000, or roughly $10 per person that Doctors Without Borders expects it to protect.

Scientists aren’t yet sure how Wolbachia actually blocks viral transmission. And it isn’t clear whether the bacteria will work equally well against all strains of the virus, or if some strains might become resistant over time, said Bobby Reiner, a mosquito researcher at the University of Washington.

“It’s certainly not a one-and-done fix, forever guaranteed,” Reiner said.

SPECIAL MOSQUITOES BRED IN COLOMBIA

Many of the world’s mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia were hatched in a warehouse in Medellín, Colombia, where the World Mosquito Program runs a factory that breeds 30 million of them per week.

The factory imports dried mosquito eggs from different parts of the world to ensure the specially bred mosquitoes it eventually releases will have similar qualities to local populations, including resistance to insecticides, said Edgard Boquín, one of the Honduras project leaders working for Doctors Without Borders.

The dried eggs are placed in water with powdered food. Once they hatch, they are allowed to breed with the “mother colony” — a lineage that carries Wolbachia and is made up of more females than males.

A constant buzz fills the room where the insects mate in cube-shaped cages made of mosquito nets. Caretakers ensure they have the best diet: Males get sugared water, while females “bite” into pouches of human blood kept at 97 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius).

“We have the perfect conditions,” the factory’s coordinator, Marlene Salazar, said.

Once workers confirm that the new mosquitoes carry Wolbachia, their eggs are dried and filled into pill-like capsules to be sent off to release sites.

DOCTORS ENLIST HELP IN HONDURAS

The Doctors Without Borders team in Honduras recently went door-to-door in a hilly neighborhood of Tegucigalpa to enlist residents’ help in incubating mosquito eggs bred in the Medellin factory.

At half a dozen houses, they received permission to hang from tree branches glass jars containing water and a mosquito egg-filled capsule. After about 10 days, the mosquitoes would hatch and fly off.

That same day, a dozen young workers from Doctors Without Borders fanned out across Northern Tegucigalpa on motorcycles carrying jars of the already hatched dengue-fighting mosquitoes and, at designated sites, released thousands of them into the breeze.

Because community engagement is key to the program’s success, doctors and volunteers have spent the past six months educating neighborhood leaders, including influential gang members, to get their permission to work in areas under their control.

Some of the most common questions from the community were about whether Wolbachia would harm people or the environment. Workers explained that any bites from the special mosquitoes or their offspring were harmless.

María Fernanda Marín, a 19-year-old student, works for Doctors Without Borders in a facility where Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes are hatched for eventual release. She proudly shows neighbors a photo of her arm covered in bites to help earn their trust.

Lourdes Betancourt, 63, another volunteer with the Doctors Without Borders team, was at first suspicious of the new strategy. But Betancourt – who has been sickened by dengue several times — now encourages her neighbors to let the “good mosquitoes” grow in their yards.

“I tell people not to be afraid, that this isn’t anything bad, to have trust,” Betancourt said. “They are going to bite you, but you won’t get dengue.”

___

Burakoff reported from New York City. AP journalist Marko Álvarez contributed to this story from Medellín, Colombia.

——-

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Special mosquitoes are being bred to fight dengue. How the old enemies are now becoming allies appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told political leaders at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos that supplies of Western weapons must come quicker than Russia’s attacks, urging the world to move faster because “tragedies are outpacing life; the tyranny is outpacing democracy.”

Zelenskyy, speaking by video link from Kyiv, said the world needs to react more rapidly to challenges like global security, climate change, hunger and energy, warning that in the war, “the time the free world uses to think is used by the terrorist state to kill.”

He said his allies must not hesitate: “The supplying of Ukraine with air defense systems must outpace Russia’s vast missile attacks. The supplies of Western tanks must outpace another invasion of Russian tanks.”

Zelenskyy’s spoke after U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the world as being in a “sorry state” because of interlinked challenges including climate change and Russia’s war in Ukraine that are “piling up like cars in a chain reaction crash.”

The gloom hung on the second day of the elite gathering of world leaders and corporate executives in the Swiss ski resort of Davos after a helicopter crashed into a kindergarten in Ukraine, killing more than a dozen people, including Ukraine’s interior minister.

Zelenskyy stood and asked for a moment of silence for the victims. There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash, but he said that “every individual, every death is a result of war.”

His wife, first lady Olena Zelenska, earlier called it “another very sad day,” dabbing teary eyes, then telling Davos attendees that “we can also change this negative situation for the better.”

The Ukrainian delegation to Davos, including Zelenska, has been pushing for more aid, including increasingly advanced weapons, from international allies to fight Russia.

Shortly before Zelenskyy spoke, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reiterated that Germany was one of the top suppliers of military equipment to Ukraine when asked why he had not sent tanks to the war-torn country.

While Germany has provided air-defense systems and armored personnel carriers, Scholz — the only leader to attend Davos from the Group of 7 biggest economies — is facing increasing pressure to send Leopard 2 battle tanks to help Ukraine.

“We will continue to support Ukraine – for as long as necessary,” Scholz said.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine’s Western backers this week will discuss ways to supply heavier and more advanced weapons.

“The main message there will be: more support, more advanced support, heavier weapons and more modern weapons,” Stoltenberg said of a gathering in Germany of top defense officials, including U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who work to coordinate military contributions to Ukraine.

“This is a fight for our values, this is a fight for democracy — and we just have to prove that democracy wins over tyranny and oppression,” the NATO leader added.

Meanwhile, Guterres said the “gravest levels of geopolitical division and mistrust in generations” are undermining efforts to tackle global problems, including widening inequality, a cost-of-living crisis sparked by soaring inflation and an energy crunch, lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply-chain disruptions and more.

The U.N. chief singled out climate change as an “existential challenge,” and said a global commitment to limit the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius “is nearly going up in smoke.”

Guterres, who has been one of the most outspoken world figures on climate change, referenced a recent study that found scientists at Exxon Mobil made remarkably accurate predictions about the effects of climate change as far back as the 1970s, even as the company’s stance publicly raised doubts about whether global warming was real.

“We learned last week that certain fossil fuel producers were fully aware in the 1970s that their core product was baking our planet,” he said in his speech. “Some in Big Oil peddled the big lie.”

Critics have questioned the impact of the four-day meeting where politicians, CEOs and other leaders discuss the world’s problems — and make deals on the sidelines — but where concrete action is harder to measure. Environmentalists, for example, slam the carbon-spewing private jets that ferry in bigwigs to an event that prioritizes the battle against climate change.

Government officials, corporate titans, academics and activists attended dozens of panel sessions Wednesday on topics covering the metaverse, environmental greenwashing and artificial intelligence.

Ukraine has taken center stage as the anniversary of the start of the war nears. When Zelenskyy was asked about engaging in a dialogue with Russia, he said that “they will have to recognize their own mistakes, they will have to recognize Ukrainian statutes and they will have to really respect our territorial integrity.”

NATO’s leader says supplying Ukraine more equipment long term will help force Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate.

“It is very dangerous to underestimate Russia,” Stoltenberg warned. “Weapons — they are the way to peace” but they must come quickly.

Zelenskyy has daily pleaded for more advanced weapons, escalating his requests as Russia introduces new tactics and weapons against the much smaller Ukrainian army. Western countries have heeded the calls, although often with a delay and not in the number sought.

Guterres was not optimistic that the conflict being waged less than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from Davos would end soon.

“I do not see the end of the war in the immediate future,” he said. Deep historical differences between Russia and Ukraine make it more difficult to find a solution based on international law and that respects territorial integrity, he added.

“For the moment, I don’t think that we have a chance to promote or to mediate a serious negotiation to achieve peace in the short term,” Guterres said.

___

AP journalists Masha Macpherson and David Keyton in Davos and Kelvin Chan in London contributed.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post At Davos, Zelenskyy urges allies to speed up push vs. Russia appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials celebrated in early September when top allies agreed to back an audacious, never-before-tried plan to clamp down on Vladimir Putin’s access to cash as he wages war on Ukraine.

The idea sounded simple enough: The countries would pay only cut-rate prices for Russian oil. That would deprive Putin of money to keep prosecuting his war in Ukraine, but also ensure that oil continued to flow out of Russia and helped to keep global prices low.

A month later, the Group of Seven, representing some of the world’s leading economies, is still figuring out how to execute the plan — a far more complex task than it might seem at first blush — and the Dec. 5 deadline to marshal participants is fast approaching.

In the meantime, the war grinds on. The Kremlin is mobilizing 300,000 more troops to join the invasion of Ukraine and Putin has annexed four Ukrainian regions after Kremlin-orchestrated referendums that the West denounced as shams.

And while the U.S. and European countries have levied thousands of financial and diplomatic sanctions on Russia, including recently announced penalties, Treasury leaders say a price cap on oil could deliver the most effective blow to Russia’s economy, undermining its greatest revenue source.

Pushed by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the price cap plan is testing the bounds of statecraft and capitalism. Yellen made her reputation as a Federal Reserve chair who helped steer the U.S. into the longest expansion in its history. Now she’s trying to use global energy markets as a vise to stop a war and keep oil prices from rushing upward this winter.

Yellen and her team at Treasury have been lobbying their international counterparts on the price cap since at least May. The U.S. has already blocked Russian oil imports, which were small to begin with.

“This is an entirely new way to use financial measures against a global bully,” Elizabeth Rosenberg, Treasury’s head of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, said at a recent congressional hearing.

“A price cap coalition requires unprecedented coordination with international partners, as well as close partnership with global maritime industries, and exceptional resolve in the face of hostile Russian bluster and threats, including the risk that Russia may seek to retaliate,” Rosenberg said.

The risks of this new form of economic warfare are immense to the global oil supply. If it fails or Russia retaliates by stopping the export of oil, then energy prices worldwide could skyrocket. U.S. consumers could feel the ramifications in another spike in gasoline prices.

“I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know exactly what Russia will do here. There are a lot of different options,” Ben Harris, Treasury’s assistant secretary for economic policy, said during a recent Brookings Institution presentation. He added: “The price cap provides an opportunity for a bit of a release valve and the hope that these Russian barrels will find the market, but at a reduced price.”

The Dec. 5 deadline for setting the price for discounted oil comes just before a year-end wider European embargo on seaborne Russian crude oil and a complete ban on shipping insurance designed to prevent Russian oil from reaching non-European buyers. The embargo and insurance ban could eliminate up to 4 million barrels a day from the world’s daily supply of petroleum, a loss of roughly 4%.

Treasury’s hope is that the price cap kicks in first and allows some of that oil to keep flowing via exceptions to the embargo and the insurance ban, albeit at prices lower than market rates.

While Treasury officials and leading economists express confidence that the plan will work — and already is working — some oil analysts are wary of trying to implement it before winter, in a global economy already scarred by supply shocks, and a Europe facing fast-rising inflation.

The unknowns are too many, they say.

“The wildcard factor to me is what the Russians do, because the Russians have made abundantly clear that they do not want to play along with price caps,” said Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets.

“We should prepare ourselves at least,” she said, “that they may withhold oil.”

Ed Morse, head of commodities research at Citi Group, said at the Brookings Institution recently: “It’s an experiment that’s never been done in world history. I think it is a poor judgment call to do this at this time.”

Oil is the Kremlin’s main pillar of financial revenue and has kept the Russian economy afloat so far in the war despite export bans, sanctions and the freezing of central bank assets that began with the February invasion.

Before the war, Russia exported roughly 5 million barrels of oil per day as one of the world’s biggest oil exporters. That figure — accounting for roughly 9% of the world’s crude exports — has largely been unchanged despite all the sanctions.

Russia has vowed to take retaliatory measures to offset the impact of the price cap. Last week, Kommersant, a Russian business newspaper, reported that the Kremlin is considering raising $50 billion in additional revenue from taxes on exported energy, in response to the plan.

Analysts are hopeful the Russians are bluffing. Deutsche Bank recently assigned a “low probability” to Russia stopping its exports and cut its forecast for the price of crude by 10%. The German bank cited the U.S. Treasury’s announcement that India could have flexibility to buy from non-EU providers if it doesn’t join the price cap coalition, among other factors.

And while it’s assumed China and India won’t be part of an official coalition on the price cap, lower prices paid to Russia by these nations would help accomplish the coalition’s goal, Treasury officials say, getting more oil on the market with less revenue for the Kremlin. Already, Russia is locking in long-term contracts to limit the loss of potential oil revenues.

Raoul LeBlanc, vice president of energy at S&P Global Commodity Insights, said in some ways the discounts Russia is already providing countries show that a price cap could work.

LeBlanc said the complete loss of Russian oil on the global marketplace “would be catastrophic to the world economy” and losses would most heavily affect Latin America and much of South Asia.

Many European countries are already seeing major impacts of the war on their economies without a price cap in effect. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last week said the global economy is set to lose $2.8 trillion in output in 2023 because of the war.

On other energy matters, European Union energy ministers on Friday levied a tax on fossil fuel companies’ windfall profits, but could not agree on a natural gas price cap.

Treasury is navigating a host of tricky questions as it works to implement the oil price cap plan. Among them: figuring out the size of the discount the G-7 and others would force on Russian oil, how the price cap would interact with the coming embargo and insurance ban, how companies would conduct their business as they try to avoid sanctions and how to stop Putin from getting around any cap.

Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he believes the price cap is “better than the status quo” — the expected European embargo on oil and ban on maritime insurance. But, Cahill adds, it will create complexities in the market that could drive up the cost of doing business.

“It’s a big gamble,” he said.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Allies aim for risky Russian oil price cap as winter nears appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

YESICA FISCH and JON GAMBRELL | AP News

The U.S. defense chief urged Ukraine’s allies to “move at the speed of war” to get more and heavier weapons to Kyiv as Russian forces rained fire on eastern and southern Ukraine amid new fears that the fighting could spill over the country’s borders.

For the second day, explosions rocked the separatist region of Trans-Dniester Tuesday in neighboring Moldova, knocking out two powerful radio antennas. And a Russian missile hit a strategic railroad bridge linking Ukraine’s Odesa port region to neighboring Romania, a NATO member, Ukrainian authorities said.

Meanwhile, two other neighboring NATO members, Poland and Bulgaria, said the Kremlin is cutting off natural gas supplies starting Wednesday, the first such actions of the war. Poland has been a major gateway for the delivery of weapons to Ukraine and confirmed this week that it is sending the country tanks.

Poland said it was well-prepared after working for years to reduce its reliance on Russian energy. Poland also has ample natural gas in storage, and it will soon benefit from two pipelines coming online, analyst Emily McClain of Rystad Energy said.

Bulgaria gets over 90% of its gas from Russia, and officials said they were working to find other sources, such as from Azerbaijan.

Both countries had refused Russia’s demands that they pay in rubles, as have almost all of Russia’s gas customers in Europe.

Two months into the fighting, Western arms have helped Ukraine stall Russia’s invasion, but the country’s leaders have said they need more support fast.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin convened a meeting Tuesday of officials from about 40 countries at the U.S. air base at Ramstein, Germany, and said more help is on the way.

“We’ve got to move at the speed of war,” Austin said.

He said he wanted officials to leave the meeting “with a common and transparent understanding of Ukraine’s near-term security requirements because we’re going to keep moving heaven and earth so that we can meet them.”

Lilia stands next to a place where a bomb heavily damaged the basement of a residential building killing, according to the residents, a 8-year-old girl during a Russian attack yesterday, in Lyman, Ukraine, Tuesday, April 26, 2022. Russia pounded eastern and southern Ukraine on Tuesday as the U.S. promised to “keep moving heaven and earth” to get Kyiv the weapons it needs to repel the new offensive, despite Moscow’s warnings that such support could trigger a wider war. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

Lilia stands next to a place where a bomb heavily damaged the basement of a residential building killing, according to the residents, a 8-year-old girl during a Russian attack yesterday, in Lyman, Ukraine, Tuesday, April 26, 2022. Russia pounded eastern and southern Ukraine on Tuesday as the U.S. promised to “keep moving heaven and earth” to get Kyiv the weapons it needs to repel the new offensive, despite Moscow’s warnings that such support could trigger a wider war. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — The U.S. defense chief urged Ukraine’s allies to “move at the speed of war” to get more and heavier weapons to Kyiv as Russian forces rained fire on eastern and southern Ukraine amid new fears that the fighting could spill over the country’s borders.

For the second day, explosions rocked the separatist region of Trans-Dniester Tuesday in neighboring Moldova, knocking out two powerful radio antennas. And a Russian missile hit a strategic railroad bridge linking Ukraine’s Odesa port region to neighboring Romania, a NATO member, Ukrainian authorities said.

Meanwhile, two other neighboring NATO members, Poland and Bulgaria, said the Kremlin is cutting off natural gas supplies starting Wednesday, the first such actions of the war. Poland has been a major gateway for the delivery of weapons to Ukraine and confirmed this week that it is sending the country tanks.

Poland said it was well-prepared after working for years to reduce its reliance on Russian energy. Poland also has ample natural gas in storage, and it will soon benefit from two pipelines coming online, analyst Emily McClain of Rystad Energy said.

Russia-Ukraine war

UN chief and Russia’s Putin agree on key Ukraine evacuation

EXPLAINER: How is Trans-Dniester related to war in Ukraine?

Live updates | Russia-Ukraine War

Poland, Bulgaria say Russia suspending natural gas supplies

Bulgaria gets over 90% of its gas from Russia, and officials said they were working to find other sources, such as from Azerbaijan.

Both countries had refused Russia’s demands that they pay in rubles, as have almost all of Russia’s gas customers in Europe.

Two months into the fighting, Western arms have helped Ukraine stall Russia’s invasion, but the country’s leaders have said they need more support fast.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin convened a meeting Tuesday of officials from about 40 countries at the U.S. air base at Ramstein, Germany, and said more help is on the way.

“We’ve got to move at the speed of war,” Austin said.

He said he wanted officials to leave the meeting “with a common and transparent understanding of Ukraine’s near-term security requirements because we’re going to keep moving heaven and earth so that we can meet them.”

After unexpectedly fierce resistance by Ukrainian forces thwarted Russia’s attempt to take Ukraine’s capital, Moscow now says its focus is the capture of the Donbas, the mostly Russian-speaking industrial area in eastern Ukraine.

In the town of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, people fleeing the shelling lined up Tuesday to board a train headed to the far west of the country. One person was lifted onto the train in a wheelchair, another on a stretcher.

The passengers took with them cats, dogs, a few bags and boxes, and the memory of those who did not flee in time.

“We were in the basement, but my daughter didn’t make it and was hit with shrapnel on the doorstep” during shelling on Monday, said Mykola Kharchenko, 74. “We had to bury her in the garden near the pear tree.”

He said his village, Vremivka, was under heavy fire for four days and all but destroyed. With tears in his eyes, Kharchenko said he somehow held himself together at home, but once he reached the train station he fell apart. In a flash of anger, he lashed out at Russia.

“Is this liberation? From whom am I, a Russian speaker, from whom am I being liberated? From whom? From my daughter? From everything I have built during my whole life?

In the gutted southern port city of Mariupol, authorities said Russian forces hit the Azovstal steel plant with 35 airstrikes over 24 hours. The plant is the last known stronghold of Ukrainian fighters in the city. About 1,000 civilians were said to be taking shelter there with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian defenders.

Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, said Russia was using heavy bunker bombs. He also accused Russian forces of shelling a route they had offered as an escape corridor from the steel mill.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region of the Donbas, said on the Telegram messaging app that Russian forces “continue to deliberately fire at civilians and to destroy critical infrastructure.”

Ukraine also said Russian forces shelled Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, which lies in the northeast, outside the Donbas. But it is seen as key to Russia’s apparent bid to encircle Ukrainian troops in the Donbas from the north, east and south.

Ukrainian forces struck back in the Kherson region in the south.

The attack Tuesday on the bridge near Odesa — along with a series of strikes on key railroad stations a day earlier — appeared to signal a major shift in Russia’s approach. Until now, Moscow has spared strategic bridges, perhaps in hopes of keeping them for its own use in seizing Ukraine. But now it seems to be trying to thwart Ukraine’s efforts to move troops and supplies.

No injuries were reported in the strike on the bridge, and Ukraine’s military said repair work was underway.

The southern Ukraine coastline and Moldova have been on edge since a senior Russian military officer said last week that the Kremlin’s goal is to secure not just eastern Ukraine but the entire south, so as to open the way to Trans-Dniester, a long, narrow strip of land with about 470,000 people along the Ukrainian border where about 1,500 Russian troops are based.

It was not clear who was behind the blasts in Trans-Dniester, but the attacks gave rise to fears that Russia is stirring up trouble so as to create a pretext to either invade Trans-Dniester or use the region as another launching point to attack Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the explosions were carried out by Russia and were “designed to destabilize,” with the intention of showing Moldova what could happen if it supports Ukraine.

Austin, the U.S. defense secretary, said the U.S. was still looking into blasts and trying to determine what was going on, but added: “Certainly we don’t want to see any spillover” of the conflict.

With the potentially pivotal battle for the east underway, the U.S. and its NATO allies are scrambling to deliver artillery and other heavy weaponry in time to make a difference.

German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said her government will supply Gepard self-propelled armored anti-aircraft guns to Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has faced mounting pressure to send heavy weapons such as tanks and other armored vehicles.

Austin noted that more than 30 allies and partners have joined the U.S. in sending military aid to Ukraine and that more than $5 billion worth of equipment has been committed.

The U.S. defense secretary said the war has weakened Russia’s military, adding, “We would like to make sure, again, that they don’t have the same type of capability to bully their neighbors that we saw at the outset of this conflict.”

A senior Kremlin official, Nikolai Patrushev, warned that “the policies of the West and the Kyiv regime controlled by it would only be the breakup of Ukraine into several states.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov cautioned that if the Western flow of weapons continues, the talks aimed at ending the fighting will not produce any results.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post US: Allies must move ‘at the speed of war’ to help Ukraine appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.