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‘Görli is our garden’: Berliners fight to stop mayor locking their park at night

The “hollow” in Görlitzer Park was heaving with revellers who had gathered in reaction to a court ruling against Berlin’s mayor who wanted to lock it up at night. “Görli is our garden,” said Monika, a retired psychiatric nurse who lives nearby and had joined the crowds on Monday night for a beer and a bop on the popular deep bowl-shaped meadow in the Kreuzberg district. “Görli is where we socialise and where my daughter grew up,” she said, using the affectionate nickname for the centrally located green space covering 14 hectares (35 acres). A decades-long on-off row about the park’s patrons and its role in Berlin’s daily life resurfaced earlier this year when the state government voted to seal it with a perimeter fence overnight in order to squeeze out the drug dealers and addicts who proliferate there. “We must, in the literal sense, take back control of Görlitzer Park,” the mayor, Kai Wegner, declared in 2023 after a “security summit”. After much deliberation, a metal fence with 16 gates, installed at a cost of about €2m (£1.7m), became operational on 1 March. After the ruling on Monday, the fence has stayed up but the gates have remained open 24/7. Few deny the problems attached to drug dealing – families report finding syringes and human faeces in playground sandpits and women say they have been abused. But “a fence doesn’t solve any problems, it just moves them elsewhere”, said Monika, a member of Görli Zaunfrei (Görli Fence-Free), one of several groups that campaigned against the fence and are calling for a more integrated, sustainable and better-funded plan to tackle the park’s challenges. Monday’s court ruling came as a blow to Wegner, of the conservative Christian Democrat party, who faces an election in September that he has billed as referendum on his promise to clamp down on crime in the German capital. In Kreuzberg, a culturally diverse and bohemian neighbourhood, parts of which have rapidly gentrified, he is disparagingly referred to as the “Zaunkönig” (fence king). “He himself has nothing to lose in Kreuzberg, where the CDU hardly stands a chance politically,” said Judith, a teacher and, like Monika, a member of Görli Zaunfrei. The park has long been at the centre of wider culture war debates in Germany, to the extent that most Berliners – and many beyond – have an opinion about it even if they have never set foot in it. As Judith put it: “A fence around Görli was never anything more than symbol politics – an election campaign gift for CDU voters in the suburbs.” As opponents of the fence predicted, illicit activity has been pushed into neighbouring areas, where there are reports of drug users being found sleeping in the stairwells and doorways of apartments and kindergartens. Many of the Berliners interviewed by the Guardian in the park this week – from people watching their grandchildren at a play day to a group singing campfire ballads – said they would rather the €2m, and estimated annual security costs of €800,000, were used to tackle addiction and related issues. Residents and local politicians complain that resources for drop-in drug centres, social workers and drug consumption rooms have been frozen or cut back. One of the legal headaches faced by Wegner is that by erecting the fence, he has ruled against the will of the district council responsible for the space. “It reminds us of Trump in California – going over the heads of those in power there, to assert his law and order,” said an elderly woman walking her chihuahua at dusk. She spoke of her frustration at being forced to curtail “walkies at dawn”. Long-term residents say the spirit of the community campaign is reminiscent of clashes between police and Kreuzbergers in the 70s and 80s, when squatters campaigned with considerable success to save the elegant period buildings that surround the park from being bulldozed. At the height of what has often been a high-spirited campaign to remove the fence, activists dressed as Easter bunnies handed out copies of the master keys to locks on the fencing, which actually worked, and offered tips on the whereabouts of gaps where they said “night-time hoppers” could enter the park. In response to supporters of the fence who have asked why the park needed to stay open late at night, an older, blind man said it intersected with several residential streets and that its closure forced pedestrians and cyclists to take significant detours along routes that were often poorly lit. He described Görli as his “vital shortcut” from the stop where the night bus dropped him off to his flat. Wegner has said the senate will appeal against the interim ruling, which could be reversed. Monika said: “We are making the most of the situation in the meantime.” She and Judith, who met through their campaigning and are now friends, said one good aspect of the fence was that it had brought the community closer together. They are now on a crusade to pull down the park’s boundaries altogether, Judith said, so that “people can go in and out whenever they like and no one needs to feel scared”.

‘It’s time to move forward’: Armenians vote in election closely watched by Russia and EU

Armenians are going to the polls in an election that could cement the country’s shift towards Europe and away from its traditional alliance with Russia. Prime minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party enters the vote as the favourite, ahead of three opposition candidates who advocate for closer ties with Moscow. Pashinyan’s main challenger, Samvel Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire who built much of his fortune in Russia, has been forced to campaign from house arrest at his mansion outside Yerevan. Much is at stake for the South Caucasus nation of 3 million people, with Moscow, Brussels and Washington all closely watching the vote. A Karapetyan victory could set Armenia on a trajectory similar to neighbouring Georgia, where a billionaire with Russian-made wealth has spent years dismantling pro-western reforms and pulling the country back towards Moscow. A strong majority for Pashinyan would give him a mandate to pursue his signature and politically sensitive goal: a peace agreement with Armenia’s longtime enemy Azerbaijan and the normalisation of relations with Turkey. A former journalist who swept to power during the 2018 Velvet Revolution, Pashinyan has campaigned on a platform of peace, arguing that ending Armenia’s decades-long confrontation with its neighbours would unlock economic opportunities, improve security and reduce its dependence on Russia. The prime minister, known for his populist and often emotional rhetoric, has sought closer ties with Europe, signalling that Armenia’s future lies in deeper integration with the west and expressing hope that the country could one day join the European Union. Pashinyan has received an endorsement from Donald Trump, who described him as “a great friend and leader”. The US has taken on an increasingly prominent role in efforts to broker a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Sunday’s vote is the first national election since Armenia’s loss of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan in 2023, a traumatic defeat that ended more than three decades of Armenian control over the disputed region. The opposition has sought to portray the loss as evidence of Pashinyan’s failures, accusing him of surrendering historical Armenian lands to its enemies. Yet Pashinyan has tried to turn the issue into a political asset. Arguing that Armenia’s pursuit of Karabakh helped trap the country in perpetual conflict and dependence on Russia, he has presented the painful chapter as the necessary starting point for a more secure and prosperous future. Anahit Sarkisyan, a lawyer from Yerevan, said after casting her vote on Sunday: “Pashinyan has a vision for the future, the rest are stuck in the past. We can’t be in endless wars with our neighbours. It’s time to move forward” Pashinyan’s course has put him in the crosshairs of Moscow, which has long projected influence over Armenian politics and the economy. Many Armenians became disillusioned with Russia after Moscow failed to come to their aid when Azerbaijan seized Nagorno-Karabakh despite the presence of Russian peacekeepers in the region. The fallout prompted Pashinyan to suspend Armenia’s participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) of six post-Soviet states, including Russia, marking the most dramatic rupture in relations with Moscow since the country’s independence. In the run-up to the election, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said Armenia, which has not formally applied for EU membership, was heading down the same path as Ukraine. “And where did it start?” Putin said, referring to Armenia’s EU push. “With Ukraine seeking to join the European Union.” Armenian officials and analysts have accused Russia of attempting to influence the election through disinformation campaigns in favour of pro-Russian candidates, and efforts to fly Armenians living in Russia back home to vote against Pashinyan. In recent weeks, Moscow has adopted a more overt approach, imposing a series of trade restrictions affecting everything from flowers and fish to fruit and Armenian brandy. But these last-ditch measures have so far failed to put a dent in Armenia’s economy. Buoyed up by strong economic growth following the influx of Russian businesses and capital after the invasion of Ukraine, Pashinyan has invested heavily in Armenia’s regions, where his support remains strongest. Yet observers have also pointed to his increasingly personalised style of politics, and what critics describe as growing authoritarian tendencies in Armenia, a country that remains a rare democratic outlier in a region largely governed by strongmen. In the run-up to the elections, Armenian authorities arrested opposition figures, including members of Karapetyan’s party, on accusations ranging from vote-buying and financial crimes to calls to overthrow the government. Karapetyan himself was detained in June and charged with calling for the seizure of power, leading him to campaign from house arrest. Pashinyan has at times appeared erratic, engaging in ugly public disputes with refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh, whom he accused of having “run away” from the region rather than staying to fight. The EU, meanwhile, has largely brushed aside criticism of Pashinyan, making little secret of its support for Armenia’s shift away from Moscow. Brussels this week announced an initial €50m support package to help Armenia withstand Russian economic pressure. Karen Grigoryan, a doctor, who voted for Karapetyan on Sunday, said: “Pashinyan is not the man he was when he came to power.” Referring to the Ottoman-era mass killings of Armenians that Yerevan and many western countries recognise as genocide, he added: “We can’t just be friendly with Turkey and pretend the past is erased.” Observers say many voters continue to back Pashinyan largely because the opposition remains deeply discredited and closely linked to Russia. Tatul Hakobyan, a popular Armenian commentator, saidL “People are choosing the lesser of two evils. The alternatives to Pashinyan are much worse.”

Air-raid alerts and frontline memoirs: Kyiv hosts literary festival amid war

It was a literary festival, all right, but if your reference for such things is Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh, or Melbourne and Sydney, or New York and Washington DC, then at Kyiv Book Arsenal you might think you had slipped through a crack in the universe and landed in an alternative reality. For a start, they were so young, the audience members. Dressed in their considerable best, they clutched their bags of books bought directly from publishers’ stalls and stopped to hug their friends – the festival providing the perfect opportunity for a people-watching passeggiata through its venue, the city’s vast 18th-century military arsenal. As an outsider, you wouldn’t know it from the surging crowds and the loo queues, but, remarkably, this was, everyone said, a touch quieter than previous editions of the festival. That was partly the fault of the terrible weather (Kyiv apparently having swapped its usual spring heat for Hay-on-Wye’s accustomed rain). But there was also the small fact that there had been repeated warnings of an imminent Russian attack of the kind that had struck the previous week, when the invaders let loose 60 missiles and 600 drones, most of them targeted at Ukraine’s capital. Such an attack – a rain of ballistic missiles and Shahed drones on the city – did not come until after the festival had ended, on Monday night. Even so, on Friday the venue was evacuated several times, and the deputy minister for culture, Bohdana Laiuk, had to compete with the air-raid alert to award a prize for the best foreign translation of a Ukrainian book (won by Nina Murray for her English version of Lesia Ukrainka’s early-20th-century feminist verse drama, Cassandra). Then there were the military uniforms, everywhere. The 8th Air Assault Force was running arguably the best coffee stand (setting a high bar in a coffee-obsessed country), handing out bookmarks printed with the slogan “If you love reading, we like you”, and a link to donate. The cultural forces of the army had set up an ammo box for donated books to be sent to the frontline: offerings included Ukrainian translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, plus a volume by the contemporary poet Halyna Kruk and a recent work about life on the frontline, Please Don’t Be Afraid, by Pavlo “Pashtet” Belyanskiy. A sign of the nation’s complete engulfing by war was the presence of so many soldiers on the stages; writers who had become soldiers, soldiers who had become writers. The Russia-Ukraine war has dragged on so grievously, and for so long, that entire publishing cycles have turned since 2022. Earlier in the full-scale invasion, it was volumes of verse that emerged, poetry being the form that could most swiftly encapsulate the explosion of time and meaning wrought by war. But now soldiers have had time, after four years, to put together finely tuned volumes of frontline memoir. “I’m seeing more and more books describing the experience of those who have joined the army, reflecting a change of status from civil to military and how it has impacted on their sense of selves,” said one of the festival’s programmers, Maksym Butkevych, a human rights defender who volunteered for the army in 2022 and was captured, tortured and held prisoner for two years. It was he who had suggested the tagline for this year’s festival, which, in its English translation “bear your freedom”, hinted at the burden of responsibility that comes with the privilege of liberty. “Reading is a symbol of freedom – something that during most of my time in captivity I was forbidden from doing. It is the place where you have an inner world that cannot be invaded by the captors,” he said. A balance between freedom, frankness and responsibility was one of the subjects of onstage discussion between soldier-memoirists, including Artur Dron’, a young writer and poet whose new volume of essays, Hemingway Knows Nothing, has become a bestseller. In a context in which such writing is not subject to government censorship, where truth-telling about ugly frontline conditions seems a necessary precondition for bridging the gap of experience between combatants and civilians, the writers debated whether they had a duty to impose a degree of self-censorship, for the common good. “It’s not about forbidding yourself something,” said Dron’ in the session, “but about feeling responsible for what you do.” In another session, titled Fragility of the Hero, Dron’ and others dwelled on the importance of disengaging from an old-fashioned Soviet image of the soldier as an inhumanly, untouchably, perfect being. That kind of hyperbolic rhetoric, said Dron’, risked allowing citizens to outsource individual responsibility for the country on to these supposedly flawless “heroes”. “If we put the military on to a pedestal,” added Butkevych, “we deprive them of the right to be ordinary, imperfect human beings.” Time has also engendered new approaches in prose. From the clipped, self-consciously unexperimental documentary writing of the early years, new forms are emerging, such as Katya Iakovlenko’s poetic book-length essay Donbas as a Metaphor, newly out in Ukrainian from ist publishing. Sasha Dovzhyk, the director of the Institute for Documentation and Exchange (Index), which supports writers and researchers in documenting the invasion, pointed to work by Anna Gruver, who, in her hybrid of “diary, essay and poetic writing” was “breaking free of expectations of what ‘war writing’ should be. Writers are ready to experiment.” Not everything was directly focused on the war. There were huge book signing queues for Ilarion Pavliuk’s fat mystery novels (one air-defence volunteer was carrying two to be signed, along with a handful of kids’ books for his grandchildren in the US). The national treasure and public intellectual Oksana Zabuzhko talked about the 30th anniversary of her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, which was a bestselling feminist succès de scandale when it was published in 1996 and a trailblazer for Ukrainian-language publishing in the newly independent country. The Osnovy publishing house was promoting titles including the first Ukrainian translation of EM Forster’s A Room With a View. On the outdoor stage, performers were competing for the national slam poetry championships. There were collage workshops for teenagers, soft play for kids, a Ukrainian calligraphy studio and a quiet room in case the sensory overload got on top of you. But of course, the war pervaded everything. The publishers themselves had had a tough ride, along with everyone else over the past winter of blackouts and freezing temperatures. One talked of rising material costs exacerbated by the exchange rate against the euro; the necessary but costly use of generators in printing factories and warehouses; floods damaging stock when heating systems exploded after the winter freeze; delayed print runs. All of it meant books were more expensive for buyers. “Two years ago people were buying two or three books without hesitation,” the publisher said. “Now it’s a question of, this one, or this one?” It was hard to imagine a book festival in which the stakes could be higher. The boom in Ukrainian publishing that began three years ago was the direct result of a shift in consciousness for many Ukrainians, one that encompassed a move away from the Russian language and literature that many had grown up with. As Bohdana Laiuk (then Neborak) said in 2023: “People began to understand that the Russians came here to kill people simply because they were Ukrainian. So people are asking: what does it actually mean to be Ukrainian? Literary culture gives us the place to understand who we are.” “Kyiv Book Arsenal is more than a book festival, it’s a laboratory for exchanging ideas,” said Butkevych. “It’s about discussing our values and what we share as a community. Everything is intertwined: the Ukrainian language, book buying, discussing ideas – these are the threads that knit our community together.”

‘Racist mindsets’: Congolese in Ireland feel fear in wake of Yves Sakila’s death

When Kembetia Bissa fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo and moved to Ireland in 2003 he found not only sanctuary but beauty, friendship and a home. The asylum seeker settled in Bandon, west Cork, and found work as a landscaper. He opened an African dance school with Congolese drumming and taught local people the rhythms of his homeland. “It was very positive, very welcoming. I felt like I was in my own country,” Bissa, 55, said this week in Dublin. Times have changed. For the interview with the Guardian he took a Luas tram from Tallaght, a west Dublin suburb, to the city centre. When he sat down a white man beside him glowered, stood up and moved away. “He did not want to be near me.” It was a small indicator that for some Congolese people and other refugees, immigrants and people of colour, the welcome is over. A spate of recent incidents in Ireland, including a shocking death with echoes of George Floyd, have prompted a reckoning over race and racism. “We are actually scared now,” said Bissa, who runs the Facebook group, Congolese Community in Ireland (CCI). “We are scared that they should start to target us in our homes, on the street. If this thing is not controlled the number of deaths will be worse.” On 15 May department store security guards chased and caught Yves Sakila, 35, a Congolese man suspected of shoplifting. Video footage showed him pinned to the pavement on Henry Street for about five minutes, with one man kneeling on his neck. When police arrived they briefly handcuffed Sakila before realising he was unresponsive and took him to hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Police are still investigating and Sakila’s family has requested a second postmortem after the first proved inconclusive but the protesters who have marched and held vigils do not doubt that race played a part in his death. It is not just the parallels with George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck in 2020, it is the context. Days before Sakila’s death, Bertie Ahern, a former taoiseach, was secretly filmed saying: “The ones I worry about are the Africans. We can’t be taking in people from the Congo and all these places.” Ahern was canvassing in a Dublin byelection that platformed hostility to Black immigrants and Muslims. They are blamed for crime, housing shortages and the cost of living crisis, a narrative amplified by far-right agitators. In recent years, mobs have attacked refugee shelters and targeted foreigners, including an Indian man who was beaten and stripped. A Facebook page that requested justice for Sakila was inundated with scornful comments from users who cited Sakila’s numerous criminal convictions, including for shoplifting, and the fact that he was homeless. “Why wasn’t he deported?” said one. “Can you forward some of your literature as I am short of toilet paper,” said another. “Bring them security fellas before the witchdoctor,” said another. The backlash is not limited to online trolling. Stallholders who work a block from where Sakila died expressed resentment at the fuss, and said the media overlooked violence by Black perpetrators against white people. “It’s all about that, this crowd marching every week,” said Martina Farrell, 66, a fruit seller, referencing the protests and vigils for Sakila. “A white fella can be killed and there’s nothing about that,” she said, citing a recent case. Others echoed her view. Alan Clarke said new arrivals were displacing Irish people from shelters and social housing. “There is more Irish on the streets because the foreigners are taking the properties.” For Bissa, it has been a long, melancholic arc from teaching African dance to hearing clamours for deportation. The manner in which a guard restrained Sakila showed dehumanisation, he said. “Did he think he was putting his knees on the neck of a dog, an animal, or a human being?” Bissa attributed xenophobia to the speed of demographic change and a failure to integrate newcomers. “The Congolese community feels detached from Irish society. The government should work with our leaders to connect people.” He estimates that since the 2022 census, the Congolese community has more than doubled to about 8,000. They are part of a much wider influx. Between 2012 and 2022, 401,433 people arrived from abroad. Of the 5.1 million population, a fifth were born elsewhere. Ireland’s experience of colonialism and discrimination did not guarantee empathy with outsiders, especially in an era of social media disinformation, said Leon Diop, founder of the advocacy group Black and Irish and author of a memoir titled Mixed Up: An Irish Boy’s Journey to Belonging. “People are being pulled into racist mindsets.” Many Irish people were hospitable but the traditional greeting, céad míle fáilte, which translates as 100,000 welcomes, needed updating, he said. “We’re now the country of 75,000 welcomes rather than the country of 100,000 welcomes.” Bulelani Mfaco, a former spokesperson for the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland, said rhetoric with racialised undertones, some of it imported from the UK, had eroded tolerance. “It comes from politicians and then people see it as an opportunity to commit acts of violence.” Ireland’s far right had flopped in elections but infected the political mainstream with its vocabulary, said Mfaco. “When you talk about people being a problem, the natural response is to eliminate the problem. Words have an impact.” When asylum seekers had opportunities to engage directly with Irish people the response was often warm, said Mfaco, citing an example from Achill Island in County Mayo. “It gives me hope.” On Henry Street, rain extinguished candles at a memorial for Sakila. Some nearby stallholders expressed sorrow over his fate. “No matter what he stole or didn’t steal, it wasn’t right,” said Caroline, 56. “Doesn’t matter what colour he is, it’s still a life.”

Peru’s discontented voters face straight left-right choice in election runoff

Peruvians go to the polls on Sunday in an election runoff that pits a perennial rightwing candidate, Keiko Fujimori, against a leftist congressman, Roberto Sánchez. Amid rising crime, chronic political instability, corruption scandals and voter apathy, they are vying to become Peru’s ninth president in a decade. Fujimori, who is the daughter of the late president Alberto Fujimori, won 17% of the vote in the first round in April. Sánchez, a former trade and tourism minister, took 12 % of the vote, edging out Rafael López Aliaga, an ultra-conservative former Lima mayor. The stage is set for a polarised left-right replay of the country’s last election in 2021. It is the fourth presidential run by Fujimori and it may be her best chance yet. She was thrust into politics aged 19 when she was named first lady after her parents’ marriage imploded during her father’s authoritarian rule throughout the 1990s. A surprise second-round contender, Sánchez, 57, served as a minister for the populist leftist president Pedro Castillo and has claimed his legacy, garnering support from rural voters – even donning his trademark sombrero. Castillo was ousted in December 2022 after trying to dissolve congress and rule by decree. In November 2025, he was sentenced to 11 years and five months in jail for rebellion. Sánchez has picked up votes in the rural Andes, where many identify with Castillo and some believe he was unfairly pushed out of office. Pollsters predict an extremely tight vote in line with the last three election runoffs in Peru. The candidates are statistically tied, with Sánchez on 43.8% and Fujimori on 43.2%, according to an Ipsos poll published on Thursday. The election campaign, which started with a record 35 candidates in April, has ended with a choice between two candidates who represent just 29% of the vote. Voters are exhausted and deeply sceptical after a period of record instability in which Peru has pedalled through eight presidents since July 2016, only three of whom were elected. The other presidents fell into the role through the vagaries of an unrepresentative congressional system, and were – in most cases – unsuited to the country’s highest office. The last president to be ousted, José Jerí, 39, was accused of influence-trafficking in secretive meetings with Chinese businessmen. He was replaced by the current head of state, José María Balcázar, 83, who is best known for his support for child marriage. “Politicians have lost a lot of credibility, and very few people trust them any more,” said Santiago Pedraglio, a sociologist and professor at Lima’s Pontifical Catholic University. “If voting weren’t mandatory in Peru, the abstention rate would be much higher.” More than 6 million Peruvians did not turn out to vote in the first round in April, despite fines for failing to do so. Another 3 million spoiled their ballots in protest, leaving them unreadable or blank. The blank or spoilt ballots would have won the vote. “The level of popular discontent and mistrust was already high 20 years ago; now it’s through the roof,” Steven Levitsky, a political scientist and professor of government at Harvard University, told the Peruvian newspaper La República last month. Fujimori carries the legacy of her father, who spent 16 years in jail for authorising kidnappings and murders during his government’s “war against terrorism” before he died in 2024. Though she faces the strong anti-Fujimori movement, she has capitalised on her father’s mano dura (iron fist) reputation, promising a tough-on-crime stance as Peruvians face rocketing rates of extortion and murder. Pedraglio said some voters feared Fujimori would lead an “authoritarian government and that the separation of powers won’t be respected”. Her Fuerza Popular (Popular Force) party holds more seats than any other party in the country’s congress, which recently reinstated the bicameral system. Pedraglio said Sánchez had sparked fear among some that he would lead not just a “leftwing government” but a “bad government” like Castillo, who was widely seen as incompetent. Sánchez has pledged to free Castillo, whom he describes as the victim of a “coup plot”. He also says he wants to restore the government “to the people” and draft a new constitution. However, he has backed down from an earlier pledge to remove the head of the central bank, Julio Velarde. “The time has come for the true rebirth of our nation: a sovereign, just nation built from the foundations of the Peruvian people,” Sánchez told foreign reporters last month.

Ukraine war briefing: Kyiv unleashes hundreds of drones on Russia after Putin rejected Zelenskyy meeting

Ukraine fired hundreds of drones at Russia early on Saturday, leaving one person dead and setting an oil depot ablaze on the final day of Russia’s flagship economic forum in St Petersburg, officials said. Many of the drones targeted St Petersburg itself, the second Ukrainian attack on the city in less than a week, with Ukraine’s SBU security services saying it had hit a naval base. The strikes come a day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, rejected Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s proposal for a meeting, drawing criticism from the Ukrainian president, who accused him of “choosing war again”. More than 140 drones were shot down over the Leningrad region, which surrounds St Petersburg, governor Aleksandr Drozdenko said. The city’s governor, Alexander Beglov, issued a rare call for residents to stay indoors during the attack. “Russian air defences prevented any damage. The condition of the three injured is assessed as minor and they have been discharged,” he said. Russian air defences intercepted a total of 376 drones over the regions of “Belgorod, Bryansk, Kaluga, Kursk, Leningrad, Novgorod, Oryol, Pskov, Rostov, Ryazan, Smolensk, Tver, and Tula, the Moscow region, Crimea Republic, Abkhazia Republic, and over the waters of the Azov and Black Seas”, Russia’s defence ministry said. Ukraine’s SBU said it had targeted St Petersburg’s Kronstadt naval base, as well as “the Russian Navy’s 15th Arsenal in the Leningrad region”. The attacks also sparked a fire at an oil depot in the southern town of Ust-Labinsk, while drone debris killed a man in the western Tver region, according to local officials. Zelenskyy described the strikes as a “just response” to Russian aggression against Ukraine. “It is time to end this war. But Russia’s ruler wants to keep fighting. That is why Ukrainian sanctions against this aggression are working,” he said on X. “Any manifestation of injustice against Ukraine will receive a just response.” Russia renewed its strikes on Ukraine early on Saturday. A Russian drone killed a 64-year-old man in the southern Mykolaiv region, while a strike on the nearby Zaporizhzhia region wounded a 10-year-old boy and his father, regional authorities said. Russian drone and artillery attacks in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region killed one person and left three others wounded, regional governor Oleksandr Ganzha wrote on Telegram. Russian forces also attacked two civilian search and rescue vessels in Ukrainian waters, causing injuries, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Oleksiy Kuleba said on Saturday. “The enemy launched strikes on two boats of the maritime search and rescue service which were carrying out a humanitarian mission within the Ukrainian sea corridor,” he wrote on Telegram, referring to a Black Sea route used to take vessels to Romanian ports. “Unfortunately, there are injured. Evacuation by boats of the Ukrainian navy is currently under way.” The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, will host Zelenskyy, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz for talks in Downing Street on Sunday to discuss support for Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader will visit the UK with the French president and German chancellor after a week of heightened hostilities and Vladimir Putin’s rejection of his proposal of face-to-face talks on Moscow’s war. The three countries meeting the Ukrainian leader are some of Kyiv’s staunchest allies. The UK and France are leading the “coalition of the willing” initiative to provide security guarantees for Ukraine as part of a peace process.

China wants to suppress independent cinema. But young film-makers are undaunted by red lines

Class started at 9am. Assignments were doled out, ideas were pitched and scripts written, followed by a long day of shooting and editing. Twelve hours later, 20 aspiring and exhausted film-makers were sat in a crowded, makeshift studio, listening to their work being trashed. “The content is still too poor,” the course director, Nan Xin, remarked, after watching a two-minute film about boys on the loose who harass a stray dog. “I didn’t see any deep thought in it. What you did left me with no clue how to actually process it,” Nan told the film’s auteurs, who took the feedback with admirably straight faces. More films, more feedback. “Too cliched.” “Useless piece of dialogue.” Nan, a garrulous 36-year-old with an impish smile, seemed to relish in demolishing his students’ work. But he insists it is to help them grow as filmmakers. Nan, a self-taught filmmaker who left school at 15, says he wants to widen access to the craft through offering cheap or free workshops packed full of hands-on experience. Nan hosts several courses throughout the year. Each lasts about 10 days and hosts up to a couple of dozen of students who pay 50 yuan (£5.49) per day, or sometimes less, to attend. Nan is best known for Go Fishing, a 2022 low-budget production set in his home town of Lingbao, a tiny city in central China’s Henan province. The film, which was selected for a few international film festivals, tells the story of old friends who reconnect after a decade apart. One critic praised its depiction of “apparent banality … which now constitutes the common destiny of an entire generation”. But the film has never been released in China. That is because it does not have the longbiao, the “dragon seal” administered by the China Film Administration, which determines which films can be legally screened. The authorities rejected Nan’s longbiao application for Go Fishing on the grounds that it “does not align with core socialist values”. China’s censorship regime has tightened in recent years. Filmmakers have always needed to apply for a longbiao to release films domestically; a law passed in 2016 says the permit is needed to submit films overseas as well. Coupled with a crackdown on China’s once lively independent film festival scene, the impact has been profound. As China opened up in the 1990s and film-makers developed outside the state-controlled economy, “there was a lot of interest in ideas like civil society, the public sphere”, says Chris Berry, a professor of film studies at King’s College London. “When Xi Jinping came to power [in 2012] these things were said to be pernicious western liberal democratic ideas that were not appropriate to China.” The result is that films that critique society, of which there were several in the early 2000s, are rarely seen in China these days. “You never know what the criteria are,” says a leading independent documentary director, who asked to remain anonymous because of fears of harassment. “The result often comes down to one individual censor. If they think that something is problematic, then it is.” Still, in the age of iPhones and cheap, portable equipment, there is little to stop budding filmmakers from shooting their shot. Nan encourages them to focus on their craft rather than future hurdles. “I tell students not to think about censorship,” he says. “It’s not the young people’s responsibility that Chinese cinema has come to this situation.” Many of Nan’s students, who have travelled from across China for the workshop in Lingbao, insist they are unconcerned by China’s creative controls. Han Xizhu, a 24-year-old engineering graduate, says there are no limits to his creative vision. “I haven’t really felt a lack of freedom,” he says. China’s censorship requirements only restricts “negative things”. Han dreams of making “light and relaxed” films about personal relationships, like Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. “It doesn’t have to discuss some major theme, or link back to society and all that.” The choice to focus on the personal rather than the societal is one that many young filmmakers are making, whether or not they are consciously influenced by the censorship regime. “It’s really difficult to look outward. A lot of people just focus on their family stories,” says the documentarian. Seasoned filmmakers talk of a suffocating regime that the students have yet to encounter. Away from his students, Nan concedes: “They don’t have any issues right now. But the moment they decide to make a feature film, censorship will become their nightmare.” Guo Xiaodong, an independent filmmaker based in Beijing, says that the authorities show more leeway with short films, in part because they’re less likely to have a large impact. But for feature-length productions, “censorship will play a very important role in the creative process”. Some of Nan’s students have already had a taste of the red lines. Xu Shuai, 24, left a job at a theatre in Beijing last year, in part because he grew fed up with censorship. His job involved reviewing what could and couldn’t be staged. Much of it was guesswork, but themes that his team rejected included sex, suicide, government criticism, and anything Japanese. “I felt so bad. I was killing new ideas every day,” he says. Now he wants to make films about topics that are important to him. In particular, depression. Films that depict mental health problems may help sufferers feel less lonely, he says. “I don’t know if we could talk about [depression] in China,” he says, because the government may fear a social contagion. But he’s going to try anyway. Despite Nan’s harsh criticism, Xu says that he’s been inspired by spending time with fellow creatives. “I used to be a pessimist. I used to think there are a lot of people doing great things, and what I’m doing is shit. But there’s a huge difference now, I don’t think that way any more. Maybe the changes started here … it’s magic.” Additional research by Yu-chen Li

Palestinian baby shot dead by Israeli troops in occupied West Bank

Israeli troops killed a seven-month-old Palestinian baby in the occupied West Bank and injured his parents after opening fire on the family’s car, despite it having complied with an order to stop. Soldiers opened fire on Friday on a car carrying the infant and his parents in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron. The seven-month-old, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, was critically injured, evacuated in critical condition to a hospital, where he later died. The boy turned seven months on Friday, the day he was killed. The Israeli military said troops had fired at a vehicle they believed was moving towards them, but an initial inquiry found those injured were uninvolved civilians. In an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the father, Fahd Abu Haikal, a lecturer at Bethlehem University, said that “a bullet passed through his hand and struck his son, Sam, who was being held by his mother in the back seat”. Abu Haikal said the family, which also included the couple’s 11-year-old son and Abu Haikal’s mother, had been driving through Hebron on Friday evening when soldiers signalled for the vehicle to stop, he said. He said it was still daylight and that the soldier who opened fire could clearly see the occupants were a family. “The soldier signalled me to stop. I brought the car to a complete halt and raised my hands on the steering wheel. Immediately afterwards, they opened fire on the vehicle,” he told Haaretz. The Israel Defense Forces said its troops “perceived a vehicle accelerating toward them” and one of the soldiers “responded with single shots toward the vehicle”. “As a result, three Palestinians were injured and evacuated for medical treatment,” the IDF said, adding that “the incident is under review” and expressed “deep sorrow for any harm caused to uninvolved individuals”. Abu Haikal rejected the military’s account. “The soldier was about 10 metres away from me. He saw me, he saw my wife and the children,” he told Haaretz. “The windows were not tinted, it was broad daylight and everything was clear. You can’t say he didn’t see that it was a family. “I stopped as I was instructed to, and then they simply shot at the car,” he added. “There was no clear checkpoint, just soldiers standing in the street. I stopped when I was asked to, and then the shooting started,” he said. Speaking at the boy’s funeral on Saturday, the father said “the soldier opened fire, then pulled back his unit and just walked away without a single word or a second thought”. “The car was completely stationary when he shot at us, it wasn’t moving at all. A seven-month-old infant killed in cold blood. He didn’t deserve this,” he added. Abu Haikal called for an investigation and said the soldier responsible should be held to account. “I demand and expect, if there is any conscience, any law, any morality, that the soldier who fired the shots will be held accountable for his actions. This case must not be closed without an investigation and without accountability. At the very least, I do not intend to give up.” Abu Haikal told the Associated Press that his wife was in critical condition, with shrapnel close to her heart. The family told her that her son was killed just before heading to funeral prayers. The baby’s body was wrapped in a Palestinian flag. His father carried him. The men placed the small bundle at their feet and bowed in prayer. The British consulate in Jerusalem said on X that it was “shocked and saddened” by the killing of the baby, calling for an “immediate and transparent investigation and accountability”. In a similar incident, Israeli troops operating in Tamoun, in the northern Jordan valley, opened fire on a vehicle travelling through the village on 15 March, killing a Palestinian couple and two of their children. The victims were identified as Ali Bani Odeh, 38, his wife, Waad Bani Odeh, 36, and their sons Othman, six, and Mohammad, five. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, soldiers removed two other children from the vehicle, Khaled, 11, and Mustafa, eight, both of whom suffered minor shrapnel injuries. The organisation said the troops then subjected Khaled to a violent interrogation at the scene. B’Tselem said the military initially prevented ambulances from reaching the area and allowed medical teams access only after a delay. The organisation added that soldiers later confiscated the family’s vehicle, which it said was riddled with bullet holes. The UN said last month that more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the war began, at least 240 of them children, and 49 people have been killed this year. Israeli soldiers accused of harming Palestinians are rarely penalised and were indicted in less than 1% of cases based on 2,427 complaints alleging wrongdoing between 2016 and 2024, according to Israeli rights group Yesh Din. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli strikes killed nine people on Saturday, medical sources and the territory’s civil defence said. Israel’s military said one of the dead was a Hamas “terrorist cell commander”. In Gaza City, a drone strike killed seven people and wounded 15 others in the Jawazat camp for displaced people, according to the civil defence, a rescue service that operates under the authority of Hamas. The city’s al-Shifa hospital also reported receiving six bodies. “We targeted terrorists in that sector,” the Israeli army told AFP, without providing further details. The civil defence announced in the evening a eighth person had been killed in an Israeli strike in south-east Gaza City, identifying him as a 37-year-old man. Farther south, Muhannad Othman Farwana, 25, was killed in the morning in a strike on a tent, the civil defence said. Nasser hospital in Khan Younis said the man’s body was brought in along with several wounded. In a statement, the Israeli army said Farwana was “a terrorist cell commander in the military wing” of Hamas, adding he was killed in a precision strike. The strike had hit his tent on the roof of his house. He was due to get married later in the day, his cousin Mohammed Farwana said. “The whole family was ready to celebrate his wedding. Now, we’re attending his funeral instead of his marriage,” he told AFP. Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse