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President Zelenskiy: The Figurehead of Ukraine’s Defiance

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visits a place of a fight with Russian troops during Russia's invasion to Ukraine, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine May 29, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via Reuters)
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visits a place of a fight with Russian troops during Russia's invasion to Ukraine, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine May 29, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via Reuters)
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President Zelenskiy: The Figurehead of Ukraine’s Defiance

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visits a place of a fight with Russian troops during Russia's invasion to Ukraine, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine May 29, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via Reuters)
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visits a place of a fight with Russian troops during Russia's invasion to Ukraine, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine May 29, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via Reuters)

Volodymyr Zelenskiy has inspired Ukrainians and won global respect and praise for his courage and defiance in resisting Russia's devastating invasion of his country.

Refusing to leave Ukraine's capital of Kyiv at the outbreak of the war, even as Russian bombs rained down, the former comedian rallied his compatriots in broadcasts from the capital.

Last Sunday, he went on his first trip east since the war started, visiting Ukrainian troops near the frontline in Kharkiv region.

He has also drawn standing ovations in foreign parliaments whose urgent help he has sought via videolink.

Asked about his daily regime during the war, which will enter its 100th day on Friday, he told Reuters and CNN in a joint interview in March: "I work and I sleep."

Asked how long Ukraine could hold out, Zelenskiy said: "We do not hold out, we fight, and our nation will fight to the end. This is our home, we are protecting our land, our homes. For the sake of our children's future."

Wearing his trademark olive green T-shirt, often tired and unshaven but always impassioned, Zelenskiy has urged Western lawmakers to impose an embargo on Russian oil and gas and to step up arms supplies to his embattled forces on the frontline.

The West has rebuffed his appeal on no-fly zones, fearing this could lead to direct conflict with Russia and even trigger World War Three, but provided military aid - including self-propelled US howitzers and advanced rockets - and economic support while imposing unprecedented sanctions on Russia.

"History is at a turning point ... This is really the moment when it is decided whether brute force will rule the world," the 44-year-old father of two told global business leaders at Davos last month, casting the war as part of a global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

He has accused Russia of waging a genocidal war: "This is a deliberate and criminal attempt to kill as many Ukrainians as possible, to destroy as many houses, social facilities and enterprises as possible." Russia denies targeting civilians.

Zelenskiy has also castigated what he sees as Europe's tardiness to sanction Russian energy imports, which help bankroll Moscow's military campaign, and those Western politicians who urged him to make territorial concessions to end the war.

Making his first trip out of Kyiv on May 29 since the start of the war, he told soldiers in the northeast Kharkiv region: "You risk your lives for us all and for our country."

When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 in a what it calls "special operation" to disarm and "denazify" the country, Zelenskiy, who is Jewish, responded by invoking Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

"Russia treacherously attacked our state this morning, as Nazi Germany did during World War Two," he said in a national address. "Russia has embarked on a path of evil, but Ukraine is defending itself and won't give up its freedom, no matter what Moscow thinks."

The war, while enhancing Zelenskiy's reputation at home and abroad, has been disastrous for Ukraine, killing tens of thousands of people, reducing cities to rubble and prompting more than 6 million people to flee abroad, according to the United Nations.

Servant of the people
Zelenskiy is an unlikely wartime leader. He shot to fame in a popular television series, "Servant of the People", in which he played an honest school teacher who is elected president and outwits crooked lawmakers and shadowy businessmen.

Winning the presidency by a landslide in April 2019, he pledged to tackle the corruption that has blighted Ukraine's transition from communism to democracy. But Russia has always posed the biggest challenge to his aspirations to build a modern, democratic and stable European country.

His Servant of the People party won a big majority in a July 2019 parliamentary election and Zelenskiy initially sought a negotiated peace to the war against Russia-backed separatists in Donbas, ongoing since 2014.

But that did not last long. Russia continued to support the separatists and tensions continued to grow.

Risking Moscow's ire, Zelenskiy has courted Western leaders, including US President Joe Biden at talks in the White House on Sept. 1, 2021. He has infuriated Putin with his increasingly insistent calls for NATO and the EU to admit Ukraine.

"Everyone should understand ... that we are at war, that we are defending democracy in Europe and defending our country ...," Zelenskiy said in a June 2021 interview.

"Every day we prove that we are ready to be in the (NATO) alliance more than most of the countries of the European Union."

Zelenskiy rode a wave of public discontent with Ukraine's corrupt political elite to victory over the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko, a wealthy businessman, in 2019.

Asked by Reuters ahead of that election how he differed from other presidential hopefuls, Zelenskiy pointed to his face, saying: "This is a new face. I have never been in politics.

"I have not deceived people. They identify with me because I am open, I get hurt, I get angry, I get upset ... If I'm inexperienced in something, I'm inexperienced. If I don't know something, I honestly admit it."

Zelenskiy was drawn unwittingly into US politics after a phone call in which then-President Donald Trump tried to get him to investigate his Democratic rival Biden over business deals in Ukraine.

The Democrat-led US House of Representatives impeached Trump after an inquiry concluded he had withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to influence Kyiv. Trump denied wrongdoing and the Republican-controlled US Senate later acquitted him.

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Features

Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, a Haven for Journalists During Lebanon’s Civil War, Shuts Down

People stand outside the closed Commodore hotel, in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP)
People stand outside the closed Commodore hotel, in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP)
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Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, a Haven for Journalists During Lebanon’s Civil War, Shuts Down

People stand outside the closed Commodore hotel, in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP)
People stand outside the closed Commodore hotel, in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP)

During Lebanon’s civil war, the Commodore Hotel in western Beirut's Hamra district became iconic among the foreign press corps.

For many, it served as an unofficial newsroom where they could file dispatches even when communications systems were down elsewhere. Armed guards at the door provided some sense of protection as sniper fights and shelling were turning the cosmopolitan city to rubble.

The hotel even had its own much-loved mascot: a cheeky parrot.

The Commodore endured for decades after the 15-year civil war ended in 1990 — until this week, when it closed for good.

The main gate of the nine-story hotel with more than 200 rooms was shuttered Monday. Officials at the Commodore refused to speak to the media about the decision to close.

Although the country’s economy is beginning to recover from a protracted financial crisis that began in 2019, tensions in the region and the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war that was halted by a tenuous ceasefire in November 2024 are keeping many tourists away. Lengthy daily electricity cuts force businesses to rely on expensive private generators.

The Commodore is not the first of the crisis-battered country’s once-bustling hotels to shut down in recent years.

But for journalists who lived, worked and filed their dispatches there, its demise hits particularly hard.

“The Commodore was a hub of information — various guerrilla leaders, diplomats, spies and of course scores of journalists circled the cafes and lounges,” said Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent who covered the civil war. “On one occasion (late Palestinian leader) Yasser Arafat himself dropped in to sip coffee with” with the hotel manager's father, he recalled.

A line to the outside world

At the height of the civil war, when telecommunications were dysfunctional and much of Beirut was cut off from the outside world, it was at the Commodore where journalists found land lines and Telex machines that always worked to send reports to their media organizations around the globe.

Across the front office desk in the wide lobby of the Commodore, there were two teleprinters that carried reports of The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies.

“The Commodore had a certain seedy charm. The rooms were basic, the mattresses lumpy and the meal fare wasn’t spectacular,” said Robert H. Reid, the AP’s former Middle East regional editor, who was among the AP journalists who covered the war. The hotel was across the street from the international agency’s Middle East head office at the time.

“The friendly staff and the camaraderie among the journalist-guests made the Commodore seem more like a social club where you could unwind after a day in one of the world’s most dangerous cities,” Reid said.

Llewellyn remembers that the hotel manager at the time, Yusuf Nazzal, told him in the late 1970s “that it was I who had given him the idea” to open such a hotel in a war zone.

Llewellyn said that during a long chat with Nazzal on a near-empty Middle East Airlines Jumbo flight from London to Beirut in the fall of 1975, he told him that there should be a hotel that would make sure journalists had good communications, “a street-wise and well-connected staff running the desks, the phones, the teletypes.”

During Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and a nearly three-month siege of West Beirut by Israeli troops, journalists used the roof of the hotel to film fighter jets striking the city.

The parrot

One of the best-known characters at the Commodore was Coco the parrot, who was always in a cage near the bar. Patrons were often startled by what they thought was the whiz of an incoming shell, only to discover that it was Coco who made the sound.

AP’s chief Middle East correspondent Terry Anderson was a regular at the hotel before he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1985 and held for seven years, becoming one of the longest-held American hostages in history.

Videos of Anderson released by his kidnappers later showed him wearing a white T-shirt with the words “Hotel Commodore Lebanon.”

With the kidnapping of Anderson and other Western journalists, many foreign media workers left the predominantly-Muslim western part of Beirut, and after that the hotel lost its status as a safe haven for foreign journalists.

Ahmad Shbaro, who worked at different departments of the hotel until 1988, said the main reason behind the Commodore’s success was the presence of armed guards that made journalists feel secure in the middle of Beirut’s chaos as well as functioning telecommunications.

He added that the hotel also offered financial facilities for journalists who ran out of money. They would borrow money from Nazzal and their companies could pay him back by depositing money in his bank account in London.

Shbaro remembers a terrifying day in the late 1970s when the area of the hotel was heavily shelled and two rooms at the Commodore were hit.

“The hotel was full and all of us, staffers and journalists, spent the night at Le Casbah,” a famous nightclub in the basement of the building, he said.

In quieter times, journalists used to spend the night partying by the pool.

“It was a lifeline for the international media in West Beirut, where journalists filed, ate, slept, and hid from air raids, shelling, and other violence,” said former AP correspondent Scheherezade Faramarzi.

“It gained both fame and notoriety,” she said, speaking from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

The hotel was built in 1943 and kept functioning until 1987 when it was heavily damaged in fighting between Shiite and Druze militiamen at the time. The old Commodore building was later demolished and a new structure was build with an annex and officially opened again for the public in 1996.

But Coco the parrot was no longer at the bar. The bird went missing during the 1987 fighting. Shbaro said it is believed he was taken by one of the gunmen who stormed the hotel.

Features

Key Details of Greenland’s Rich but Largely Untapped Mineral Resources

Houses covered by snow are seen on the coast of a sea inlet of Nuuk, Greenland, on Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP)
Houses covered by snow are seen on the coast of a sea inlet of Nuuk, Greenland, on Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP)
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Key Details of Greenland’s Rich but Largely Untapped Mineral Resources

Houses covered by snow are seen on the coast of a sea inlet of Nuuk, Greenland, on Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP)
Houses covered by snow are seen on the coast of a sea inlet of Nuuk, Greenland, on Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP)

The Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers will meet US Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday after President Donald Trump recently
stepped up threats to take over Greenland.

The autonomous territory of Denmark could be useful for the ​United States because of its strategic location and rich mineral resources. A 2023 survey showed that 25 of 34 minerals deemed "critical raw materials" by the European Commission were found in Greenland.

The extraction of oil and natural gas is banned in Greenland for environmental reasons, while development of its mining sector has been snarled in red tape and opposition from indigenous people.

Below are details of Greenland's main mineral deposits, based on data from its Mineral Resources Authority:

RARE EARTHS
Three of Greenland's biggest deposits are located in the southern province of Gardar.

Companies ‌seeking to ‌develop rare-earth mines are Critical Metals Corp, which bought the ‌Tanbreez ⁠deposit, ​Energy Transition Minerals, ‌whose Kuannersuit project is stalled amid legal disputes, and Neo Performance Materials.

Rare-earth elements are key to permanent magnets used in electric vehicles (EV) and wind turbines.

GRAPHITE
Occurrences of graphite and graphite schist are reported from many localities on the island.
GreenRoc has applied for an exploitation license to develop the Amitsoq graphite project.
Natural graphite is mostly used in EV batteries and steelmaking.

COPPER
According to the Mineral Resources Authority, most copper deposits have drawn only limited exploration campaigns.

Especially interesting are the underexplored areas ⁠in the northeast and center-east of Greenland, it said.

London-listed 80 Mile is seeking to develop the Disko-Nuussuaq deposit, which has ‌copper, nickel, platinum and cobalt.

NICKEL
Traces of nickel accumulations are numerous, ‍according to the Mineral Resources Authority.

Major miner ‍Anglo American was granted an exploration license in western Greenland in 2019 and has ‍been looking for nickel deposits, among others.

ZINC
Zinc is mostly found in the north in a geologic formation that stretches more than 2,500 km (1,550 miles).

Companies have sought to develop the Citronen Fjord zinc and lead project, which had been billed as one of the world's largest undeveloped zinc resources.

GOLD
The most prospective ​areas for gold potential are situated around the Sermiligaarsuk fjord in the country's south.

Amaroq Minerals launched a gold mine last year in Mt Nalunaq in ⁠the Kujalleq Municipality.

DIAMONDS
While most small diamonds and the largest stones are found in the island's west, their presence in other regions may also be significant.

IRON ORE
Deposits are located at Isua in southern West Greenland, at Itilliarsuk in central West Greenland, and in North West Greenland along the Lauge Koch Kyst.

TITANIUM-VANADIUM
Known deposits of titanium and vanadium are in the southwest, the east and south.

Titanium is used for commercial, medical and industrial purposes, while vanadium is mainly used to produce specialty steel alloys. The most important industrial vanadium compound, vanadium pentoxide, is used as a catalyst for the production of sulfuric acid.

TUNGSTEN
Used for several industrial applications, tungsten is mostly found in the central-east and northeast of the country, with assessed deposits in the south and west.

URANIUM
In 2021, ‌the then-ruling left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party banned uranium mining, effectively halting development of the Kuannersuit rare-earths project, which has uranium as a byproduct.

Features

The West Bank Football Field Slated for Demolition by Israel

Israeli army bulldozers pass buildings during a military operation in Nur Shams refugee camp, near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 12 January 2026. (EPA)
Israeli army bulldozers pass buildings during a military operation in Nur Shams refugee camp, near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 12 January 2026. (EPA)
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The West Bank Football Field Slated for Demolition by Israel

Israeli army bulldozers pass buildings during a military operation in Nur Shams refugee camp, near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 12 January 2026. (EPA)
Israeli army bulldozers pass buildings during a military operation in Nur Shams refugee camp, near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 12 January 2026. (EPA)

Israeli authorities have ordered the demolition of a football field in a crowded refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, eliminating one of the few ​spaces where Palestinian children are able to run and play.

"If the field gets demolished, this will destroy our dreams and our future. We cannot play any other place but this field, the camp does not have spaces," said Rital Sarhan, 13, who plays on a girls' soccer team in the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem.

The Israeli military ‌issued a demolition ‌order for the field on ‌December ⁠31, ​saying ‌it was built illegally in an area that abuts the concrete barrier wall that Israel built in the West Bank.

"Along the security fence, a seizure order and a construction prohibition order are in effect; therefore, the construction in the area was carried out unlawfully," the Israeli military said in a statement.

Mohammad Abu ⁠Srour, an administrator at Aida Youth Center, which manages the field, said the ‌military gave them seven days to demolish ‍the field.

The Israeli military ‍often orders Palestinians to carry out demolitions themselves. If they ‍do not act, the military steps in to destroy the structure in question and then sends the Palestinians a bill for the costs.

According to Abu Srour, Israel's military told residents when delivering ​the demolition order that the football field represented a threat to the separation wall and to Israelis.

"I ⁠do not know how this is possible," he said.

Israeli demolitions have drawn widespread international criticism and coincide with heightened fears among Palestinians of an organized effort by Israel to formally annex the West Bank, the area seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

Israel accelerated demolitions in Palestinian refugee camps in early 2025, leading to the displacement of 32,000 residents of camps in the central and northern West Bank.

Human Rights Watch has called the demolitions a war crime. ‌Israel has said they are intended to disrupt militant activity.