��������

KOSTIANTYNIVKA, Ukraine: For many residents of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, evacuation begins with one defining blast — the explosion that makes it impossible to stay. For 69-year-old Tetiana Zaichikova, it came when a strike reduced her home to rubble.
The region has been the epicenter of heavy fighting for years and evacuations there have continued as long as Russia’s invasion — more than three years. Town after town in the region, larger than Slovenia or roughly the size of Massachusetts, is emptying amid the fighting as Russian forces now control around 70 percent of the area.
Some are staying in shattered cities, clinging to the hope that the war will end any day — a hope fueled by ongoing peace efforts, largely led by US President Donald Trump, that so far yielded no breakthroughs. They hold on until it becomes too dangerous even for the military and police to drive into the city.
“We kept hoping. We waited for every round of negotiations. We thought somehow they would reach an agreement in our favor, and we could stay in our homes,” said Zaichikova, who still bears bruises and hematomas across her face.
Defining moment to flee
If Zaichikova had taken even one step into the kitchen that night, she is convinced she would not have survived.
In Kostiantynivka — a city that once had a population of approximately 67,000 — conditions in recent months have become apocalyptic: There is no reliable electricity, water or gas, and nightly barrages grow heavier with each passing hour. Russian forces fire all types of weapons while Ukrainian troops answer back, and the former industrial hub has become a proving ground crowded with drones overhead.
Zaichikova knew the city was barely livable, but she clung to the hope she would not lose the place where she had lived all her life and taught music at a kindergarten.
On the night of Aug. 28, after months of rarely leaving her home, she wanted only to make tea before bed. She switched on a night lamp and walked toward the kitchen. As she reached for the light switch, the blast hit.
A wooden beam and shelves collapsed on her. When she came to, the rubble rose as high as she stood. The entrance to her building was blocked.
Emergency services no longer operated in the city, too dangerous even for soldiers. “If we had been burning, we would have just burned,” she said.
Her neighbor swung a sledgehammer through the night until midday, finally breaking a hole for her to crawl through. Outside, she saw what she believed was the crater of a glide bomb.
A few days later, she left the city.
“I didn’t want to leave until the last moment, but that was the last straw. When I was driven through the city, I saw what it had become. It was black and destroyed,” she said.
Last call
Police Officer Yevhen Mosiichuk has driven into Kostiantynivka almost every day for the past year to evacuate people. He has watched the situation deteriorate.
The city now sits on Ukraine’s shrinking patch of territory, wedged just west of Russian-held Bakhmut and nearly encircled from three sides by Moscow’s forces.
“The difficulty of evacuations is that the city is under constant attack,” he said, listing not only drones but artillery, rockets and glide bombs.
As he spoke, a drone detector beeped. “Oh, it caught drones,” he said.
They drove across the river, one flying over it and then toward the bridge, before jamming it with their equipment. Their van is fitted with anti-drone netting, and they pass through mesh corridors that Ukrainians installed to force drones to detonate prematurely or malfunction.
“The situation has been worsening — not every day, week or month, but every minute,” Mosiichuk said. “It is clear because they are using all kinds of weapons.”
For civilians, that means their city may soon be wiped off the map, like other once-large cities in the Donetsk region — Avdiivka and Bakhmut, now ghost towns stripped of their industrial and historic past.
Like Zaichikova, those still in the city are mostly elderly, often disabled and poor. For them, losing their homes means setting out into the unknown without any support. Some evacuees said dying at home would be easier than leaving.
Wearing a helmet and body armor, Mosiichuk approached the apartment building of those who had requested evacuation. Explosions rumbled at varying distances. He and his colleague worked quickly, knowing every minute in the city was life-threatening.
The entrance was littered with shattered glass, and every floor had broken windows. Faded notices on the walls advertised electricians and plumbers who would never come.
They climbed to the seventh floor. A few residents peeked out after hearing the commotion. Police shouted at them to leave as soon as possible, warning that it would soon be impossible to enter the city.
Leaving it all behind
When police came to evacuate 67-year-old Mykhailo Maistruk, it was the first time in two years he had set foot outside. With an amputated leg, he had been trapped in his apartment since the elevator stopped working and the city became too dangerous.
Together with his wife, Larysa Naumenko, he packed what little they had. Naumenko had lived in the apartment since before the Soviet Union collapsed.
They handed the keys to one of the two neighbors left in the building and left under the thunder of shelling.
“We hoped … we lived here for 40 years. Do you think it’s easy to leave all this behind? At our age, we are left with nothing,” Naumenko said.
Maistruk said even they could no longer endure the endless explosions and finally decided to leave. Many of their neighbors and friends had fled in the first months of the invasion; some later returned and left again. What kept them in place was not only Maistruk’s disability but also their small pensions, which made it nearly impossible to start from scratch elsewhere.
“Hardly anyone will come back here. It feels like the city is being wiped off the face of the earth,” Naumenko said as she was driven away by the evacuation car. “Who will rebuild all this? It was such a developed city, with so many factories. Now they are gone.”

WASHINGTON: Democrats and Republicans pushed US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr. on his recent vaccine policies and their stark contrast to President Donald Trump’s successful first-term pandemic initiative to speed vaccine development during a combative three-hour Senate hearing on Thursday.
Half a dozen heated exchanges focused on the details of his decision to fire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez, who had started the job with Kennedy’s support only a month earlier.
Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who played a critical role in Kennedy’s confirmation, grilled him about the cancelation of $500 million in COVID vaccine contracts, while citing examples of doctors and cancer patients who have been unable to obtain the protection against the potentially deadly disease.
“I would say, effectively, we’re denying people vaccine,” concluded Cassidy.
“Well, you’re wrong,” Kennedy responded.
Cassidy, of Louisiana, praised Trump for having accelerated the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020.
His line of questioning — mirrored by two other members of his and Trump’s party — underscored the tightrope Republicans critical of Kennedy needed to walk in order to push back against his vaccine policies without criticizing the president.
Cassidy asked Kennedy during the Senate Finance Committee hearing if he agreed with him that Trump deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for the COVID vaccine initiative, known as Operation Warp Speed. Kennedy said he did.

Why then had Kennedy said the vaccines killed more people than COVID? Cassidy asked. Kennedy denied making the statement, would not agree that the vaccines saved lives, and in a later exchange acknowledged the shots prevented deaths but not how many.
COVID vaccines in the first year of their use saved some 14.4 million lives globally, according to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.
Kennedy has also canceled $500 million in funding for research on the mRNA technology that yielded the most widely used COVID vaccines under Trump, which Cassidy characterized as denying people vaccines.
Republicans Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Barrasso of Wyoming, who like Cassidy is a physician, adopted Cassidy’s tactic, as did Senate Democrats Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, where the CDC is headquartered, and Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats.
The White House backed Kennedy, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Vice President JD Vance both defending him and Leavitt attacking Democrats in posts on X. Neither mentioned his Republican critics.
“Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines. Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned,” said Barrasso.
“The public has seen measles outbreaks, leadership in the National Institutes of Health questioning the use of mRNA vaccines, the recently confirmed Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fired,” the senator added.

Under fiery questioning from most Democrats and some Republicans, Kennedy defended the ousting of Monarez, adding that he might need to fire even more people at the agency.
Trump fired Monarez after she resisted changes to vaccine policy advanced by Kennedy that she believed contradicted scientific evidence, further destabilizing the already embattled agency.
In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Monarez said she had been directed to preapprove vaccine recommendations and fire career CDC officials, describing her ouster as part of a broader push to weaken US vaccine standards.
Kennedy said she lied and that he had never told Monarez she needed to preapprove decisions, but that he did order her to fire officials, which she refused to do.
“Secretary Kennedy’s claims are false, and at times, patently ridiculous. Dr. Monarez stands by what she said in her Wall Street Journal op-ed,” her lawyers said in a statement, adding that she was willing to repeat it under oath.

Calls for Kennedy's resignation
Kennedy said the CDC during the COVID-19 pandemic had lied to Americans about mask wearing, social distancing, school closures and the ability of the vaccine to stop transmission.
“I need to fire some of those people and make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Kennedy said.

The CDC’s pandemic recommendations were based on past experience with virus transmission and what was known about the novel coronavirus at the time. By late 2021, with more real-world data, the CDC acknowledged the shots could not stop COVID infection and transmission, but were highly effective in preventing severe cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Since taking the job, Kennedy has made a series of controversial changes to US vaccine policy, including narrowing who is eligible for COVID shots and firing all 17 expert members of a CDC vaccine advisory panel, choosing some fellow anti-vaccine activists to replace them.
Vaccination rates in the US have been on the decline. Florida on Wednesday said it plans to end all state vaccine mandates, including for students to attend schools. No senators asked Kennedy about the announcement in the hearing.
Criticism of Kennedy has intensified since Monarez’s firing, which triggered resignations of four CDC agency officials who cited anti-vaccine policies and misinformation pushed by him and his team. He revisited several issues after the hearing, posting four times on X to address questions and respond to accusations.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the committee’s top-ranking Democrat, called for Kennedy’s resignation, as have Warnock, Sanders, and over 1,000 current and former health employees.