Latest news with #Kovalenko
Global News
21 hours ago
- Sport
- Global News
Ukrainian basketball fan, 14, wins front-row look at Winnipeg Sea Bears action
A teenage basketball fan who came to Manitoba from Ukraine is seeing his hoop dreams come to fruition as the winner of a Winnipeg Sea Bears prize pack that includes tickets to the CEBL's Western Conference final on Friday. Vlad Kovalenko, 14, was nominated for the prize by a counsellor at a local youth group, who said he's become a role model to many of the younger kids. 'Vlad came here a couple years ago and just meeting him and his family was really inspirational for me,' Nikolas Barrett of the Ukrainian Youth Association told 680 CJOB's The Start. 'We're helping newcomers and people in the Ukrainian community have a sense of family, and (Vlad) comes pretty much every single week — the kids look up to him already. 'Being able to have him there … it helps us. They want to talk to someone their age. Vlad's just a really good kid and helps out as much as he can all the time.' Story continues below advertisement Kovalenko, who attended his first-ever Sea Bears game earlier this month, said basketball has been a lifelong passion — from the very first time he picked up a ball. Get daily National news Get the day's top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day. Sign up for daily National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy 'We went to the park, I was seven … and I just saw the ball, I shot it, and I just knew it was for me,' he said. 'It's been a big part of my life. I fell in love with the game.' Kovalenko fled Ukraine to safety in Manitoba with his mother and sister. His dad remains in Ukraine, fighting in the war. 'He's a generous person, he would help everyone — for me, he's a hero. I can text him every day, call every other day. I'm still in contact with him.' Story continues below advertisement Barrett said it's rewarding to see newcomers from Ukraine recognize how much support they have in Winnipeg and throughout the province. 'When they come here, they're usually amazed at how many Ukrainian flags are flying around everywhere. Even just the landscape, it reminds them of Ukraine a lot. 'I believe it's very calming and settling for them to see that we care for Ukraine and show our support.' Kovalenko, who is already predicting a Sea Bears win in the club's matchup with the Calgary Surge on Friday, says he can't wait to take advantage of the prize and see his basketball heroes up close and personal. 'I didn't believe it at first…. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be courtside and see your favourite basketball players play. It's great.'
Miami Herald
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
‘Real Housewives of Miami' star's ex husband has another new girlfriend. Keep up
The ink on Lenny Hochstein's divorce from Lisa Hochstein is barely dry, and he's moved on yet again. The 'Real Housewives of Miami' castmate is with someone new these days, Us Weekly reports. She's Alena Kovalenko, a 25-year-old model from his homeland of Russia. They apparently met through a mutual friend and sparks flew. 'It's very new and fresh,' the plastic surgeon known as Boob God, 59, told the celebrity news outlet. 'We have a mutual attraction to each other, enjoy spending time together and doing the things that normal couples do.' Kovalenko calls Bali home, but that could change on a dime as Hochstein reveals she is currently staying with him at his Star Island mansion. On her Instagram, Kovalenko shows herself posing on the steps of the luxurious waterfront home that Hochstein used to share with his wife and two kids. The Moscow native now shares custody of the children 50/50 with his ex, with whom he split in 2022. 'Wearing confidence,' said Kovalenko's caption. So will the stunning visitor stay or will she go? That remains to be seen. 'It's still too early to make any decisions,' said Hochstein, who broke up with his on again, off again influencer fiancée Katharina Mazepa earlier this year. As for what Lisa Hochstein thinks of the current situation? She didn't respond to a Miami Herald request seeking comment, but that's not unusual given Bravo keeps all Housewives under lock and key. The 42-year-old did recently tell us that she is happy with her boyfriend Jody Glidden, with whom she founded SplitWell, an AI powered tool to make the divorce process easier. It also seems she would like things to get to the next level. Hochstein told Us in a separate interview last November during the Bravo Fan Fest in Wynwood: 'My left hand just feels a little empty.'
Time of India
12-07-2025
- Sport
- Time of India
Nikolai Kovalenko's NHL journey hits pause as he signs two-year deal with CSKA Moscow
Photo byA year ago, Nikolai Kovalenko was seen as a playoff x-factor for the Colorado Avalanche—a promising winger trusted with postseason ice time straight out of Russia. Now? He's charting a very different path, returning home to sign a two-year deal with CSKA Moscow in the KHL. It's a dramatic turn for the 25-year-old, whose 2024–25 NHL season never quite took off, even after being traded to the rebuilding San Jose Sharks. The move underscores the tough reality many international players face when the NHL dream collides with limited opportunity, roster shuffles, and the unforgiving pace of North American hockey. Traded from Colorado Avalanche to San Jose Sharks, Nikolai Kovalenko heads to CSKA Moscow to revive NHL hopes When Nikolai Kovalenko arrived at the end of the 2023–24 KHL season, the Avalanche wasted no time plugging him into their playoff lineup, a clear vote of confidence in his skill and readiness. But those expectations quickly cooled. Despite that initial gamble, Colorado struggled to find him a consistent role the following season. By midyear in 2024–25, the Avalanche cut their losses and traded him to the San Jose Sharks. Even on a rebuilding Sharks roster, Kovalenko couldn't seize a major role. His combined NHL stats tell the story: four goals and four assists in 28 games with Colorado, followed by three goals and nine assists in 29 appearances for San Jose. When asked this week in San Jose Sharks about Kovalenko's time there, a source close to the Sharks organization didn't mince words: 'He's got skill, no question, but it just didn't click here. Sometimes you need to go back, reset, and come back stronger. That's what we hope he does.' Is that harsh? Maybe. But it's the reality of an NHL season that simply didn't offer him the breakout he, Colorado, or San Jose hoped for. Why CSKA Moscow is the smart choice for Nikolai Kovalenko The signing with CSKA Moscow, confirmed in Moscow this week, offers Kovalenko a chance to reset in familiar territory while playing for one of the KHL's most respected and competitive clubs. For Russian players, returning home can be both a comfort and a proving ground. CSKA is known for developing talent and offering players big minutes—something Kovalenko never consistently found in Colorado or San Jose. It's a logical move for a 25-year-old who still has prime years ahead and wants to keep growing his game. For Avalanche fans, Sharks fans, and NHL watchers alike, the move raises the obvious question: Is this the last we'll hear of Nikolai Kovalenko in the NHL? Don't bet on it. While he's heading thousands of miles from Denver and San Jose, this is less a farewell than a detour. Players have come back stronger from the KHL before, and at 25, Kovalenko's story is far from over. For now, he'll have to prove himself on home ice with CSKA Moscow. But NHL scouts won't stop watching—and neither should we. Also Read: Minnesota Wild re-sign Michael Milne to one-year deal, betting on NHL breakthrough For real-time updates, scores, and highlights, follow our live coverage of the India vs England Test match here. Catch Manika Batra's inspiring story on Game On, Episode 3. Watch Here!
Balkan Insight
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Balkan Insight
Damian Kocur: 'I don't have the moral right to show the war as it is because I am not Ukrainian'
June 30, 2025 - James Low - Books and Reviews Interviews Promotional poster for Under the Volcano. The sun has set on a Tenerife hotel, and a poolside conga column formed by some of its guests shuffles merrily into frame. In the foreground sit the Kovalenko family. They do not partake in the festivities. The father, Roman, instead, reads aloud the latest accounts of Russia's bombardment of their home country. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began just a few nights ago, on what was supposed to be the last night of the Kovalenkos' holiday. With no flights home available, they are confined to the island, to passivity, until further notice. While the conga image could easily be an allegory for a very current, Trump-approved indifference to Ukrainian suffering, it in fact comes from a film that is almost a year old. Under the Volcano (2024), the prescient sophomore effort from the young Polish director Damian Kocur, was Poland's submission for Best International Feature at this year's Oscars. It continues to play the festival circuit to much acclaim. Kocur, who also co-wrote the script, spoke with me via video link about this startling film's commitment to a faithful portrayal of displacement, its unconventional casting, and what it notably chooses to omit. The beginning of Russia's invasion sets the scene for the film, yet we never see its events directly. Aside from grainy news footage of an apartment block on fire, the unfolding horror shows itself exclusively through the dazed reactions of the Kovalenko family – comprising Roman (Roman Lutskyi), his wife Anastasiia (Anastasiia Karpenko), and his two children from a previous marriage, Sofiia (Sofiia Berezovska) and Fedir (Fedir Pugachov). They desperately receive updates on their phones, call friends and relatives to establish their safety and, powerless to do much else, continue their leisure activities. 'I was thinking that it would be a good idea to speak about the war without showing the physical affects,' Kocur tells me, referring to his thoughts upon reading a real-life newspaper story that then inspired the Kovalenkos' predicament in the film. This is 'because most of the victims [of war] will be purely mental victims, not the physical victims of rockets, bombings, you know, most people suffer in a different way.' As an outside observer of the conflict, Kocur felt obliged to maintain some distance: 'I don't feel I have the moral right to show the war as it is because I am not Ukrainian,' he stresses at several points in our discussion. 'I was trying to combine my own safe position – because I was in Poland at the time, like how my protagonists are not in Ukraine […] with this feeling of guiltiness and helplessness.' The mass-proliferation of violent images online, Kocur contests, has only strengthened the case against a more explicit approach. 'I think nowadays it's easy to get those images of pain, suffering and war. On YouTube, just by clicking a link, you can see dead bodies in Gaza or in Ukraine. I don't think film has the need to do that, to show it. [Film] is more about hiding now, talking about things not in such a direct way. Just like photography took away from painting the need to depict the world realistically, social media has now taken this need away from cinema.' But this is not to say that the film reduces the war to an abstraction. Kocur, aided by the observational, 'slow cinema'-style camerawork of cinematographer Nikita Kuzmenko, ensures that the Kovalenkos' every interaction – with each other or those they meet on the island – bears some of that 'guiltiness and helplessness'. Otherwise banal incidents are tied up in the larger calamity. When Anastasiia pushes an unamused Sofiia into the sea to encourage her to loosen up, it could simply read as a misstep in the already prickly relationship between a stepmother and stepdaughter. Or when Roman beeps at a British tourist blocking a road, the violent reaction that follows is typical 'Brits abroad' fare. But what really frustrates Sofiia is that her phone – her sole means of contacting friends in Ukraine – is in her hand as she falls. And the emasculating image of Roman sat behind the wheel while a stranger assaults the family vehicle comes on the heels of his wife having already probed his willingness to join up to the far less trivial fight that awaits them at home. Kocur acknowledges parallels with Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure (2014), which sees a parent's poor conduct during a controlled avalanche turn a family ski holiday into an existential bind for all involved. He says the films share 'this feeling of, 'we are trying to live normal life in circumstances that don't really allow us to,' because inside there is this kind of dark energy'. For Kocur, this translates to 'old patterns and old conflicts going up like lava in a volcano', hence the film's title (Tenerife's Mount Teide features throughout). But he issues a caveat to the Östlund comparison: 'the situation of my protagonists is even worse. One of their relatives can still die, so the threat is real.' Fittingly, there are moments when a figurative eruption appears inevitable. The presence of Russian holidaymakers at the resort is painful. Sofiia films a Russian woman at the pool before following her to the door of her hotel room. The teenager, reckoning with her sexuality, is given to filming young women on the island, but this moment carries more menace. Anastasiia, for her part, lambasts that woman's family when their cheerfulness at breakfast becomes too much to bear: 'Having a great time?' she asks in disbelief. Kocur derived such exchanges from real accounts of Ukrainians crossing paths with Russians abroad: 'one guy told me that he was sitting on the beach, and he looked at this Russian guy and he thought maybe he should kill him, before the Russian guy [does the same to him] on the front in a couple of months.' This kind of painstaking authenticity is important to Kocur. As with his debut, Bread and Salt , all the roles are filled by non-professional actors (aside from the central married couple). These are 'real people and real emotions', as the director puts it. I learn, somewhat disconcertingly, that when Sofiia breaks down upon hearing carnival fireworks, it is in fact a genuine trauma response based on the actress's experiences in Ukraine: '[Berezovska's reaction] was so strong that I thought to myself, 'we have to keep it in the movie, we have to use it.'' Roman Lutskyi, though an established Ukrainian actor, also draws on his real past during a charming moment of respite where his character tells Sofiia about the romance (and rap battles) that coloured his youth. The film, with its 'slow cinema' pacing and lack of true plot beats aside from the outbreak of war, nonetheless maintains real urgency thanks to these moments of stark naturalism. No less bold is the attention this Polish-Ukrainian collaboration pays to Tenerife's West African refugees. 'My aim wasn't just to make a film about the war in Ukraine, it was more about saying something about displacement,' Kocur says. 'Making a film about displacement without showing those who landed on the same island as my protagonists would just not be right.' Kocur draws parallels between the Kovalenkos and 'maybe the only ones who can really understand their situation, because they lost their homes too'. In doing so, he had in mind the moral implications of his native Poland accepting large numbers of Ukrainian refugees while 'there are so many people from the Middle East and African countries that we don't want to let in'. That even those apparently favoured Ukrainians have since become a target of growing disdain in Poland has perhaps vindicated Kocur's refusal to discriminate. Out of that refusal comes a moving pairing. Sofiia meets a boy named Mike, and the pair sit on the quayside as he recounts the boat crossing that resulted in the death of his best friend, presumably a real story from another non-professional. The equivalence between the groups is not a facile one; Kocur admits that their circumstances are 'maybe not comparable at all'. Indeed, the pair's meeting cannot be called a dialogue in the true sense of the word – Sofiia does not remark on Mike's story, and, amusingly, they cannot agree on who played the male lead in Titanic ('Brad Pitt', Mike insists). But it is a movingly human moment of togetherness. This approach allows the film to transcend the specifics of the events of February 2022. Its concern with human displacement on a more universal level is what shines through in the end. But this is not a cheap or easy move. Kocur's eye for precise, naturalistic detail argues that universality is no barrier to complexity. Tellingly, the otherwise heartening scene where Roman recalls his youth ends on a note of irresolution: 'To victory,' toasts Roman, beer in hand. 'Over what?' asks Sofiia. An easier question, given the circumstances, would be 'over whom?' But this is not a film that poses easy questions. On casting Sofiia, the film's most complex character, Kocur says that 'it's much easier working with teenagers, they don't cheat as much as we do.' Neither does the director cheat his audience, for that matter, and Under the Volcano is all the richer for it. James Low is a freelance writer and recent Cambridge graduate in Slavonic Studies writing about Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. New Eastern Europe is a reader supported publication. Please support us and help us reach our goal of $10,000! We are nearly there. Donate by clicking on the button below. Film, Polish culture, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine at war, Ukrainian diaspora, Ukrainian refugees
Miami Herald
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Map Shows Ukraine's Crippling Strikes on Russia's Microchip Plants
Ukraine targeted a technology plant close to Moscow overnight, Kyiv's military said on Thursday, the latest in a run of attacks on Russian microelectronics plants since the beginning of the year. The assault was launched on the Rezonit facility roughly 25 miles, from the center of the Russian capital city, Andriy Kovalenko, an official with Ukraine's national security and defense council, said on Thursday. The site was a "bold target" for Ukraine, Kovalenko added. Ukraine's military, confirming the overnight attack, said the Rezonit plant was an "important facility" for Russia's industry, supplying its military. Kyiv has repeatedly targeted Russian facilities pumping out microelectronics and components key for some of the country's most advanced weapons, including next-generation missiles. Russia's Defense Ministry said it had destroyed three Ukrainian drones over the broader Moscow overnight. The mayor of the city of Moscow and the governor of the Moscow region had not commented at the time of writing. The extent of the damage is not clear, but footage circulating online on Thursday appears to show at least one bright flash and plumes of smoke at the site. Newsweek could not independently verify the footage and has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email. The microelectronics made at the Rezonit plant are used for flight control, navigation and guidance systems in Russia's Iskander missiles, Kalibr and Kh-101 cruise missiles, as well as Russian drones and artillery systems, Kovalenko said. Ukraine said on May 21 it had attacked the Bolkhovsky semiconductor plant in Russia's Oryol region, southwest of Moscow, with ten drones. Kyiv's military described the site as one of Russia's major suppliers of semiconductors and microelectronics, key for producing Iskander and Kinzhal missiles, as well as Russia's aircraft. Russia has frequently fired Iskander missiles at Ukraine and debuted the Kinzhal, one of the Kremlin's "next generation" weapons, during the conflict. Russia claims the missile is hypersonic and impossible to intercept. Ukrainian and Western intelligence suggests advanced U.S.-made air defense systems have shot down Kinzhal missiles in Ukraine. A week later, Kyiv said it had struck a microelectronics plant, named as the Mikron facility in Zelenograd, near Moscow. Ukraine's Kovalenko said Russia's Kremniy-EL microelectronics plant in the Bryansk region bordering Ukraine was attacked in late April. Russian state-controlled media reported in January the Bryansk plant suspended operations after six Ukrainian drones homed in on the site. Ukraine's military said on Thursday its forces had "struck an important facility of the Russian aggressor's military-industrial complex." Related Articles Europe Can Bypass Trump to Hit Putin's Oil Empire: KallasRussian War Losses Pass Grim 1-Million MilestoneEurope Delivers 'Final Nail' Into Putin Gas Empire's CoffinMette Frederiksen: Denmark's PM on Trump, Russia and Greenland's Future 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
