Returning Ukraine's dead
Since Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine began three and a half years ago, at least 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have been reported missing. Soldiers often vanish after coming face-to-face with Russians in combat. Some are taken alive as prisoners of war; others who die on the battlefield are captured as collateral for future body repatriation exchanges between Kyiv and Moscow — a corpse for a corpse. For the missing's wives, parents, siblings, and children back home, there is most often no way of knowing where they are, what condition they are being kept in, and whether they are alive.
At the center of the search for missing soldiers are some 1,300 investigators within the war crimes unit of Ukraine's National Police. Each investigator, some in their early 20s and fresh out of the police academy, manages hundreds of cases at a time, working early mornings, late nights, and weekends to locate, return, and identify the missing. They interview witnesses, scour social media and cellphone records, collect DNA samples, and coordinate with the Ukrainian government. Perhaps more than anything, they serve as a crucial lifeline to the families living through a nauseating uncertainty that can extend for months or even years. This summer, the National Police gave Business Insider exclusive access to interview and witness the investigators at work at three locations in the Kyiv region — the first time a publication has been allowed to report on their work in detail. (This story contains graphic descriptions and photos.)
At the Brovary police station east of Kyiv, Maksym Kot's phone rings, one of 50 calls he will get throughout the day, the majority from the families of some of the 400 missing soldier cases he is working on. Baby-faced and soft-spoken, Kot is 23 and graduated from Ukraine's police academy two years ago. He is the sole investigator of soldier disappearances in Brovary, a city of more than 100,000.
As we sit in his small, cluttered office, Kot explains how each case begins: A family member files a missing persons report with the police, which includes the name and circumstances of a soldier's disappearance, if there are any known witnesses, or any suspected perpetrators — in this case, Russian service members. Then Kot starts calling the vanished's fellow soldiers, other relatives, and friends into the station for questioning.
Soldiers serving alongside the missing service member provide a timeline leading up to their last known moments. They can tell Kot where a troop was fighting, what their last orders were, and the exact last location of the missing soldier.
The families, whom Kot refers to as "the victims," share intimate details of the missing soldiers' lives. They provide pictures and descriptions of the soldiers' faces, tattoos, birth marks, and other identifying features, the last text messages soldiers wrote to them, and DNA samples — to test for matches with bodies returned from Russia in prisoner exchanges.
When Kot talks to the families, they often "can't stop crying, and it's hard to engage them in conversation," he says. "I always tell them that hope dies last." The emotional toll they face is deep and excruciating. Russian soldiers have also been known to torture Ukrainian POWs, starving them, and at times sexually assaulting them. (The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has gathered claims from Russian prisoners of war of being tortured, severely beaten, and subjected to sexual violence.) Mental images of what could be happening to their loved ones in captivity often sends family members into hysterics.
At Kot's office, a 21-year-old woman named Nadiia arrives for a scheduled visit. Her father, Pavlo, 46, went missing off the front lines in the eastern Bakhmut region on October 1, 2022. She has come to provide her first DNA sample; an uncle had previously provided one. (The families who work with Kot whom I spoke with asked that their last name be withheld for security reasons; if their soldier is alive and in captivity, they fear speaking out could worsen the soldier's treatment.)
"The last time I spoke to him was during the day," Nadiia tells me of her father. "He didn't say anything special, he just said he would call me again in the evening, but he never did." One week later, her family received a call from a military office informing them that Pavlo had gone missing. Several weeks after that, a soldier serving alongside Pavlo told his brother that their unit had been sent to positions in two groups of four — one group returned and the other did not. Nearly three years later, his case remains open, and his whereabouts and whether he's alive remain unknown.
After a few minutes, a forensic specialist walked into Kot's room with a large black suitcase containing personal protective equipment and a buccal swab kit to take a DNA sample from inside Nadiia's cheek. While the swab takes a few seconds, it can take months to a year to create a DNA profile. Nadiia tells me she is hopeful that her sample will not match with the remains of any of the soldiers recently returned from captivity to Kyiv — which would mean her father could still be alive.
After Nadiia leaves, Kot reaches over to the left side of his desk and grabs a large stack of paper held together by a binder clip — this is the paperwork of a single case.
Once he collects witness statements and DNA samples, Kot goes through various bureaucratic channels of Ukraine's government to receive permission to create the official case of a missing soldier. With that, he can gain access to cellphone records — which can show who the soldier last spoke with and where — as well as letters from the military confirming the soldier is missing.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is another resource investigators rely on. As a neutral body, the ICRC has designated teams in both Moscow and Kyiv that maintain lists of current POWs from both sides of the war. "There are delays. It's not a perfect system. But by and large, this system functions," says Pat Griffiths, a spokesperson for the ICRC Ukraine. It can be months before a POW is entered into the system, and if they have not been accounted for after a prolonged period, the likelihood that the person has been killed increases significantly, Griffiths says. As of June, the ICRC has received requests to account for 134,000 missing people from both Russia and Ukraine since the start of the war. Of those, 14,200 have been told the fate of their loved ones.
Families come to Kot regularly with any fragments of information from their own research. He trawls Telegram and other Russian social media and messaging channels for information about a soldier's whereabouts. In one instance, he found video and photos of one of the missing soldiers who was in Russian captivity. "I quickly informed his mother about this. She was very happy," Kot recalls.
Beyond collecting evidence, all Kot can do as the investigator is wait and comfort the families through their maddening purgatory.
"I never show them that I have reached a dead end," says Kot. "I have not shown and will not show weakness." When he started his job, Kot took every new case "to heart," he says — each family's anguish tormented him. After thousands of meetings with missing soldiers' wives, siblings, parents, and children, he's managed to "stay psychologically resilient," he says, though he still feels each case deeply.
One case that Kot worked on was a 38-year-old soldier named Oleksandr, who went missing from the eastern Pokrovsk region, one of the war's hotspots, on November 22, 2024. Eleven days before his disappearance, Oleksandr married his wife, Nataliia, 37. A few hours into my visit to Kot's office, Nataliia arrives to meet with him.
"No one knew I was getting married because I wasn't sure if his brigade would allow him to attend the ceremony," she tells me with a smile. "After we got married, my mother asked me, 'Why him?' I said, 'Because he can listen to me and understand me." She talks about the hobbies she took on to pass the time: web design, adopting a poodle, learning Turkish for no particular reason. She is 99 percent certain her "soulmate" is alive, she says with conviction.
Nataliia has come to show a Facebook post about some soldiers who went missing with her husband and recently returned from captivity — could Kot locate and interview them? Kot nods as he types notes into Oleksandr's case file on his desktop computer.
Eight days after my visit, Nataliia sends me a text message. She had just heard from Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which interviews POWs upon their return, that two witnesses saw Oleksandr die. She did not specify whether it was on the battlefield or in captivity. "It feels like I'm falling into an abyss," she says on the phone. Months of certainty that her husband was alive were stripped away in a moment.
Kot says that he and other investigators are identifying witnesses and will conduct interviews to confirm that Oleksandr is dead. After that comes the interminable process of returning and identifying his body.
Since 2022, Ukraine has secured the release of 5,700 prisoners of war and civilians from Russia. The Ukrainian police believe there are many thousands more still in Russian captivity, as well as tens of thousands of bodies of Ukrainian soldiers. Most of them have been killed on the front lines; at least 206 have died in captivity, according to the Ukrainian government. Ukraine receives the bodies of around 100 deceased soldiers every two to six weeks, investigators told BI. They are unloaded from vans by Russian government workers in an undisclosed location and collected by their Ukrainian counterparts, who in turn return the bodies of Russian soldiers.
In June, Ukraine received a sudden influx of 6,057 bodies (while Russia received 78, according to Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky) as part of a round of failed ceasefire talks between Kyiv and Moscow in Istanbul. The mass of corpses strained an already delicate system, with hundreds of bodies being brought to morgues throughout the country simultaneously. "As the nature of this conflict changed and rapidly escalated, suddenly you're dealing with a lot more human remains. The forensic infrastructure here risks being overwhelmed," says Griffiths. More than 90 percent of bodies return unlabeled and unidentified, and connecting each to a missing persons report is a lengthy, painstaking endeavor.
On June 26, I visit a morgue on the edge of Kyiv that just received the bodies of 50 servicemen, and meet with Victoriia Konopatska, a 24-year-old senior police investigator. Where Kot focuses primarily on locating missing soldiers who are thought to be alive, Konopatska focuses on identifying the dead upon their return. When the full-scale war began in February 2022, she was in her final year at Ukraine's police academy. She had four months of training left when, in March, she and her classmates graduated early to join the police force.
The smell of decaying corpses in the morgue seeps into the skin, makes your eyes water, and lingers long after you leave the building. Konopatska has been exposed to this smell nearly every day on the job for three and a half years, and has not grown used to it.
In the front room of the morgue, three dead civilians who just died at a local hospital — an elderly man and woman, and a man in his 40s — lie on separate tables. The mortician, a middle-aged woman, carefully dresses them in their funeral clothes: the men in black suits, the woman in a deep blue dress and a headscarf that the mortician delicately wraps around her head and tied just below her chin.
The bodies of the civilians were intact and their eyes and mouths peacefully closed — a stark contrast from the room Konopatska leads me to a few steps away. She is wearing a large white PPE suit, a blue hair net, and a face mask. Underneath all of the dressing, her eyebrows are perfectly shaped, her long lashes painted with mascara, and she has a fresh French manicure. As she stands holding an iPad, Simon Nikolaichuk, a forensic scientist, and his assistant assess the body of an unidentified soldier lying on the metal table. Though the soldier was dressed in the military uniform he had been killed in, the body was partly skeletal and mummified. It has "significant putrefactive changes and is generally reduced to bones and grease," Konopatska says flatly. Identifying it will be challenging.
As Nikolaichuk conducts the autopsy over the next hour, characteristics of the soldier begin to emerge. A rosary is pulled from his jacket, followed by a destroyed cellphone charger, and a pair of reading glasses, which suggests he may have been older. (The average Ukrainian soldier fighting today is 40.) These mementos will be given to the family of the soldier if he is identified and they are notified.
Konopatska types on her iPad each assessment called out to her. "Head injury. Gunshot wound to the head. Damage to the skull bones," says Nikolaichuk. "Broken shoulder blade. Fracture of the right and left shoulder blades. Fracture of the upper third of both humerus bones." He examines the soldier's scalp. "There are remnants of hair up to 0.7 inches long."
Konopatska estimates that she has assessed well over a thousand bodies throughout the war, both civilian and military. She spends the majority of her workdays collecting DNA samples from the bodies of the soldiers returned to Kyiv, up to five per day. "We finish working with some bodies, and others are immediately brought in," she says.
Their assessment of the soldier's body complete, Nikolaichuk and his assistant return the remains to a white bag and carry it to a nearby cargo-sized refrigerator that is filled with dozens of other bodies stacked neatly on shelves. Nikolaichuk walks back to the morgue and quickly looks through the corpses in the three other bags — one dead a few months and partially intact, the man's white beard flowing from his chin; one putrefied; and the other torn to shreds, the skull split in two, likely from an explosion.
Bones and mummified corpses are all that remain of 80 percent of the soldiers' bodies that Russia returns to Ukraine, according to Ihor Kalantai, head of the police unit investigating war crimes. Some return decapitated, have their hands tied, or have stab wounds — all "signs of extrajudicial executions," says Kalantai. Undetonated explosive devices have been found tucked inside the clothes of bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, Kalantai says. A de-miner is now present during every repatriation. Some soldiers, Kalantai says, return as nothing more than a leg, arm, or a mere finger.
Other bodies have been dissected and have pieces of medical waste sewn into them. Bodies have also returned with missing organs. Last spring, when the body of Victoria Roshchyna, a prominent Ukrainian journalist who died in Russian custody at age 27, was returned to Ukraine, her eyes, brain, and parts of her windpipe were reportedly missing.
" It's hard to single out which bodies are difficult to look at," says Konopatska, "because every body is difficult to look at because you understand that someone was waiting for this person at home."
There is a common folklore belief in Ukraine that when a loved one dies, they will visit the dreams of their family members to say goodbye. When families have lost all contact with their relatives on the battlefield, many hold onto that legend, believing that if they have not dreamed of their son, their husband, or their father, then he must still be alive somewhere.
Once Konopatska has taken the DNA samples of the bodies, she brings them to Olha Sydorenko, 33, an investigator at the station's Department of Particularly Serious Crimes. She sends the samples to forensic scientists to create a DNA profile and begins the process of matching the remains to possible relatives.
When there is a match, Sydorenko is tasked with informing families. She has had this conversation with more than 2,000 families. It always begins with a phone call where she introduces herself and asks them to come to her office in Kyiv to discuss their case, a courtesy to deliver life-altering news in-person. Often, though, they're already expecting the worst, and she breaks the news on the call.
"No one wants to believe that their loved one has died," Sydorenko says in her office. Some families require many repeated explanations to fully comprehend that their son or husband has returned home in a body bag. Then she details the condition the body has returned in, so the family can decide whether to view the bodies and begin to make funeral arrangements. Many often choose cremation.
One of Sydorenko's first and most haunting cases, she tells me, was of Vladyslav Lytvynenko, a 27-year-old who went missing on April 7, 2022. Vira Lytvynenko, Vladyslav's mother, received a call from the patronage service of the 12th Special Forces Brigade of the National Guard — a unit known in Ukraine as Azov — informing her that he was killed fighting in Mariupol.
"I felt hysterical, like any mother would," Vira tells me. "We had been waiting for a message from him while he was already gone," she says as her voice breaks. She was then told that the fighting in Mariupol — the site of the heaviest shelling in the war's early months — was too fierce to collect the dead. Azov was forced to surrender in Mariupol to encircling Russian soldiers in May 2022, and more than 2,500 soldiers of the brigade were believed to have been taken as prisoners of war. Russian forces also took the bodies of hundreds of soldiers, including Vladyslav.
Sydorenko first connected with Lytvynenko that summer, and they worked together for months to find a way to bring her son's body home. For hours at a time, the pair looked through the National Police's online catalogs of corpses, which are filled with pictures of remains in morgues throughout Ukraine. Lytvyenko and her husband provided two rounds of DNA samples and pictures of their son's tattoos, one of which is a Viking warrior standing tall in front of skyscrapers, an orange sunset visible in the distance. In mid-October 2022, Sydorenko called Lytvynenko to inform her that they'd found a match: Vladyslav's body was at a morgue in Kyiv.
It was a cold spring when Valdyslav died, Lytvynenko says, and she hoped Russian soldiers would "at least return his body in a proper condition so that I could see him one last time." But the decaying body that Russia had returned bore no resemblance to her son, Sydorenko told her. "Nothing was sacred to them," she says of Russian soldiers who kept Valdyslav's body for months. Lytvynenko chose not to see his remains, in part because Sydorenko advised her against it, and in part because she did not believe her son would want her to see him as the "pieces of rotten flesh" he returned as.
"It's horrible to see any animal or person dead," she says. "And if you see it and they tell you it's your son, I guess humanity hasn't come up with a word to describe that feeling yet."
Anna Conkling is a journalist currently based in Kyiv. Her writing has been featured in Rolling Stone, Elle, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere.

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NBC News
2 hours ago
- NBC News
Tens of thousands flee their homes as Thailand and Cambodia clash
SURIN, Thailand — Tens of thousands of people sought refuge as border fighting between Thailand and Cambodia entered its third day Saturday, heightening fears of an extended conflict with the total death toll reaching 32. The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting behind closed doors late Friday in New York, while Malaysia, which chairs the 10-nation regional bloc that includes both countries, called for an end to hostilities and offered to mediate. The council did not issue a statement but a council diplomat said all 15 members called on the parties to deescalate, show restraint and resolve the dispute peacefully. The council also urged the regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations known as ASEAN, to help resolve the border fighting, the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the meeting was private. Cambodia's U.N. Ambassador Chhea Keo told reporters afterward that his country, which called for the emergency meeting, 'asked for immediate ceasefires, unconditionally, and we also call for the peaceful solution to the dispute.' He responded to accusations that Cambodia attacked Thailand asking how a small country with no air force could attack a much larger country with an army three times its size, stressing, 'We do not do that.' Calls for restraint Keo said the Security Council called for both sides to exercise 'maximum restraint and resort to diplomatic solution' which is what Cambodia is calling for as well. Asked what he expects next, the ambassador said: 'Let's see how the call can be heard by all the members there.' Thailand's U.N. ambassador left the meeting without stopping to talk to reporters. The Thai Health Ministry on Friday said more than 58,000 have fled from villages to temporary shelters in four affected border provinces, while Cambodian authorities said more than 23,000 people have evacuated from areas near the border. The latest flare-up in a long-running border dispute between the two countries has killed at least 19 people in Thailand — mostly civilians —while Cambodia said Saturday that 12 people more people have killed on its side, bringing its death toll to 13. Thailand's acting prime minister, Phumtham Wechayachai, said Friday that Cambodia may be guilty of war crimes due to the deaths of civilians and damage caused to a hospital. He said Thailand had exercised the 'utmost restraint and patience in the face of provocations and aggression' from Cambodia. Tensions over a disputed border area erupted into fighting after a land mine explosion along the border wounded five Thai soldiers on Wednesday. Clashes break out The Thai military reported clashes early Friday in multiple areas along the border, including near the ancient Ta Muen Thom temple claimed by both sides. Associated Press reporters near the border could hear sounds of artillery from early morning hours. The Thai army said Cambodian forces had used heavy artillery and Russian-made BM-21 rocket launchers, prompting what Thai officials described as 'appropriate supporting fire' in return. Thailand said six of its soldiers and 13 civilians were killed while 29 soldiers and 30 civilians were wounded. Early Saturday, Cambodian Gen. Maly Socheata, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense, told reporters Saturday that seven more civilians and five soldiers have died from two days of fighting. It earlier reported one fatality — a man who was killed when the pagoda he was hiding in got hit by Thai rockets. The Cambodian Education Ministry claimed that on Friday two Thai rockets had hit a school compound in Oddar Meanchey but caused no injuries. It said all schools in the province have been closed. The Thai army denied it targeted civilian sites in Cambodia, and accused Cambodia of using 'human shields' by positioning their weapons near residential areas. Thousands flee villages As the fighting intensified, villagers on both sides have been caught in the crossfire, leading many to flee. Around 600 people took shelter at a gymnasium in a university in Surin, Thailand, about 50 miles from the border. Evacuees sat in groups, on mats and blankets, and queued for food and drinks. Seamstress Pornpan Sooksai was accompanied by four cats in two fabric carriers. She said she was doing laundry at her home near Ta Muen Thom temple when shelling began Thursday. 'I just heard, boom, boom. We already prepared the cages, clothes and everything, so we ran and carried our things to the car. I was frightened, scared,' she recalled. Rattana Meeying, another evacuee, said she had also lived through the 2011 clashes between the two countries but described this flare-up as worse. 'Children, old people, were hit out of the blue,' she said. 'I never imagined it would be this violent.' At the nearby Phanom Dong Rak hospital, periodic explosions could be heard Friday, and a military truck arrived with three injured Thai soldiers, including one who had both legs severed. Thursday's shelling shattered windows at one of the hospital's buildings and damaged its roof. In the neighboring Sisaket province, more villagers took their belongings and left homes in a stream of cars, trucks and motorbikes after they received an evacuation order on Friday. Across the border in Cambodia, villages on the outskirts of Oddar Meanchey province were largely deserted. Homes stood locked, while chickens and dogs roamed outside. Some villagers earlier dug holes to create makeshift underground bunkers, covering them with wood, tarpaulin and zinc sheets to shield themselves from shelling. Families with children were seen packing their belongings on home-made tractors to evacuate, though a few men refused to leave. A remote Buddhist temple surrounded by rice fields accommodated several hundred evacuated villagers. Women rested in hammocks, some cradling babies, while children ran about. Makeshift plastic tents were being set up under the trees. Veng Chin, 74, pleaded with both governments to negotiate a settlement 'so that I can return to my home and work on the farm.'


The Hill
6 hours ago
- The Hill
Tens of thousands flee their homes as Thailand and Cambodia clash
SURIN, Thailand (AP) — Tens of thousands of people sought refuge on Friday as border fighting between Thailand and Cambodia entered a second day, heightening fears of an extended conflict. The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting behind closed doors later Friday in New York, while Malaysia, which chairs the 10-nation regional bloc that includes both countries, called for an end to hostilities and offered to mediate. The council did not issue a statement but a council diplomat said all 15 members called on the parties to deescalate, show restraint and resolve the dispute peacefully. The council also urged the regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations known as ASEAN, to help resolve the border fighting, the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the meeting was private. Cambodia's U.N. Ambassador Chhea Keo told reporters afterward that his country, which called for the emergency meeting, 'asked for immediate ceasefires, unconditionally, and we also call for the peaceful solution to the dispute.' He responded to accusations that Cambodia attacked Thailand asking how a small country with no air force could attack a much larger country with an army three times its size, stressing, 'We do not do that.' UN Security Council urges restraint by both sides Keo said the Security Council called for both sides to exercise 'maximum restraint and resort to diplomatic solution' which is what Cambodia is calling for as well. Asked what he expects next, the ambassador said: 'Let's see how the call can be heard by all the members there.' Thailand's U.N. ambassador left the meeting without stopping to talk to reporters. The Thai Health Ministry on Friday said more than 58,000 have fled from villages to temporary shelters in four affected border provinces, while Cambodian authorities said more than 23,000 people have evacuated from areas near the border. The latest flare-up in a long-running border dispute between the two countries has killed at least 19 people in Thailand — mostly civilians —while Cambodia confirmed its first fatality on Friday. Thailand's acting prime minister, Phumtham Wechayachai, said Friday that Cambodia may be guilty of war crimes due to the deaths of civilians and damage caused to a hospital. He said Thailand had exercised the 'utmost restraint and patience in the face of provocations and aggression' from Cambodia. Tensions over a disputed border area erupted into fighting after a land mine explosion along the border wounded five Thai soldiers on Wednesday. Clashes break out across border areas The Thai military reported clashes early Friday in multiple areas along the border, including near the ancient Ta Muen Thom temple claimed by both sides. Associated Press reporters near the border could hear sounds of artillery from early morning hours. The Thai army said Cambodian forces had used heavy artillery and Russian-made BM-21 rocket launchers, prompting what Thai officials described as 'appropriate supporting fire' in return. Thailand said six of its soldiers and 13 civilians were killed, including children, while 29 soldiers and 30 civilians were wounded. Cambodia's chief official in Oddar Meanchey province, Gen. Khov Ly, said a man died Thursday after a Thai rocket hit a Buddhist pagoda where he was hiding. At least four civilians in the province were also wounded Thursday. The Cambodian Education Ministry claimed that on Friday two Thai rockets had hit a school compound in Oddar Meanchey but caused no injuries. It said all schools in the province have been closed. The Thai army denied it targeted civilian sites in Cambodia, and accused Cambodia of using 'human shields' by positioning their weapons near residential areas. Thousands flee villages near the border As the fighting intensified, villagers on both sides have been caught in the crossfire, leading many to flee. Around 600 people took shelter at a gymnasium in a university in Surin, Thailand, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the border. Evacuees sat in groups, on mats and blankets, and queued for food and drinks. Seamstress Pornpan Sooksai was accompanied by four cats in two fabric carriers. She said she was doing laundry at her home near Ta Muen Thom temple when shelling began Thursday. 'I just heard, boom, boom. We already prepared the cages, clothes and everything, so we ran and carried our things to the car. I was frightened, scared,' she recalled. Rattana Meeying, another evacuee, said she had also lived through the 2011 clashes between the two countries but described this flare-up as worse. 'Children, old people, were hit out of the blue,' she said. 'I never imagined it would be this violent.' At the nearby Phanom Dong Rak hospital, periodic explosions could be heard Friday, and a military truck arrived with three injured Thai soldiers, including one who had both legs severed. Thursday's shelling shattered windows at one of the hospital's buildings and damaged its roof. In the neighboring Sisaket province, more villagers took their belongings and left homes in a stream of cars, trucks and motorbikes after they received an evacuation order on Friday. Across the border in Cambodia, villages on the outskirts of Oddar Meanchey province were largely deserted. Homes stood locked, while chickens and dogs roamed outside. Some villagers earlier dug holes to create makeshift underground bunkers, covering them with wood, tarpaulin and zinc sheets to shield themselves from shelling. Families with children were seen packing their belongings on home-made tractors to evacuate, though a few men refused to leave. A remote Buddhist temple surrounded by rice fields accommodated several hundred evacuated villagers. Women rested in hammocks, some cradling babies, while children ran about. Makeshift plastic tents were being set up under the trees. Veng Chin, 74, pleaded with both governments to negotiate a settlement 'so that I can return to my home and work on the farm.' ASEAN chair calls for calm The conflict marks a rare instance of armed confrontation between ASEAN member countries though Thailand has tangled with Cambodia before over the border and has had sporadic skirmishes with western neighbor Myanmar. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said Friday that Thailand and Cambodia had agreed to a ceasefire and to withdraw their troops from the border, but requested more time before implementing the action, according to a report by Malaysia's Bernama national news agency. Anwar said he had spoken to both Cambodian leader Hun Manet and Thailand's Phumtham and urged them to open space for 'peaceful dialogue and diplomatic resolution,' while offering to have Malaysia facilitate talks. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has also called for restraint and urged both countries to resolve disputes through dialogue, according to U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq. It's the latest flareup in longstanding border tensions The 800-kilometer (500-mile) frontier between Thailand and Cambodia has been disputed for decades, but past confrontations have been limited and brief. The last major flare-up in 2011 left 20 dead. The current tensions broke out in May when a Cambodian soldier was killed in a confrontation that created a diplomatic rift and roiled Thailand's domestic politics. Things got worse when a land mine wounded five Thai soldiers on Wednesday, leading Bangkok to close the border and expel the Cambodian ambassador. The next day, clashes broke out along the border.


Newsweek
7 hours ago
- Newsweek
Donald Trump Says His Supreme Court Win Helps Obama—'He Owes Me Big'
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. President Donald Trump says former President Barack Obama "owes" him "big" after a Supreme Court ruling in 2024 on presidential immunity. Newsweek reached out to the office of Barack and Michelle Obama via online form Friday for comment. Why It Matters The president and former president have been in a public feud this week after Trump accused Obama and his team of committing "treason," alleging the former president manufactured intelligence regarding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Obama's office responded to the accusation in a rare statement, saying in part, "Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes," Obama's spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. "These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio." The Supreme Court's ruling last year on presidential immunity has broadened the limits of legal protection for presidents, both sitting and former, in relation to their official acts. The decision has had immediate effects on ongoing legal cases involving Trump and has sparked debate about its far-reaching implications. What To Know When asked by a reporter if the Supreme Court ruling would benefit Obama and cover what Trump is accusing him of, the president responded, "It probably helps him a lot. Probably helps him a lot, the immunity ruling, but it doesn't help the people around him at all." The president added, "But it probably helps him a lot ... he's done criminal acts, no question about it. But he has immunity, and it probably helps him a lot." Trump then concluded by saying, "He owes me big, Obama owes me big." On July 1, 2024, the High Court ruled 6-3 that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for their "core" constitutional acts while in office. The ruling stemmed from criminal charges against Trump related to his actions during and following the 2020 presidential election. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that this immunity is essential for the executive branch's independence, and even former presidents are entitled to a presumption of immunity for official acts. President Donald Trump can be seen calling on a reporter during a meeting with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Oval Office at the White House on July 22 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by... President Donald Trump can be seen calling on a reporter during a meeting with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Oval Office at the White House on July 22 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by) More What People Are Saying Roberts, in the ruling: "It is these enduring principles that guide our decision in this case. The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law. But Congress may not criminalize the President's conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the Executive Branch under the Constitution." Roberts continued: "And the system of separated powers designed by the Framers has always demanded an energetic, independent Executive. The President therefore may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. That immunity applies equally to all occupants of the Oval Office, regardless of politics, policy, or party." What Happens Next For future presidents of both parties, the immunity standard is likely to serve as binding precedent, making it harder to hold a president criminally liable for actions deemed official. Although Trump signaled that the ruling protects Obama, there is no current investigation that has been announced by the Department of Justice into Obama or his administration over actions during the 2016 election.