The European Court of Human Rights will hear an “unprecedented” lawsuit on Wednesday, brought by six young people against 32 European countries accusing them of failing to tackle the human-caused climate crisis.

The claimants, between ages 11 and 24 and all from Portugal, will argue that they are on the frontlines of climate change and ask the court to force these countries to rapidly accelerate climate action.

It is the first climate case to be filed with the European Court of Human Rights and is the largest of a total of three climate lawsuits the court is hearing.

The stakes are high. A win would force countries to rapidly scale up their climate ambitions and would also offer a huge boost to the chances of other climate lawsuits around the world – especially those arguing that countries have human rights obligations to protect people from the climate crisis.

If the court rules against the claimants, however, it could prove damaging for other climate claims.

“This is truly a David and Goliath case, that’s unprecedented in its scale (and) its potential impacts,” said Gearóid Ó Cuinn, the director of Global Legal Action Network, or GLAN, which has supported the claimants’ case.

Deadly wildfires

The journey to Wednesday’s hearing began six years ago. “Everything started in 2017 with the fires,” said Catarina Mota, one of the claimants.

The disaster catalyzed the lawsuit. Mota started talking to her friend and now fellow claimant, Cláudia Duarte Agostinho, and with the assistance of GLAN, they gathered four more claimants, all of whom were affected by the 2017 fires.

While the claim was triggered by the fires, climate change continues to affect their lives, the group argues, particularly the fierce heat waves that Portugal regularly experiences. They say these periods make it hard to go outside, to concentrate on schoolwork, to sleep and for some even to breathe, in addition to the impacts on their mental health.

“It makes us worried about our future. How could we not be scared?” said 15-year-old claimant André dos Santos Oliviera.

‘Like a legally binding treaty’

The lawsuit, which was filed in 2020 and has relied heavily on crowdfunding, was fast-tracked by the European Court of Human Rights due to the urgency of the issue and the large number of defendants.

On Wednesday, the claimants will argue that a failure to tackle the accelerating climate crisis is breaching their human rights, including their rights to life and family life, to freedom from inhuman treatment and to freedom from discrimination on the basis of age.

They are asking the court to rule that countries fueling the climate crisis have obligations to protect not only their own citizens but also those outside their borders.

Their demand is that the 32 countries, which include the 27 European Union countries plus Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom, drastically cut their planet-heating pollution and also force companies headquartered within their borders to cut emissions across their whole supply chains.

For their part, the countries being sued have claimed in written submissions that none of the claimants has established they have suffered serious harm as a result of climate change.

The government in Greece – a country which has just experienced a deadly summer of heat, fire and storms – said in its response: “The effects of climate change as recorded so far do not seem to directly affect human life or human health.”

The lawsuit could go one of several ways.

The court could dismiss the claim on procedural grounds or decide that it doesn’t have the jurisdiction to hear it.

If it passes procedural hurdles, the court could rule that states do not have human rights obligations when it comes to climate change. “That could be very damaging to other similar cases,” said Michael B. Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.

The lawsuit is the largest of three claims before the court, all of which concern countries’ obligations towards their citizens when it comes to climate change.

The other two were heard by the court in March. One was brought by more than 2,000 older Swiss women, who claimed that climate change-fueled heat waves undermined their health and quality of life, and the other by a French mayor, who claimed France’s failure to act on climate change breached his human rights.

It’s unclear if the courts will make a ruling on all the claims together but the time frame between the hearing and the judgment is typically nine to 18 months, said Gerry Liston, senior lawyer at GLAN.

The rise of climate litigation

As extreme weather worsens, climate litigation is proving to be an increasingly popular tool to try to force climate action, especially as the world’s nations have not done enough to cut pollution and avert catastrophic levels of warming.

Even if current climate policies are met, the world is still on track for more than 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. The planet has already warmed around 1.2 degrees, and the impacts are clear. This year alone has seen record-breaking heat waves, unprecedented wildfires and catastrophic floods.

Countries are currently doing the bare minimum, said Liston from GLAN, and if every nation does that, “we are just going to keep going on this totally catastrophic trajectory.”

That’s why people have been turning to the courts. There are more than 2,400 climate lawsuits globally, according to the Sabin Center, with more added every week.

Continued advocacy and climate conferences – such as the upcoming United Nations COP28 summit in Dubai – are also vital, she added.

For the Portuguese claimants, it will be an anxious wait for the court’s judgment. Even if the claim doesn’t go their way, Mota said, at least it will have got people to sit up and pay attention.

Still, she added, “we long for a positive outcome.”

Russia is formally seeking to rejoin the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, nearly 18 months after it was suspended from the body following its invasion of Ukraine.

The country is listed on the UN website as a candidate for the election of members of the council for the 2024-2026 term, with a vote due to take place on October 10.

Any move to reinstate Russia would be met with fury from the West, with several leading NATO states repeatedly insisting that Moscow’s illegal invasion of a neighboring state should disqualify it from membership of international bodies.

Russia has been accused of a huge number of human rights abuses over the course of its war in Ukraine, and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for its President Vladimir Putin over an alleged scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia.

The position paper, which Russia is circulating to UN members to drum up support, states that Moscow “believes it is important to prevent the increasing trend of turning the Human Rights Council into the instrument, which serves political wills of one group of countries punishing non-loyal governments for their independent internal and external policy.”

Russia was removed from the body in April 2022, weeks after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Membership of the council is based on equitable geographical distribution, with two vacant seats in the Eastern European States regional group. Russia, along with Albania and Bulgaria, is listed as having announced their candidacy for that region so far.

Russia’s position paper claimed it would “firmly promote principles of cooperation and strengthening of constructive mutually respectful dialogue” if re-elected to the body.

But Western countries will be expected to strongly oppose its application ahead of October’s vote.

A Human Rights Council commission said on Monday that there is “continuous evidence that Russian forces are “committing war crimes in Ukraine,” alleging that its attacks on the country include “unlawful attacks with explosive weapons, attacks harming civilians, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, and attacks on energy infrastructure.”

In the vote to suspend Russia from the council during the April 2022 UN General Assembly, 93 of the UN’s 193 countries supported the move to remove Moscow, while 24 voted against and 58 abstained.

China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Vietnam, alongside Russia, were among those opposing the move, while Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were among the abstentions.

Russia had joined the council in January 2021, as one of 15 countries elected to serve a three-year term.

It became the first country to be removed from the council since Libya, in 2011, following the repression of political protesters by its then-leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Russia remains one of five permanent members of the UN’s Security Council, and no clear legal framework exists to remove it from that post.

Moscow last took the presidency of that council, which rotates among the 15 members on a monthly basis, in April.

North Korea has decided “to expel” US Army Private Travis King, who crossed into the North from South Korea during a tour of the joint security area in July, state media KCNA reported on Wednesday.

“The relevant organ of the DPRK decided to expel Travis King, a soldier of the U.S. Army who illegally intruded into the territory of the DPRK, under the law of the Republic,” KCNA said. The report said the investigation into King “has been finished.”

It is unclear from KCNA’s report where, when and how King would be expelled.

North Korea claimed on Wednesday that King has “confessed that he illegally intruded into the territory of the DPRK as he harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the U.S. army and was disillusioned about the unequal U.S. society.”

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last month that it “would not be out of character” for North Korea to use US soldier Travis King as a propaganda tool or bargaining chip.

Kirby added at that time that King’s location was unclear, as well as “the conditions he’s being held” and information about his health.

Record-breaking NASA astronaut Frank Rubio has finally returned to Earth, feeling the pull of the planet’s gravity for the first time in more than a year.

Rubio and his two Russian colleagues — cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin — parachuted to a landing in Kazakhstan aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-23 capsule at 5:17 p.m. local time (7:17 a.m. ET) on Wednesday.

The crew’s arrival marked the end of a long — and unexpected — journey for Rubio, who had been slated to spend only six months aboard the International Space Station. He instead logged a total of 371 days in space following the discovery of a coolant leak coming from his original ride while docked to the orbiting outpost.

Rubio’s stay set a new record for the longest a US astronaut has ever spent in microgravity. He also became the first American to log an entire calendar year in orbit.

His record-breaking mission also marked other notable firsts for Rubio: This was his first journey to space after being selected for the NASA astronaut corps in 2017, and at the outset of the mission, he became the first astronaut of Salvadoran origin to travel to low-Earth orbit.

“And that’s only because of family things that were going on this past year,” he said. “And if I had known that I would have had to miss those very important events, I just would have had to say, ‘thank you, but no thank you.’”

Rubio, who has four children, is now expected to begin the journey home from the Soyuz spacecraft’s landing site near the town of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan. He will first fly to Karaganda, which lies about 330 miles (530 kilometers) northeast of Dzhezkazgan, before boarding a flight to Houston.

All told, Rubio and his crewmates traveled 157.4 million miles (253.3 million kilometers) and completed 5,963 orbits of the Earth, according to NASA.

Rubio bested the previous record for the longest stay in space by a US astronaut — 355 days — which was set by NASA’s Mark Vande Hei in 2022.

The late Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who logged 437 continuous days in orbit aboard Russia’s Mir space station between January 1994 and March 1995 , holds the world record for the longest stay in space.

US and Russian cooperation in space

Rubio traveled to the space station on a Russian spacecraft as part of ride-sharing agreement between NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, that was hashed out in the summer of 2022 amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The seat-swap arrangement was an effort to continue longstanding policies that have sought to ensure access to the space station for both the United States and Russia — the primary operators of the outpost — should either country experience spacecraft issues that left their astronauts grounded.

Rubio, Prokopyev and Petelin launched aboard the Soyuz MS-22 vehicle on September 21, 2022, and safely arrived at the ISS three hours later, leaving the Soyuz capsule docked to the space station’s exterior as they went to work aboard the orbiting laboratory.

In an interview with reporters last week, Rubio thanked his family, noting their “resilience and strength has carried me through this entire mission.”

Increasing risk from space debris

Less than three months into its crew’s mission, the Soyuz MS-22 began spewing coolant. Investigations by Roscosmos, which were reviewed by NASA later, determined that the spacecraft was likely struck by a small object in orbit. The culprit was determined to be a micrometeorite or a piece of orbital debris, a growing threat in the increasingly congested environment of low-Earth orbit.

The Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft was deemed unfit to return the astronauts, and Roscosmos quickly worked to launch a replacement vehicle — the Soyuz MS-23 — in February.

But Rubio and his colleagues couldn’t return home yet: Officials determined that they would instead extend their stay as Roscosmos prepared for yet another Soyuz capsule to launch a fresh crew to replace them.

Space station crew rotation

The Soyuz MS-24 vehicle was finally ready this month and carried NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub to the space station on September 15, paving the way for Rubio’s return on Wednesday.

Rubio, a medical doctor and military helicopter pilot with more than 600 hours of combat experience, acknowledged that he likely will not be immediately returning to his pre-spaceflight life upon return because of the affects that long stints in microgravity can have on the body.

“We’re not walking, we’re not bearing our own weight (while in space), and so it’ll be anywhere from two to six months before I essentially say that I feel normal,” he said.

But there are plenty of earthly treasures he is looking forward to experiencing: “Up here we kind of have the constant hum of machinery that’s keeping us alive,” he said during an interview from space. “And so I’m looking forward to just being outside and enjoying the peace and quiet.”

A fire tore through a wedding hall in Qaraqosh in northern Iraq on Tuesday, killing at least 100 people and injuring 150 others, Iraqi state news agency INA reported citing local authorities.

Fireworks were set off at the venue in the Hamdaniya district of northeast Nineveh governorate, the Iraqi Civil Defense said, and an investigative committee was formed to identify the cause of the incident.

“The hall did not meet safety criteria. Because of the fireworks the ceiling collapsed on the people in the hall,” Interior Minister Abdul Amir al-Shammari told reporters on Wednesday.

“Justice will be served to those who were negligent,” Al-Shammari added.

Survivors of the blaze were transferred to hospitals in Nineveh and the nearby Kurdistan region, Nineveh governor Najm Al-Jubouri told INA. He said the final death and injury toll is yet to be determined.

ISIS invaded Qaraqosh in August 2014, during its years-long grip on power in northern Iraq. The group launched numerous assaults on the predominantly Christian town, destroying much of the infrastructure and leaving it in ruins.

Qaraqosh was liberated by US-backed Iraqi forces in October 2016. But a lack of resources complicated efforts to rebuild the town with adequate safety measures.

The wedding hall where the fire broke out was covered with highly flammable Ecobond panels that violated safety instructions requirements, according to the Iraqi Civil Defense, INA reported.

“The fire led to the collapse of parts of the hall as a result of the use of highly flammable, low-cost building materials that collapse within minutes when fire breaks out,” the Iraqi Civil Defense said in a statement.

‘The bride and groom are fine’

Videos from the scene in Qaraqosh show thick smoke billowing out of the Al Haytham Wedding Hall while crowds and ambulances gather outside the venue.

A wedding guest told local media the bride and groom were safe, but devastated by the disaster.

“The bride and groom are fine. I was just with them now, but their condition is devastating due to what happened to people here,” the guest told private Iraqi channel Alawla TV.

“There are hundreds of people injured, we are in need of blood,” Salm said. “This tragedy hurt us more than ISIS. At least when ISIS came we could escape, but now a wedding became a graveyard for us.”

Salm added that he has relatives who were injured and killed in the fire, while others are unaccounted for.

Prime Minister Mohammed Shiaa Al-Sudani has instructed his cabinet to assist those affected by the fire, according to a statement from his office.

The Iraqi leader has been in touch with the Nineveh governor by telephone about the incident and ordered a full mobilization to aid the victims, according to his office and INA.

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq expressed its condolences to family members of those killed and injured Tuesday, calling the incident “an immense tragedy.”

“Shocked and pained by the horrible loss of life and injuries in the fire,” the mission said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The Iraqi government issued a three-day national mourning period following the blaze.

There’s a bustling trade in people and goods across the Guatemala-Mexico river border this week. But almost the entire flow of people skirts the route across the road bridge and tries to avoid official eyes by floating across the water.

Makeshift rafts of wood and truck inner tubes carry families across the Suchiate River – most of them getting set to cross yet another country as they aim for the United States and hopes of a better life.

They are part of a continuing surge of travelers impacting towns and cities in Mexico, which announced new measures this month, as well as in the US.

Crossings cost about US$1.50 a person, said Javier Guillen, though rates surge to $20 a head for a more dangerous night-time trip. And sometimes the fares must be paid in US currency.

Guillen, a trained chef, said he felt “a little calmer” having reached Mexico. Marchan added: “We are almost there, but also scared because they say Mexico is a little dangerous.”

The couple, tired but still hopeful of reaching friends living in Alexandria, Virginia, chatted on the dusty Mexican side of the Suchiate where many migrants have made camp.

Laundry washed in the river they had just crossed hangs from string tied between trees, and entrepreneurs arrive to sell food to anyone who still has money.

While they had used the unofficial inner-tube ferries to reach Mexico, they said they would be heading to government offices soon to seek asylum or permission to transit the country to go on to the US.

The migrants from the riverbank will head to Tapachula – an hour’s drive or a day’s walk from the border. Mexican officials estimate there are already 15,000 to 17,000 migrants in Tapachula, waiting for papers or aid to get back on the road north.

Migrant crossings along the US-Mexico border are rising, surpassing 8,600 over a 24-hour period last week, according to a Department of Homeland Security official. That’s up from around 3,500 daily border arrests after the expiration of Title 42 in May triggered new consequences for those who cross the border illegally.

Mexico said about 77,000 migrants applied for asylum there last year and the number could double this year.

The scene at the river supports that expectation. Even as few vehicles used the Rodolfo Robles bridge, the ferrymen went back and forth, back and forth, each time bringing more and more people to Mexico.

A Russian court has rejected an appeal by jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny against a 19-year prison sentence on extremism charges, according to Russian state media RIA, in the latest crackdown on the outspoken Kremlin critic.

Navalny was sentenced in August, after he was found guilty of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activities and numerous other crimes.

He is already serving sentences of 11-and-a-half years in a maximum security facility on fraud and other charges he denies. Navalny appeared at the hearing on Tuesday via video link from a penal colony in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow.

Supporters of Navalny claim his arrest and incarceration are a politically motivated attempt to stifle his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Navalny’s team said the hearing was moved behind closed doors, after a letter from Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs described potential unspecified danger to the participants in an open trial.

“The main reason why these processes are taking place behind closed doors is the restriction of my and Kholodny’s rights,” Navalny told the prosecutor on Tuesday.

Daniel Kholodny, the former technical director of Navalny’s YouTube channel, was sentenced to eight years in August, in the same extremism case.

Navalny has been imprisoned in Russia since returning to the country in January 2021, on charges of violating terms of probation related to a historic fraud case, which he dismisses as politically targeted.

In August 2020, he was taken from Russia to Germany after being poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. Navalny arrived in a coma to a Berlin hospital, following a medical evacuation flight from the Siberian city of Omsk.

Moscow’s clampdown on Navalny precedes the war in Ukraine, but the Kremlin has ramped up measures against internal opposition and free speech since launching its invasion.

Mali’s military junta on Monday said it would postpone February elections for technical reasons, further pushing back a timeline for a return to democratic rule after two coups.

Mali had been expected to hold the first round of the vote on Feb. 4, 2024, and a second round two weeks later, which was already a two-year delay to a timetable originally agreed by the West African country’s interim authorities.

The junta’s statement said the delay would be small and was due to several factors including a dispute with a French firm over a civil registry database. It said it would give a new timeline at a later date.

It accused the French-based international tech company IDEMIA, which provided a civil identification system known as RAVEC to the former government, of holding its database “hostage” since March due to unpaid bills.

The situation makes it impossible to register newly eligible voters and update the voter registry, and is slowing down the roll out of a new biometric identity card, the junta said.

A spokesperson for IDEMIA said the company has no contract with Mali’s interim authorities and confirmed that its service had been shut down because of outstanding invoices.

The junta said it would migrate its current civil identification data to a new system “exclusively under Malian control.”

West Africa’s main political and economic body ECOWAS has not yet commented on the announcement.

The bloc has been leading tense negotiations with Mali and other coup-hit West African nations to restore democratic rule within acceptable timelines.

Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons Anthony Rota resigned his post Tuesday, days after he praised a Ukrainian veteran who fought for a Nazi military unit during World War II.

On Friday, following a joint address to parliament by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Rota lauded Yaroslav Hunka, 98, as a Ukrainian-Canadian war hero who “fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russian aggressors then, and continues to support the troops today.”

But in the days since, human rights and Jewish organizations have condemned Rota’s recognition, saying Hunka served in a Nazi military unit known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.

“This house is above any of us, therefore I must step down as your speaker,” Rota said in parliament Tuesday afternoon, reiterating his “profound regret for my error.”

“That public recognition has caused pain to individuals and communities, including the Jewish community in Canada and around the world, in addition to survivors of Nazi atrocities in Poland, among other nations,” Rota, who is a member of the Liberal party, added. “I accept full responsibility for my actions.”

Rota’s recognition of Hunka last week prompted a standing ovation. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called the incident “deeply embarrassing.”

The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division was part of the Nazi SS organization declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946, which determined the Nazi group had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Jewish human rights organization B’nai Brith Canada in a statement condemned the Ukrainian volunteers who served in the unit as “ultra-nationalist ideologues” who “dreamed of an ethnically homogenous Ukrainian state and endorsed the idea of ethnic cleansing.”

Recognizing Hunka was “beyond outrageous,” B’nai Brith Canada CEO Michael Mostyn said, adding, “We cannot allow the whitewashing of history.”

“Canadian soldiers fought and died to free the world from the evils of Nazi brutality,” he said.

Rota apologized in a statement Sunday and on the floor of parliament Tuesday, when he said he had “become aware of more information which causes me to regret my decision to recognize this individual.”

Rota took full responsibility, saying it was his decision alone to acknowledge Hunka, who Rota said is from his electoral district.

“No one – not even anyone among you, fellow parliamentarians, or from the Ukrainian delegation – was privy to my intention or my remarks prior to their delivery,” he said.

Fears grew of a humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh Tuesday as a senior US official warned of malnutrition among the tens of thousands fleeing the breakaway region for Armenia.

Senior US officials – including US Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Samantha Power and US State Department acting assistant secretary Yuri Kim – met Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the capital Yerevan Monday.

Power traveled to Yerevan “to affirm US support for Armenia’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and democracy and help address humanitarian needs stemming from the recent violence in Nagorno-Karabakh,” the aid agency said in a statement Monday.

The visit came days after Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive and said it had taken back full control of the breakaway region, sparking an exodus of the area’s ethnic Armenian population.

By Tuesday evening, over 28,000 “forcibly displaced” people from Nagorno-Karabakh had arrived in Armenia, the Armenian government announced in a Facebook post.

Speaking from the Armenian village of Kornidzor, near the border with Azerbaijan, Power said, “It is absolutely critical that independent monitors as well as humanitarian organizations get access to the people in Nagorno-Karabakh who still have dire needs.

“The military attacks of last week have made a dire situation even worse,” Power said Tuesday, adding that many of those who had arrived were suffering from “severe malnutrition,” according to doctors at the scene.

Nagorno-Karabakh has been under blockade since December 2022, when Azerbaijan-backed activists established a military checkpoint on the Lachin corridor – the only road connecting the landlocked enclave to Armenia.

The blockade prevented the import of food, fuel and medicine to Nagorno-Karabakh, prompting fears that residents were being left to starve. A former International Criminal Court chief prosecutor said in August there is “reasonable basis to believe that genocide is being committed against Armenians” in the region.

The closure of the Lachin corridor has also prevented international organizations and foreign media from accessing Nagorno-Karabakh. The road was only opened last weekend to allow residents to flee.

“We know that there are injured civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh who need to be evacuated,” Power said, adding that Azerbaijan has a responsibility to facilitate this.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev on Tuesday about the humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, according to a State Department spokesperson.

“The secretary spoke again to President Aliyev today and underscored the urgency of no further hostilities, that there be unconditional protections and freedom of movement for civilians, that there be unhindered humanitarian access to Nagorno Karabakh,” said State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller at a press briefing.

Miller also said that the US expects Aliyev to abide by his commitment to “no further military action.”

Power announced Tuesday that the US would provide $11.5 million in humanitarian assistance to the region.

The European Union also announced 5 million euros (around $5.2 million) in aid.

“This aid will be delivered by various EU humanitarian partners operating in Armenia to reach around 25 000 people,” the EU said in a statement Tuesday. “The priority is to provide cash assistance, shelter, food security and livelihoods assistance.”

Deadly explosion

Azerbaijan’s brief but bloody offensive killed more than 200 people and injured many more, before Karabakh officials agreed to a Russia-brokered ceasefire in which they agreed to dissolve their armed forces.

But as thousands were attempting to flee the enclave on Monday evening, a powerful explosion ripped through a gas station near Stepanakert, where people had been attempting to get fuel before driving to Armenia.

The incident left at least 68 people dead and 290 injured, according to the Nagorno-Karabakh Human Rights Ombudsman. Over 100 people remain missing, the Ombudsman’s office also said.

Videos on social media showed a crowded hospital in the city as medical staff attempted to treat burn patients. “At this moment, we do not have any medical resources left that can help us. In terms of medication, we do not have [anti-burn] antibiotics. We have a very high number of burn patients,” said a member of the medical staff at a hospital in Stepanakert, in a video shared Monday by local journalist Siranush Sargsyan.