Mayor of Kyiv says Ukraine needs more help

22:17Because these whales are actually already kind of leaving the area because it's too hot for them. It's too hot and they hide under the ice and that ice is disappearing. So it's more like a shift in the ecosystem. So it's new types of whales, new species of whales that are coming there compared to what were there before. So it's not like they are pushing out the whales that were there. But it is a huge change in the entire ecosystem because, of course, it's not only the whales, which are the top predators, you could say. It is the whole ecosystem that is changing. Is this something that you're worried about?

22:58Do you expect that it will keep moving farther north? I don't think we should worry about these whales going there. In fact, they can also be hunting species for the local Inuit. That is not a problem. So I see the climate change as a problem, but not particularly that these whales are coming.

23:17Vitali Klitschko:And that was Professor Suzanne Ditlevson from the University of Copenhagen speaking to Anne Soy about the coming of the Titans, those huge whales who are now visiting more and more frequently eastern Greenland.

23:46BBC. The US and South Korea have been close allies since the 1950s. But this week, Trump announced that the US will substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea. He cited his very good relationship with North Korea's Kim Jong-un. For more, check out the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:11Vitali Klitschko:Welcome back to NewsHour. South Korea's military is currently holding its annual joint military exercises with the United States. They're to be suddenly truncated this year, thanks to President Trump announcing that he thinks they're counterproductive and unnecessary, and as he tries to woo the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, once again. For their part, the North Koreans today test-fired around 10 short-range ballistic missiles into the sea, at least according to reports from the South Korean military command. So how's the government in Seoul viewing all this? Hong Ki-won is an MP with the governing Democratic Party.

24:49Vitali Klitschko:What does he make of Mr Trump saying North Korea has been unthreatening and respectful? Actually, today, our president Lee Jae-myung also expressed a message that he strongly supports the efforts made by President Trump to promote the peace in the Korean peninsula. Our president regards President Trump's message as very positive on to promote peace in the Korean Peninsula, also to make another summit meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. We think that the meeting between them is very important for the peace on the Korean Peninsula and also to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. I'm very struck by your tone.

25:37Vitali Klitschko:I can understand it that you don't want to enrage or alienate President Trump. But for you and your president to say you entirely support what he's doing, the way in which he has talked, not just about these exercises, but just about the whole sort of relationship between the US and South Korea. He appeared to be furious that South Korea did not, in his words, help us on a very easy military operation in Iran, while we have 39 ,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un. You're saying you support him. He is clearly saying that he's very unhappy with you. Yeah, we understand that he had some kind of disappointment on the issue of the Middle East war, but we cannot accommodate the request by the U.S.

26:35side. But we still are considering to assist the war, but we don't know yet what kind of help we can provide.

26:45Vitali Klitschko:Yeah, I just, I mean, have you thought about why it is? Japan had a similar view of, you know, not wanting to get involved in this US war in Iran. But the US-Japan annual military exercises, they went ahead just as normal. But with South Korea, it seems like you've been punished for your stance on Iran. We don't think so. We don't think so. We think that the main message of the Truth Social Post about the scaling down of the joint military exercise is not to focus on the Iranian issue, but the message was aimed to give some kind of friendly gesture toward Kim Jong-un. And that was Hong Ki-won, a member of parliament with the governing Democratic Party in Seoul.

27:42Vitali Klitschko:This is the BBC World Service and you're listening to NewsHours, coming to you live from London with me, Tim Frax. We led the programme, as we so often have done over the last four and a half years, talking about Ukraine, about another intense Russian overnight bombardment, at least 15 people killed in the capital. And yet the truth for many of us, even for those who've experienced conflicts and wars, is that when you're not there, it can all feel rather distant, rather unknowable. We hear about missiles and drones, about death and injury, about sleeplessness and deprivation and fear. We register the words, but do we really understand what they mean?

28:22Vitali Klitschko:Which is where our next two guests come in. Charlotte Higgins is the chief culture writer of The Guardian newspaper. Her book, Ukrainian Lessons, Art in a Time of War, is published today. One of the Ukrainian artists she features in the book is Irina Tsilik, a poet and a filmmaker. So what's an arts journalist doing in a war zone? There are two reasons I went to Ukraine, really. One of which was that I just know from history that the way wars tend to be remembered actually is not so much through historiography or even news reports, but actually through art, through poetry, through painting. And I think that's very, very clear in the way the British particularly remember the First World War.

29:09So I just knew in my bones that Ukrainian artists would be responding to and reacting to the war in really interesting ways that would go beyond what journalists can do and what certainly what the sort of official political reports would do. And the second reason was that it was very clear to me that culture was completely bound up in this war in a very clear way. I mean, literally, Vladimir Putin wrote an essay the summer before the full scale invasion of Ukraine in which he set out these false ideas, really, that Ukraine and Russia were one culture, were one history, were one identity. And that clearly is rejected by Ukraine.

29:52But language, history, culture and identity are completely bound up in the war. So it felt to me that to leave that aspect of the war unreported would be to leave a whole kind of area of possible understanding of what was going on a blank. So I went to sort of try and fill that blank.

30:13Vitali Klitschko:Irina, I want to ask about you and your work. But to begin with, I also want to acknowledge that it's been another fearful night in Ukraine, especially in Kiev. Kiev. And I know that you and your teenage son, you told me just before we started recording that you're not in the capital, but your husband is. Can you just tell me what your thoughts are today? I mean, after another really unpleasant night? You know, this summer is actually so hard and so bizarre because the rules of the game have changed. And now we experience this Russian missile attacks so often. And it is different than before, because you don't have a time to prepare yourself, you just have a few minutes to somehow hide.

31:03And usually it's not possible. So my son, he became really anxious about those attacks. And we decided to leave Kiev just for a few days and to sleep peacefully, you know, in our country house. But at the same time, my husband is still there. He's the military, but at the moment he's serving in Kyiv. And anyway, I don't sleep when the attack is happening. And it's also crazy because now we are in Chernihiv region, so it's closer to the border with Russia. And usually those missiles or drones, they fly over us and they fly towards Kyiv. So I'm texting my husband, you know, the ballistic take me south, I fly into Kiev, please be safe.

31:50And this is crazy. Yeah, but we are fine today.

31:54Vitali Klitschko:Well, I'm glad to hear you say that, however much you clearly are shaken and exhausted. Tell me about your work. Tell me about how you define yourself as an artist and your relationship with Charlotte as well? Well, I'm a Ukrainian filmmaker. First of all, I make documentary, fiction, but also animated films. At the same time, I write because I'm a poet, I'm an essayist, and I don't remember, to be honest, how we met with Charlotte for the first time. Probably she did the interview with me. I really appreciated our conversation, and then we became almost good friends. So we are in contact. And I was really happy to read some fragments from her new book.

32:48So that is really cool that you are focusing, you know, on that book today.

32:52Vitali Klitschko:And I want to come back to some of your work and particularly a poem of yours, Irina. But Charlotte, in terms of the relationships that you struck up with Ukrainian artists, I mean, you may not have been a war correspondent up to this point but you have had a I would suggest of you've thought about war because you're a classicist by training and a lot of the classics deal with war what was it that you learned about war seeing it in the field and seeing it through the prism of art that's a hard question to answer Tim I thought that being an arts journalist in the frame of war I would somehow be insulated from the most brutal aspects of warfare, which, of course, that's absolutely true.

33:42I'm not doing military journalism. But actually, what I hadn't understood is that art, good art, like Irina's poems and films, like so much of the extraordinary visual art, I'm just in my mind. I'm just thinking of a young artist called Dasha Chechuskova. I'm thinking now of a young artist who was killed in the line of duty called Maharita Polovinco. Those artists bring you so close to the emotional world of living under a war. And that's kind of very tender and fragile and difficult, often material. So I suppose that was a thing that I hadn't registered for, this kind of nakedness and the fragility and the vulnerability of the sort of art that artists were making.

34:35And I suppose the overwhelming lesson is something that I knew already in a sense, but have understood in a much more visceral way, which is that art is unbelievably important. And that although poetry may not be the first thing you turn to when your family is in danger, it's absolutely not the last thing. And there's been an extraordinary outpouring of poetry in Ukraine because there's a sense in which poetry can try and grasp hold of the collapsing fragments of the world and make some kind of temporary sense out of them. And that's one of the things that Irina does so beautifully in her poems.

35:15Vitali Klitschko:And Irina, on that point, and just from what Charlotte was saying, it seemed like a perfect moment to ask you to read your poem that's in the book by Charlotte, My Day. Would you be willing to do that for us? Yes, I'd love to. And this is a short poem, which is actually quite simple. But at the same time, it somehow conveys about how we live today in Kyiv. My day. How was your day? How are you doing? You ask, and I'm thinking. At four in the morning, I was woken up by a narrate siren. I lay down in the corridor with my son, listening to missiles fly overhead. You can't mistake this sound for anything else.

36:01But the Russian roulette didn't go as planned. I slept for another hour, read the news about the number of people killed, cooked pancakes for my son, went to a hero's funeral, saw a woman feeding birds from her hand, cried in the park, received a romantic message from the front line, had doubts in the supermarket, Pinot Noir or Zinfandel, made dinner, wrote to a girlfriend who is recovering from a battle wound, watched a TV show, wept in the shower, a typical day overall, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm f***ing fine. Thank you. Yeah, I just realised that this poem fits so well for this morning too.

36:49Vitali Klitschko:It's an incredibly affecting poem because it interlaces just the normalcy of everyday life with just the utter extremity of war and the trauma that is just laced through presumably everything that you do, every breath that you take. Yeah, this is what happens to people which live in the country which is at war for 12 years already. So, you know, we somehow adapted and we live normal lives. But at the same time, it's not normal at all. Charlotte, one of the challenges, I guess, for you is that war is such a strange and brutal business. It can feel very, very distant. one of the things and we just heard it in that poem is that art has a has a way of cutting through that yes completely and i tried to use myself as a kind of maker of connections between you know our own history thinking about literatures of other times and places and connecting that to the literature that's being produced in ukraine now you know ukrainian artists are doing such an extraordinary job of opening up this vulnerability and the sense of what it is to live under these conditions and you know hoping to introduce readers in Britain to that and I hope to go further and then read poetry by Irina by poets like Oksana Maximchuk, Irina Shavalova and Arthur Dron.

38:26There's wonderful literature and there's extraordinary art out there which is often And devastating. And yet the very act of creating it and the very fact of its existence, I think, is hopeful. It is Ukrainian sort of asserting themselves, insisting on their existence and demanding that their experience be heard and taken seriously.

38:47Vitali Klitschko:And Irina, just the last word to you, I guess one of the things about the art that you and others in Ukraine can make and do make is that you do so. obviously you do so under the awful shadow of war, but you do so with relative artistic freedom, which is not the case in Russia, at least as Ukrainian artists, you can express yourselves. Yeah, absolutely. I feel very free. I can do whatever I want. At the same time, we sometimes feel like the hostages, you know, of this time of war, because it's not really possible to reflect on something else. We are still experiencing this really bizarre reality, which is bigger than anything else.

39:37So on the one hand, we are free to do whatever we want. At the same time, we're desperately waiting for the times when the war will be over and we will do something else. I don't know, rom-coms, comedies, anything. Yeah. I look forward to that so much, Irina. What you're saying, that this compulsion to reflect the world as it is, and the necessity and the sort of almost inescapability of doing it, but at the same time, it shouldn't be happening. You should be making rom-coms. And I really look forward to the day when you do direct a rom-com, Irina, because I'll be at the front of the queue.

40:18Vitali Klitschko:Arts journalist Charlotte Higgins, Ukrainian documentary maker and poet Irina Tzilik, speaking to me from Ukraine. Charlotte was here in the NewsHour studio with me. And Charlotte's new book, Ukrainian Lessons, Art in a Time of War, is published today. You're listening to NewsHour.

40:40Vitali Klitschko:You're with the BBC and this is NewsHour, live from London, and a reported gold discovery in a remote part of western Kenya has triggered a rush of fortune seekers from across the region and neighbouring Uganda. Hundreds have arrived in Cheperov village in West Pocot County, hoping to strike gold. But the sudden influx is putting pressure on a community with not many resources and raising concerns about security and safety. The BBC's Akisa Wandero has this report. Before sunrise, the digging begins in this remote village in western Kenya. Hundreds of people are searching for something they hope will change their lives, gold.

41:23Just a few weeks ago, Cheporor was a quiet, sparsely populated community. Today, it is the center of a gold rush. Residents say the rush began earlier this month after reports emerged that gold had been discovered here. Manasse Lomachar says he was among the first residents to get the gold. I was looking for a goat that had gone missing. That's when I came across some women who were pining for gold in the water. I joined them in the search and that's how we discovered there was gold in this area. Within days, thousands of prospectors had arrived. Westpokot's Deputy County Commissioner Samuel Kiaria told the BBC social media helped fuel the influx.

42:11We had approximately 10 ,000 people from all over the area, from neighboring counties and even from the neighboring country of Uganda. And the number has drastically reduced to 2 ,500 because, you know, the expectations were so high. The village has been transformed almost overnight. But was there really gold to be found? When we went there, traders in gold. They told us every day they are getting an average of 100 people who are selling gold to them. But unfortunately, the amount of gold might not be so huge. Among those drawn here is Ugandan artisanal miner Mugisha Godfrey. We sleep under the trees and when morning comes, we continue working.

42:59Sometimes we work both day and night. As for going back home, we can't return unless we find something. The rush has also created opportunities for traders who've travelled hundreds of kilometres to sell food, water and basic supplies to the growing population. One of them is Irene Ameja, who came from a neighboring county hoping to earn enough money to expand her business. But the sudden population boom is exposing the area's lack of infrastructure. There is limited access to clean water, few sanitation facilities and growing concerns about safety, particularly for women. This is a forest and we're in the middle of the mountains.

43:42We don't have clean water to drink or even bath. For women, the biggest challenge comes in the evening or at night. You have to find somewhere safe to go and stay because most of the people sleeping here are men. Local authorities say security has been reinforced while health and sanitation measures are being expanded. For those still digging in Cheporor, the possibility of a life-changing discovery is reason enough to keep searching.

44:10Vitali Klitschko:And that was Akisa Wandera reporting from Western Kenya. We're going to end this edition of NewsHour with the story of a remarkable fall of the man who was once ranked as Asia's richest and who today was sentenced to life in prison and had all his personal property, all his remaining wealth confiscated. He's Hui Ka Yan, the founder of Evergrande, the property giant which became the symbol of China's housing market slump. Hui pleaded guilty in April to several charges, including embezzlement and bribery. At its height, Evergrande was China's biggest real estate firm. When it collapsed in 2021, it did so owing more than$300 billion.

44:51Vitali Klitschko:Han Lin is China Country Director of the US-based consultancy The Asia Group and joins me live from Shanghai. Han Lin, thank you very much for your time here on NewsHour. It is an astonishing personal plunge, this, isn't it, for this man? Oh, absolutely. Hui was the archetype of China's Gilded Age tycoon, someone with enormous corporate leverage alongside personal wealth, political access, trophy assets and prestige projects, including a football team. And now a life in prison. He is accused or was accused, I see from the court of serious, among other things, seriously disrupting the socialist market economic order.

45:38Vitali Klitschko:I mean, how how far was he and Evergrande, do you think, key in terms of the tremendous debt problems that China and particularly China's middle classes have been struggling with? So what is important to understand is Hui has become a politically potent symbol in China. He is the image of a developer living extraordinarily well, while a highly leveraged company that he manages owes money to homebuyers, suppliers, employees and creditors. Almost contradictory to President Xi Jinping's idea of a common prosperity and financial risk control agenda. How far do you think people in China have separated, though, these sort of – I'm sure he became a bit of a sort of hate figure.

46:26Vitali Klitschko:But the idea that there were sort of bad apples who were borrowing and borrowing to sort of keep on expanding this sort of – this unsustainable debt-fueled property boom and the idea that, well, you know, maybe the people in charge in Beijing were not doing enough to manage this. So one thing that's worth noting is that at one point, property made up almost 30 % of China's economy. And with the fall of the property sector, including that of many property developers, a lot of people felt like their main source of net worth, their property, as it fell in price, they started losing confidence in the future.

47:05And because of that, it continues to have a legacy where consumption growth is slow, and the economy just really isn't the engine of growth it used to be.

47:14Vitali Klitschko:So that cascade of defaults and the property slump, you're saying it's still weighing on China's middle class? It continues to weigh on the middle class and it continues to be a conundrum for the government that's wondering, how do you boost everyone's confidence into the future? So at this point, the property sector, it hits everyone at the most personal level of what your net worth is worth today. And it looks like it's worth less today than it used to be. And that's disheartening. And just to return to Hui Ka-yen, his story now is at an end. Are there other property magnates, big, big fish whom you think may be netted yet by the judicial system?

47:59So what has become clear is that all the other major property companies such as Vanke, such as the others, essentially have basically submitted to government oversight. In other words, the idea of a private enterprise taking on so much leverage at the cost of China's future, that looks like those days have ended.

48:19Vitali Klitschko:Han Lin, very good to have you on the programme. Thank you very much for joining us live from Shanghai. Han Lin, China Country Director of the Asia Group. And that's it from this edition of NewsHour. From me, Tim Franks and the team here in London, thanks for your company.

48:41Is President Trump snubbing South Korea to reignite his friendly relationship with Kim Jong-un? I'm Asma Khaled, and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. The U.S. and South Korea have been close allies since the 1950s. But this week, Trump announced that the U.S. will substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea. He cited his very good relationship with North Korea's Kim Jong-un. For more, check out The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.