Here is the situation on Sunday, May 19, 2024.

Fighting

• Slavyansk oil refinery in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region halted operations following a Ukrainian drone attack overnight, Interfax news agency reported. The refinery is a private plant with a capacity of 4 million metric tonnes of oil per year, about one million barrels per day.

• Ukraine’s air force claimed it destroyed all 37 Shahed attack drones launched by Russia overnight. The regions targeted by the drones include Kyiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Sumy, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Cherkasy and Kherson.

• The governor of Kharkiv said nearly 10,000 people had been forced to leave their homes since Russian forces launched a surprise ground attack on May 10. Russia claimed its military took control of another village, Staritsya, in the Kharkiv region near the Russian border.
• Ukrainian prosecutors said Russian shelling killed a 60-year-old woman and injured three other civilians in the northeast city of Vovchansk, 5km (3 miles) from the Russian border. A 59-year-old man was also injured in the village of Ukrainske.
• Russia said its forces shot down nine US ATACMS missiles over Crimea and at least 60 drones over Russian sovereign territory. Its forces also shot down a Tochka-U missile fired by Ukraine in Russia’s Belgorod region.
• Belgorod regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said a Ukrainian drone attack injured a woman and a man in the village of Petrovka. The two were treated for shrapnel injuries.

Politics and diplomacy

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged issues with staffing and “morale” within the country’s troops as he signed a mobilisation law that came into force on Saturday. Kyiv has lowered the age at which men can be drafted from 27 to 25 and tightened punishments for those who avoid the call-up.
• Ukrainian prosecutors said they were investigating as a potential war crime a Russian air attack on a residential area of the regional capital, Kharkiv, in which six civilians were wounded, including a 13-year-old girl, 16-year-old male and an eight-year-old.
• Ukrainian officials accuse Russian soldiers in Vovchansk of using dozens of captured civilians as “human shields” to defend their command headquarters.
• Moscow denied deliberately targeting civilians even as thousands have been killed and injured since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
• Poland announced it would spend $2.5bn to fortify its eastern border, which includes Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

A Philippine mayor faces accusations of acting as a Chinese asset amid a growing territorial dispute between the two countries. 

“No one knows her. We wonder where she came from. That’s why we are investigating this, together with the Bureau of Immigration, because of the questions about her citizenship,” Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos told reporters this week. 

Alice Guo, the 35-year-old mayor of Bamban, has found herself in the middle of a potential scandal over her origins and allegiances. She claimed to have grown up on a pig farm and had raised no concerns prior to a strange discovery made in her town this month, the BBC reported. 

Law enforcement discovered that an online casino by the name of Philippine Offshore Gambling Operator (Pogo) in Bamban actually served as a front for a “scam center,” which had close to 700 workers — including over 200 Chinese nationals — who were posing as “online lovers.”

CHINA’S MILITARY MONITORS ROUTE TAKEN BY FILIPINO ACTIVISTS SAILING TOWARD DISPUTED SHOAL

The raid on the site in March rescued all of those workers, who claimed they were forced to work for the owners. The center tried to con victims with a “pig butchering” scam, in which a scammer adopted a fake identity to gain trust and then offered a romantic relationship to manipulate and steal from the victim. 

Guo found herself entangled in the incident when it came to light that she owned half the land where Pogo was located.

LAWMAKERS BRAWL AS TAIWAN’S PARLIAMENT DESCENDS INTO CHAOS

The nation’s Senate brought her into a hearing to testify, and she claimed she had sold the land before she ran for mayor two years earlier, along with assets that included a helicopter and a Ford Expedition, both registered under her name but allegedly sold off before her campaign, the South China Morning Press reported. 

Other irregularities raised concerns about her status. She only registered with the Commission on Elections to vote in Bamban one year before she ran and won as mayor. 

Alice Guo (far right) attends an event for Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. (Facebook)

She also admitted she only registered her birth certificate with local authorities at the age of 17 and gave few details about her background other than she was born in a house and home-schooled in a family compound where they raised pigs. 

Senators accused Guo of providing “opaque” answers to their questions about her background, leading one senator to ask if Guo was a Chinese asset. She fired back that she was “not a coddler, not a protector of Pogos.”

AFTER DOZENS DIE IN FLOODS, INDONESIA SEEDS CLOUDS TO BLOCK RAINFALL

China and the Philippines have found themselves in renewed territorial disputes as Beijing tries to enforce control over waters around the Philippines, leading to clashes between Chinese Coast Guards and Filipino fishermen. 

A Chinese coast guard boat moves near the Philippine resupply vessel Unaizah May 4 (in green) after it was hit by a water cannon blast, causing injuries to multiple crew members as they tried to enter the Second Thomas Shoal, locally known as Ayungin Shoal, in the disputed South China Sea March 5, 2024.  (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Last year saw a series of near clashes between the two coast guards near the Second Thomas Shoal. The Philippine authorities protested China’s use of a water cannon and military-grade lasers. 

China established a claim to the Scarborough Shoal in 2012, after which the Philippines formally launched a protest that went before a United Nations-backed tribunal. A 2016 ruling went against China, rejecting Beijing’s claims on “historical grounds,” but Beijing rejected the arbitration and its outcome. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.