The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • A8

A8 The World TUE SDAY, MAY 1 0 2 0 2 2 CRISIS IN UKRAINE By Emma Bubola and Valeriya Safronova NEW YORK TIMES In a suburb of Aachen, in the west of Germany, Alex Ebert, 11, was on the bus back from school, his mother said, when four boys told him that he was killing Ukrainian children. One of them, who he told her had pushed him the week before and called him a slur used for Russians, slammed head into the window and kicked him in the stomach and back. Alex, who speaks Russian because his parents are from Kazakhstan, got out at a bus stop and sat on the ground until strangers in a car stopped and picked him up. was crying and said his mother, Svetlana Ebert. understand what he has to do with Vladimir invasion has killed hundreds of Ukrainian children, orphaned many more, displaced millions, and wrecked homes and schools.

But it has al- so crept into the lives of Russian- speaking children across Eu- rope, who have found them- se pay ing fo Pu in aggression in humiliation, ha- rassment, and bullying anoth- er perverse effect of a war that is overwhelmingly affecting the in- nocent. problem is growing ev- ery said Carsten Stahl, Ger- most prominent anti- bullying activist, who said he had received scores of reports of bullying of Russian-speaking students. very angry and very In classrooms around Eu- rope, children bewildered by the war have asked questions and gotten answers. But as their gov- ernments have sought to isolate Russia both culturally and politi- cally, they have also poured out their fears, and sometimes looked for culprits or mimicked hostility, with the risk of creating new breeding grounds for violence and intimidation in a continent that is once again enduring war. we put it in their head that it is OK to hate and bully, it stays for a very long Stahl said.

World events have often sup- plied excuses for bullying. The COVID-19 pandemic brought a wave of harassment for Asian children, and in 2016, after a se- ries of Islamic State group ter- rorist attacks, Muslim children reported an increase in bullying. Now, Stahl said, distress over the war in Ukraine has added new targets for the kind of vindictive behavior that can lead children to avoid school and, in some cas- es, result in depression and sui- cidal thoughts. In Harsefeld, a town outside Hamburg, Anastasia Makisson, 13, who is Russian German, re- ceived several anonymous notes in school calling her a Nazi and urging her to go back to Russia to vodka with She said students had also come up to her and shouted, Anastasia liked school, but since the latest notes ap- peared in April, she has not gone back out of fear. scared someone could hit she said.

stares at me. as if thinking, Her father, Ilya Makisson, said the school had promised to investigate but had not acted so far; the school did not respond to a request for comment. About a week after Russia in- vaded Ukraine, Elisa Spadoni, 13, who is Russian Italian, wrapped up her homework at her house in central Italy and checked her class WhatsApp group. In the chat, one class- mate called her of Pu- Anothermessage read, might as well When the girl asked her classmates to stop, one boy re- plied, stop once youwill stop throwing missi les on He also wrote, morrow I will beat her Elisa, usually an enthusiastic, dedicated student, told her mother she no longer wanted to go to school. was said Elisa.

wished I have half-Rus- sian When her father reported the harassment to her teacher, she discussed the issue in class, Elisa said. But her mother said Elisa waited several days before open- ing up about the messages; her mother learned only from class- mates that she had been crying at school. Like Elisa, many of the Rus- sian-speaking childrenwho have been targeted have tried to keep it quiet; in some cases, out of shame, as often happens with bullying. Among those who spoke up, some parents feared that discussing incidents could result in more trouble for their children, or make them seem supportive of the war. As the case of Alex, the boy from Aachen, shows, bullying and harassment affect not only Russian children, because many people speak Russian in former Soviet republics such as Estonia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine itself.

In Europe, war hurts Russian-speaking children Students endure bullying based on nationality was aimed at assuaging the pain directly caused by the war a decree to provide addition- al aid to the children of killed and wounded soldiers. has developed a certain sense of what is and is not pos- said Gleb Pavlovsky, a close adviser to Putin until fall- ing out with him in 2011, ex- plaining why the Russian lead- er does not appear ready to or- der a mass mobilization. understands that no propagan- da can by itself force someone to speech was subdued especially when compared with the fiery rhetoric he has es- poused on other occasions over the past two months; it was al- so the speech, of all his recent appearances, that the Russian people were most likely to see, since it came during the tele- vised Victory Day parade, the Russian marquee annual event celebrating the Soviet vic- tory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Some analysts say that al- though polls show broad sup- port in Russia for the war, there appears to be concern in the Kremlin that this support is not deep. Pavlovsky said Putin seemed keen to avoid doing fur- ther damage to the unspoken deal with the Russian people that he fashioned after coming to power: Regular Russians stay out of politics, and the Kremlin largely lets them live their lives.

While more than 15,000 Russians were arrested at anti- war protests in the first weeks of the war, the vast majority stayed silent, even if they op- posed it. And although Western sanctions have hit uUKRAINE Continued from Page A1 economy, it has not collapsed, allowing many people to live largely as they had before the Feb. 24 invasion. The independent pollster Levada found last month that 39 percent of Russians were paying little to no attention to what the Kremlin calls the cial military in Ukraine. In Ukraine, President Volod- ymyr Zelensky rejected claim of purging Nazism to jus- tify the invasion, saying in a video released Monday that it was Putin who was the horrific crimes of regime the day of victory over Nazism, we are fighting for a new Zelensky said as he was shown walking alone through the streets of Kyiv, past government buildings protect- ed with barriers and barbed wire.

Together, the speeches showed both leaders digging in for what could be a protracted battle, as Ukrainian troops, armed with heavy weapons supplied by the West, fight Rus- sian forces along a 300-mile front in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. After weeks of intense combat, Russia has made only sporadic gains. The Ukrainian military said the Russian army had deployed 19 battalion tactical groups each with as many as 1,000 troops to the Russian border town of Belgorod in prepara- tion for an assault to slow a Ukrainian counteroffensive around Kharkiv and to break through Ukrainian defensive lines elsewhere in the region. In Warsaw, protesters chant- ing splashed red liq- uid on the face of am- bassador to Poland, Sergei An- Putin appears to be reluctant to ask too much of Russians dreev, as he and other Russian diplomats visited a memorial honoring Red Army soldiers killed in WWII. A spokesperson for Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, called the protesters of neo-Na- Western and Ukrainian offi- cials had speculated that Putin might use the martial pomp of theMay 9 ceremony to officially declare Russia is in a state of war and expand military con- scription, allowing him to in- crease his depleted forces that have faced so many struggles on the battlefield.

But analysts said that a mass mobilization of the Russian public, an increase in conscrip- tion, or a switch to an austere wartime economy would un- dermine the balance he had struck and bring the reality of war into many more house- holds. Putin pledged early on that conscripts young Rus- sian men who are required to complete a year of military ser- vice would not be sent into battle. After many were, Putin ordered an investigation. could turn out that peo- ple are prepared to support the war while sitting at home in front of the TV, as they say, but that they are not at all prepared to go and Pavlovsky said. the central position that Putin understands and is trying not to The choreography of the pa- rade itself seemed aimed at the comfortably familiar: troops and vehicles marched and rolled through Red Square as they had in previous years and did not show the symbol that has come to represent sup- port for the Ukraine war.

Even during cele- brations, glimmers of unrest in- side Russia continued to show. OVD-Info, a rights group, re- ported detentions of scattered protesters across the country. It distributed a photo of a man who was later arrested for hav- ing placed a box of chocolates on a central Moscow bench be- side a handwritten sign that read: some candy if against the In the most dramatic act of protest, two Russian journalists at Lentu.ru, a pro-Kremlin news website, suddenly filled its homepage with antiwar arti- cles, including one that de- clared must not stated the ar- ticle, posted briefly on the web- site. not be silent! Resist! You are not alone, and we are many! The future is In his speech, Putin re- hashed old arguments that the invasion was the cor- rect because, he false- ly claimed, Ukraine was plan- ning a of its Russian-controlled territory and because NATO was build- ing up troops near bor- ders. But some analysts warned that even if Putin defied some Western expectations of escala- tion, the threat remained high in the coming weeks.

Putin reserved his toughest language in speech for the United States. It was the United States and its that were using Ukrainian to threaten Russia, he said, forcing him to respond militarily. And i wa Un i States, he said, that was the world after the fall of the Soviet Union by pro- claiming its MIKHAIL VIA GETTY IMAGES Russian President Vladimir Putin watched the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in central Moscow Monday. ByMichael Schwirtz NEW YORK TIMES She carried a simple bouquet of white lilacs as explosions re- verberated through the bright spring air. Tears streaked her weathered face, which was framed by a blue headscarf.

Nina Mikhailovna came Monday, as she does every year onMay 9, to the eternal flame in a city park that commemorates the allied victory in World War II. She came to honor thememo- ry of her father, who was killed in 1943, and to remember those who died liberating her native Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine from the Nazis, whom she re- members forcing her into the fields as a child to cut and gather wheat. At nearly 89, Mikhailovna thought shewould neverwitness anything as bad as that war with the Germans. But the current war with the Russians is worse, she said. At least the Germans were enemies.

are our she said of the Russian forces, invok- ing the intertwined history and the family ties that link Russia and Ukraine. As she spoke, Rus- sian rockets landed close enough to rumble the ground where she stood. niece lives in Moscow but was born in she said, referring to a Ukrainian city a few miles away from Kramatorsk. now sending her husband to fight. he supposed to do, kill his mother-in-law? what is so hard to en- For decades, Ukrainians and Russians were bound by their shared experience in World War II.

Together they died by themil- lions under German fire, and to- gether they drove the Nazis from their lands. And each year on May 9, when the Soviet Union marked Vic tory Day, they marched in parades and laid flowers at monuments, always together. But this year, as President Vladimir Putin of Russia used the holiday to defend his inva- sion, praising Russian troops for for the Ukrainians hid in bomb shelters and fought in trenches and died in air raids, the way their grand- parents did somany years go. The eastern region of Don- bas, which the Kremlin is trying to seize in this war, has tradi- tionally looked to Moscow as a center of political and cultural gravity, andmany residents have close family ties to Russia. The war has complicated this rela- tionship.

After Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and instigated a sepa- ratist war in Donbas in 2014, the government in Kyiv stripped away the Soviet symbolism from Victory Day. Ukraine celebrates it simply as a victory over fas- cism, which some Ukrainians now associate with gov- ernment as well. have beat fascism, and we will defeat said Pavel Kirilenko, governor of the Donetsk region, who arrived with heavily armed guards to lay flowers at themonument. Al Monday morning in Kramatorsk, sirens wailed and the thump of bombs and rockets shook the city as Russian forces pushed nearer from the north and the east. They are not mov- ing as quickly as Putin might have liked, but they are now close enough to Kramatorsk, a large industrial hub in the Do- netsk region, to keep all but the most in rep id inc lud ing Mikhailovna, away from the park that holds theWorldWar II monument.

At a hospital Monday, ambu- lances arrived carrying civilians and soldiers wounded from the shelling. A 28-year-old sol- dier named Andriy, pale and shivering in a hospital cot, de- scribed a hellish round of bomb- ing that morning, which caused shrapnel to flay open his upper thigh and shatter his femur. was obvious that on the 9th of May this would said Andriy, who was working on a milk farm in Denmark when the war started and came back home to fight. were ready for In Barvinkove, west of Kram- atorsk, the rockets have rained down day and night, destroying homes and forcing all but the most stalwart, or stubborn, to flee. But some people there are less than enthusiastic about the ubiquitous Ukrainian troops de- fending their town fromRussian forces moving in from the north, said Bohdan Krynychnyi, a 20- year-old volunteer soldier.

we have problems with said Krynychnyi while taking a break from the fighting to buy groceries at the one working market. His call sign is Monk because he left his training at a Ukrainian monas- tery to join the war. He described entering a house that morning that had been bombed by Russian forces. Inside, he said, he found a Soviet flag and an orange-and-black St. George ribbon, which has been turned into a nationalist symbol by government.

Invasion upends a sharedWorld War II history with Ukraine LYNSEY YORK TIMES Nina Mikhailovna visited a World War II memorial as explosions thundered nearby in Kramatorsk, Ukraine..