MEXICO: About three dozen would-be asylum seekers from Russia found themselves blocked from entering the U.S. on Friday while a group of Ukrainians flashed passports and were escorted across the border.
The scene reflected a quiet but unmistakable shift in the differing treatment of Russians and Ukrainians who enter Mexico as tourists and fly to Tijuana, hoping to enter the U.S. for a chance at asylum.
The Russians, 34 as of Friday, had been camped several days at the busiest U.S border crossing with Mexico, two days after city of Tijuana officials gently urged them to leave.
They sat on mats and blankets, checking smartphones, chatting and snacking, with sleeping bags and strollers nearby as a stream of pedestrian border crossers filed past them.
Five young girls sat and talked in a circle, some with stuffed animals.
Days earlier, some Russians were being admitted to the U.S. at the San Ysidro crossing, while some Ukrainians were blocked.
But by Friday, Russians were denied while Ukrainians were admitted after short waits.
"It's very hard to understand how they make decisions," said Iirina Zolinka, a 40-year-old Russian woman who camped overnight with her family of seven after arriving in Tijuana on Thursday.
Erika Pinheiro, litigation and policy director for advocacy group Al Otro Lado, said the U.S.
began admitting all Ukrainians on humanitarian parole for one year around Tuesday, while at the same time blocking all Russians.
There was no official announcement.
A Homeland Security Department memo dated March 11 but not publicly released until Thursday told border officials that Ukrainians may be exempt from sweeping asylum limits designed to prevent spread of COVID-19.
It says decisions are to be made case-by-case for Ukrainians but makes no mention of Russians.
"The Department of Homeland Security recognizes that the unjustified Russian war of aggression in Ukraine has created a humanitarian crisis," the memo states.
Russian migrants in Tijuana sat off to the side of a line of hundreds of border residents waiting to walk across the border to San Diego on Friday.
The line was unimpeded.
A 32-year-old Russian migrant who hadn't left the border crossing since arriving in Tijuana with his wife about five days earlier had no plans to leave, fearing he may miss any sudden opportunity.
Within hours of arriving, the migrant, who identified himself only as Mark because he feared for his family's safety in Russia, saw three Russian migrants admitted to the United States.
After six hours, U.S. authorities returned his passport and said only Ukrainians were being admitted.
"Ukrainians and Russians are suffering because of one man," Mark said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He fled shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
U.S. officials have expelled migrants more than 1.7 million times since March 2020 without a chance to see asylum under sweeping authority aimed at preventing spread of COVID-19.
But the public health authority, known as Title 42, is seldom used for migrants of some nationalities who are difficult to expel for financial or diplomatic reasons.
But to claim asylum, migrants must be on U.S. soil and U.S.
officials are blocking passage except for those it wants to admit.
Even before Russia's invasion, the United States was seeing an increase in Russian and Ukrainian asylum seekers, most trying to enter at official crossings in San Diego rather than trying to cross illegally in deserts and mountains.
More than 1,500 Ukrainians entered the U.S. on the Mexican border from September through February, according to U.S.
Customs and Border Protection, about 35 times the 45 Ukrainians who crossed during the same period a year earlier.
Ukrainians who can reach U.S. soil are virtually guaranteed a shot at asylum.
Only four of the 1,553 who entered in the September-February period were barred under the public health order that lets the U.S. expel migrants without a chance at humanitarian protection.
The number of Russian asylum seekers entering at U.S land crossings from Mexico surpassed 8,600 from September through February, about 30 times the 288 the same time a year earlier.
All but 23 were processed under laws that allow them to seek asylum.
Mexican officials have been wary of migrants sleeping at the border.
Last month they dismantled a large migrant camp in Tijuana with tents and tarps that blocked a walkway to San Diego.
Eager to stop another camp from forming, the city distributed a letter on Wednesday asking migrants to leave their campsites for health and safety reasons and offered free shelter if they couldn't afford a hotel.
The UN migration agency said Friday that nearly 6.5 million people have been displaced inside Ukraine, on top of the 3.2 million who have already fled the country.
The estimates from the International Organisation for Migration suggests Ukraine is fast on course in just three weeks toward the levels of displacement from Syria's devastating war, which has driven about 13 million people from their homes both in the country and abroad.
The findings come in a paper issued Friday by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The projections also found that "over 12 million people are estimated to be stranded in affected areas or unable to leave due to heightened security risks, destruction of bridges and roads, as well as lack of resources or information on where to find safety and accommodation."
The paper cited the IOM figures as "a good representation of the scale of internal displacement in Ukraine, calculated to stand at 6.48 million internally displaced persons in Ukraine as of March 16."
UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, has said fighting that has followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24 has sparked Europe's gravest refugee crisis since World War II.
"By these estimates, roughly half the country is either internally displaced, stranded in affected areas or unable to leave, or has already fled to neighbouring countries," he said, alluding to Ukraine's population of about 44 million before the war began.
The paper said that 9.56 million people have been displaced by the war so far, as of Wednesday, and another 2.2 million people were considering leaving.
IOM estimates that more than 3 million people had fled abroad as of Wednesday.
UNHCR, in its latest figures released Friday, said more than 3.2 million people have fled Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin appeared at a huge flag-waving rally at a Moscow stadium on Friday and lavished praise on his troops fighting in Ukraine, three weeks into the invasion that has led to heavier-than-expected Russian losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home.
Meanwhile, the leader of Russia's delegation in diplomatic talks with Ukraine said the sides have narrowed their differences.
The Ukrainian side gave no immediate account of the talks.
The Moscow rally came as Russian troops continued to rain lethal fire on Ukrainian cities, including the capital, Kyiv, and pounded an aircraft repair installation on the outskirts of Lviv, close to the Polish border.
"Shoulder to shoulder, they help and support each other," the Russian president said of the Kremlin's forces in a rare public appearance since the start of the war.
"We have not had unity like this for a long time," he added to cheers from the crowd.
The show of support amid a burst of antiwar protests inside Russia led to allegations in some quarters that the rally, held officially to mark the eighth anniversary of Russia's annexation of Crimea, which was seized from Ukraine, was a manufactured display of patriotism.
Several Telegram channels critical of the Kremlin reported that students and employees of state institutions in a number of regions were ordered by their superiors to attend rallies and concerts marking the Crimea anniversary.
Those reports could not be independently verified.
Moscow police said more than 200,000 people were in and around the Luzhniki stadium.
The event included patriotic songs, including a performance of "Made in the U.S.S.R.," with the opening lines "Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, it's all my country."
Seeking to portray the war as just, Putin paraphrased the Bible to say of Russia's troops: "There is no greater love than giving up one's soul for one's friends."
Taking to the stage where a sign read "For a world without Nazism," he railed against his foes in Ukraine as "neo-Nazis" and continued to insist his actions were necessary to prevent "genocide"- a claim flatly denied by leaders around the globe.
Video feeds of the event cut out a times but showed a loudly cheering crowd that broke into chants of "Russia!" Putin's appearance marked a change from his relative isolation of recent weeks, when he has been shown meeting with world leaders and his staff either at extraordinarily long tables or via videoconference.
In the wake of the invasion, the Kremlin has clamped down harder on dissent and the flow of information, arresting thousands of antiwar protesters, banning sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and instituting tough prison sentences for what is deemed to be false reporting on the war, which Moscow refers to as a "special military operation."
The OVD-Info rights group that monitors political arrests reported that at least seven independent journalists had been detained ahead of or while covering the anniversary events in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Standing on stage in a white turtleneck and a blue down jacket, Putin spoke for about five minutes.
Some people, including presenters at the event, wore T-shirts or jackets with a "Z", a symbol seen on Russian tanks and other military vehicles in Ukraine and embraced by supporters of the war.
Putin's quoting of the Bible and a Russian admiral of the 18th century reflected his increasing focus in recent years on history and religion as binding forces in Russia's post-Soviet society.
His branding of his enemies as Nazis evoked what many Russians consider their country's finest hour, the defense of their homeland from Nazi Germany in World War II.
The rally came as Vladimir Medinsky, who led Russian negotiators in several rounds of talks with Ukraine, said that the sides have moved closer to agreement on the issue of Ukraine dropping its bid to join NATO and adopting a neutral status.
"The issue of neutral status and no NATO membership for Ukraine is one of the key issues in talks, and that is the issue where the parties have made their positions maximally close," Medinsky said in remarks carried by Russian media.
He added that the sides are now "halfway" on issues regarding the demilitarisation of Ukraine.
Earlier in the day, one person was reported killed in the missile attack near Lviv.
Satellite photos showed the strike destroyed a repair hangar and appeared to damage two other buildings.
A row of fighter jets appeared intact, but an apparent impact crater sat in front of them.
Ukraine said it had shot down two of six missiles in the volley, which came from the Black Sea.
The early morning attack was the closest strike yet to the center of Lviv, which has become a crossroads for people fleeing from other parts of Ukraine and for others entering to deliver aid or join the fight.
The war has swelled the city's population by some 200,000.
In city after city around Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people sought safety have been attacked.
Rescue workers continued to search for survivors in the ruins of a theater that was being used a shelter when it was blasted by a Russian airstrike Wednesday in the besieged southern city of Mariupol.
Ludmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian Parliament's human rights commissioner, said at least 130 people had survived the theater bombing.
"But according to our data, there are still more than 1,300 people in these basements, in this bomb shelter," Denisova told Ukrainian television.
"We pray that they will all be alive, but so far there is no information about them."
Early morning barrages also hit a residential building in the Podil neighbourhood of Kyiv, killing at least one person, according to emergency services, who said 98 people were evacuated from the building.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said 19 were wounded in the shelling.
Two others were killed when strikes hit residential and administrative buildings in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, according to the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko.
The fighting has led nearly 3.3 million people to flee Ukraine, by the UN' s estimate.
The death toll remains unclear, though thousands of civilians and soldiers on both sides are believed to have been killed.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine's defenses have proved much stronger than expected, and Russia "didn't know what we had for defense or how we prepared to meet the blow."
World leaders have demanded Russia be investigated for possible war crimes over its attacks on civilians.
The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 43 attacks on hospitals and other health care facilities, with 12 people killed.