The war in Ukraine has entered a new phase since the counter-offensive launched on August 29 against Russian troops in the Kherson region in the south of the country. If the Russian army was expecting this, a few days later they were surprised by the launch of another Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region to the north-east. There their advance is dazzling: the Russian soldiers have fled and the city of Izioum has been recaptured.

Does this double counter-offensive mark a turning point in this war? Why did the Russian army suffer such a defeat in the Northeast? And how is this failure perceived in Moscow, where Vladimir Putin is now being criticized?

In this episode of the “L’Heure du Monde” podcast, Le Monde journalists Rémy Ourdan, special correspondent in Ukraine, and Emmanuel Grynszpan, specialist on Russia, take stock of the evolution of the conflict.

An episode by Adèle Ponticelli and Garance Muñoz. Production and music: Amandine Robillard. Presentation and Editor-in-Chief: Morgane Tual. In this episode: Excerpts from Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech of September 10. Excerpts from a video posted on September 11 by Vyacheslav Zadorenko, Mayor of Kozatcha Lopan, Ukraine. Excerpts from a September 13 speech by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Excerpts from a September 12 NTV broadcast.

“The Hour of the World”

“L’Heure du Monde” is Le Monde’s daily news podcast. Listen to a new episode every day from 6am on Lemonde.fr or on Spotify. All episodes can be found here.

Learn more about the Ukrainian counteroffensive:

Also listen to War in Ukraine: Where are we?

Garance Muñoz, Adele Ponticelli, Remy Ourdan and Emmanuel Grynszpan

The German scientist, who spoke fluent Spanish, English and French, devoted himself to the study of natural sciences from an early age, which is why he went on numerous expeditions to deepen his knowledge of nature.

Only four months in Cuba

Although the character of Alejandro de Humboldt is usually closely associated with Cuba, the German scientist only stayed on the island for four months. This did not prevent him from conducting several investigations that expanded previous knowledge of geography, flora, fauna, communications, topography, climate, soils, cane cultivation and sugar production.

Alejandro de Humboldt first arrived in Cuba on December 19, 1800 and stayed until March 15, 1801. In April 1804 he returned to the island for a brief month-long visit.

During his stay in Cuba, the prominent scientist traveled to Havana and the surrounding area to Managua, Bejucal, Valle de Güines and Batabanó as well as the south of Trinidad, accompanied by the French botanist and naturalist Aimé Bonpland. He stayed in the house of the Count of O’Reilly and shared with famous figures of the time such as Don Francisco de Arango y Parreño and Doctor Tomás Romay Chacón.

As a result of his trips to Cuba, De Humboldt submitted a dissertation on the formation of the Antilles and the nature of Cuban geology, he made a map with accurate measurements of the latitudes of several ports and cities, including Havana. When he returned to Europe, he wrote down the results of his extensive and fruitful scientific production.

A national park named after him

Alejandro de Humboldt National Park is located in the Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa Mountains on the north coast of eastern Cuba. It is the largest and best preserved remnant of forested mountain ecosystems in the Caribbean and is widely considered Cuba’s most important protected area for its exceptional biodiversity.

In addition to the 66,700 hectares of land, the national park includes a marine area of ​​2,641 hectares, for a total area of ​​69,341 hectares with a terrestrial buffer zone of 34,330 hectares.

The area is embedded within the much larger Cuchillas del Toa Biosphere Reserve, which covers more than 200,000 hectares. The altitude ranges from 220 meters below sea level to 1,175 meters above sea level at Pico El Toldo.

a globetrotter

In 1799 Alejandro de Humboldt received permission to embark for the Spanish colonies in South and Central America, a voyage during which he was accompanied by the French botanist Aimé Bonpland, with whom he had already made a voyage to Spain.

Both covered almost 10,000 kilometers in three major continental stages: the first two in South America, from Caracas to the sources of the Orinoco and from Bogotá to Quito through the Andean region, and the third through the Spanish colonies in Mexico.

During these trips, Alejandro de Humboldt met some outstanding Spanish-American naturalists such as José Celestino Mutis and Francisco José de Caldas.

Among the scientific discoveries of his expeditions is the study of the ocean currents on the west coast of South America – which for a long time bore his name – a novel climatological system of representation in the form of isobars and isotherms, comparative studies between climatic conditions and ecology and, above all, his conclusions on volcanism and its connection with the development of the earth’s crust.

Advisor to King Friedrich Wilhelm III

In 1827 Alexander von Humboldt returned to Berlin. There he played a prominent role in rebuilding Germany’s academic and scientific community, which had been battered by decades of war. He became chamberlain to King Friedrich Wilhelm III. appointed by Prussia and became one of his most important advisors, conducting numerous diplomatic missions. In 1829 he undertook a journey through Asiatic Russia on behalf of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, during which he visited Dzungaria and the Altai.

Modern science icon

Alejandro de Humboldt spent a large part of his life processing, evaluating and organizing the data collected on his travels. Even the scientific community admires how he tried to explain the workings of the forces of nature through observation and measurement. One of his discoveries were isotherms, which are the lines connecting the vertices in a cartographic plane that represent the same temperatures in the unit of time used.

In the last phase of his life, the German scientist focused mainly on the writing of Cosmos, a work he considers a monumental global vision of the structure of the universe, of which four volumes were published during his lifetime. Alejandro de Humboldt, co-founder of modern geography, is considered one of the last great Enlighteners with a vast encyclopedic culture, whose work spanned areas as diverse as natural sciences, geography, geology and physics.

Sources consulted:

• German information center for Latin America
• UNESCO

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As Ukrainian forces secure the retaken areas, Russia bombards a barrage with rockets.

Russians bomb dam in central Ukraine

• with a huge missile attack for central ukrainian industrial city Kryvyi Rih According to Ukrainian sources, the Russian army severely damaged a dam. Such a large amount of water flowed through the destroyed pumping station on Wednesday that the Inhulez River threatened to overflow. President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of an attempt to flood his hometown. More on that.
• Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called the attack War crimes and an act of terrorism. “As they were defeated by the Ukrainian army on the battlefield, Russian cowards are now waging a war against our infrastructure and civilians,” he wrote on Twitter. In his video speech at night, Zelensky called the Russians “weak”: Such attacks on civilian objects are one of the reasons “why Russia is losing.”

Zelensky car accident

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was involved in a car accident in Kyiv. ONE The vehicle collided with the head of state’s car and escort vehiclesSpokesperson Serhij Nykyforow wrote on Facebook Thursday morning, who at the same time gave the clarification: “There was no serious injuries established.”

diplomacy

• European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen arrived in Kyiv for a visit. There she will meet President Zelensky and Prime Minister Denys Schmyhal. It is the third trip by the Germans to Ukraine since the Russian invasion in late February. “A lot has changed,” von der Leyen tweeted. According to the head of the commission, Ukraine is now a candidate for EU membership.
• After talks with Russian President Putin, UN Secretary General António Guterres currently has no hope of peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv in the near future. “Would be naive to believe that we are close to the possibility of a peace agreement“, said Guterres this Wednesday in New York. The chances of a diplomatic solution at the moment are “minimal”.

Combat / Military

• Since last Wednesday in the region at least 4000 square kilometers land (we’re talking up to 8,000, but including land gains in southern Ukraine). Several elite Russian army formations, including parts of the Moscow-area 1st Guards Tank Army, apparently disintegrated, leaving vast amounts of material behind. There are reports that Russian units fled across the Russian border in the Belgorod/Kursk area. Sometimes soldiers are drunk and cause accidents, he said on Twitter, but also in several liberated cities. civilians killed for no reason and Ukrainian soldiers brutally murdered found, in addition to the horrible devastation and filth (eg by excrement) in public buildings, churches and private homes.
• Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych presented the continuation of the Offensive to the east of Luhansk Oblast in the bedroom. This has been completely occupied by the Russians since the beginning of August and is part of the pro-Russian “People’s Republic of Luhansk”.

(Red/APA/Portal/dpa)

September 15, 2022 9:30 am

Negotiated by the Russian envoy in Ukraine, it provided for Zelenskyy’s renunciation of NATO membership

According to Portal, Ukrainian-born Kozak Putin said he believes the agreement made the military operation useless. But although the Russian president initially backed the negotiations, he later found Kiev’s concessions insufficient and said he had now expanded his plans to annex parts of Ukrainian territory. The agreement was therefore dropped.

However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied the news, telling Portal himself that “this has nothing to do with reality. Nothing like this has ever happened, it is absolutely wrong information”.

Related

Julio Morejon Tartabull*

No journey into the future without teaching children and young people; now in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger, more than half of them have no access to education, according to the UN and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

This situation worsened in the countries of the ecoclimatic strip of the Sahel, while at the same time the actions of extremist armed groups with a distorted Islamic creed increased.

Insecurity is the constant dilemma, and indeed supplants the priority of laying the foundations through culture, precisely to confront ignorance, a social handicap that accompanies radicalism and becomes harmful as it is.

In that vein, analysts warned that eight states in the region remained closed by the end of the 2021-2022 school year, a trend that could increase if threats to teachers, students and family members continue.

“During the last school year, the number of closed schools has increased by 66 percent in the central Sahel alone, where these schools are being attacked by armed groups or students are leaving them for fear of violence,” they said.

In a message to mark the International Day to Protect Education from Attacks (9 September), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) highlighted the negative social impact of truancy.

PRESSED QUALITY

As school children, teachers, administration and educational infrastructure are deliberately targeted: students and everyone involved in their teaching disappear and those who continue to work under difficult conditions.

“When education is under attack, it is impossible to provide safe schooling in the traditional sense,” says www.unicef.org.

It also highlights the harm done to students who drop out of school out of fear and break social ties with their classmates, despite the risk of being recruited from their own homes by armed groups.

In many cases, the presence of child soldiers in armed conflicts or the commission of crimes is associated with dropping out of school (whether forced or not).

Desperate flight from terrorism saves lives and creates an illusion of safety, but it distances the student from the content they are receiving, and this can psychologically result in dislike and trauma for the student.

In addition, a major challenge for the Sahel is to prevent the loss of a generation of students whose future depends on the government’s ability to rehabilitate, reopen and keep schools safe.

“Every child who is not in school, every lost day of learning is one less building block to build peace and prosperity in the region,” said the director of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Central Africa and West, Maureen Magee.

LOW EDUCATION

“Low primary school enrollment rates in sub-Saharan Africa have encouraged the search for solutions to this problem that threatens the future of millions of boys and girls across the continent,” say specialists Carlos Oya and Alberto Begué in The Challenges of Basic Education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

However, the authors acknowledge that “Achieving universal primary education has been and continues to be a goal of many African governments”, although this is not universal as there are differences between countries in the attention they devote to education.

In the past six months, UNESCO unveiled a new operational strategy for the continent, a plan linked to six projects and two priority axes: the culture of peace and capacity building for sustainable development and poverty eradication.

All this affects the ability for social reproduction, and with it the possibility of better development of the educational process.

The foregoing pulls strains – in both the public and private sectors – against comprehensive performance on a continent where the UN says 57 million children and young people are uneducated.

In the central strip of the continent, the insecure situation reduces the application possibilities for the pedagogical programs aimed at promoting access to knowledge and supporting the overall teaching work.

The effectiveness of teaching is being diluted, with ignorance taking the place of the academy, say United Nations experts.

In order to change the order of things and move on to the phase called progression, one must begin with the first step: education. No progress can be made if there is no development in this regard, at the discretion of the organization.

In a globalized world, in which even the most elementary topics are rapidly being digitized and in the technical socialization of knowledge, any exclusion could be tragic for the future, observers from human rights groups say.

The great challenge of the African contemporaneity is not to be explained “outside the game” and see its chances of being part of the great scientific and technological revolution that opens the doors to the future postponed.

For this, there must be inclusive constructions that can resist violence and also apathy in education.

Without circumventing the specificities of each state, but as the union leads to victory in the face of the most difficult goals, it is not excluded that continental political measures will keep education in the right place to protect the minds of African generations from now on. get.

rmh/until/mt

*Journalist for Prensa Latina’s International Newsroom.

The World Health Organization evaluated data from 53 European countries. Criterion: Disease in 2020 or 2021 and complaint lasting at least three months.

According to an analysis carried out for the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 17 million people in Europe were affected by prolonged symptoms of COVID in the first two years of the pandemic. For the calculation of the model, the University of Washington evaluated cases in 53 European countries, as announced by the WHO office in Europe on Tuesday. The criterion was the duration of symptoms of at least three months in the years 2020 and/or 2021.

The study suggests that women are twice as likely to develop Covid Longo than men, the WHO said. In addition, the risk of Covid increases dramatically after a severe corona infection, the treatment of which required hospitalization. As per the model’s calculation, one in three affected women and one in five affected men struggle with symptoms of Long Covid after such a severe course.

“Urgently needs more analysis”

“We still have a lot to learn about Long Covid,” Copenhagen-based WHO Europe region director Hans Kluge said during a WHO meeting in Tel Aviv. “But these data make it clear that we urgently need more analysis, more investment, more support and more solidarity with those affected.” Millions of people suffered from debilitating symptoms in the months following a corona infection. “They cannot continue to suffer in silence. Governments and health partners must work together to find solutions based on research and evidence.”

According to the study, about 145 million people worldwide were affected by Covid symptoms in the first two years of the pandemic.

(APA/dpa)