Kyiv, Ukraine – As luck would have it, emergency doctor Elina Dovzhenko was far enough from her vehicle when a Russian drone struck it, breaking the windshield and splattering pieces of shrapnel around.

It was getting dark on July 9 in the bombed-out, nearly-abandoned city of Kupiansk which sits less than 5km (3 miles) from the front line in the northeastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv – and just 40km (25 miles) west of the Russian border.

But there was definitely enough light left for the Russian drone operator on the front line’s opposite side to see that Dovzhenko’s vehicle was a white ambulance with red stripes parked near a shelling-damaged hospital where she and her colleagues were.

“We heard the drone move, it swirled and swirled around [the building], then we heard the blast,” Dovzhenko, 29, told Al Jazeera.

She and her colleagues were shocked and angry – but not surprised. They have been hearing regularly about Russian drones targeting ambulances, rescue workers and the people they were rescuing, mostly the elderly who refused to leave their homes, pets, kitchen gardens and family graves.

“They chase ambulances every other day. They definitely targeted us,” Denys Raievskyi, a 30-year-old paramedic and Dovzhenko’s ambulance partner, told Al Jazeera.

Their job is among the most dangerous professions in wartime Ukraine – some 200 ambulances have been damaged or destroyed by Russian shelling attacks each year since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in April.

“Ambulance workers and other personnel servicing health transport face a risk of injury and death three times higher than that of other healthcare service workers,” it said.

Premeditated, systematic attacks on ambulances are part of the Kremlin’s wider strategy to destroy Ukraine’s medical facilities and deprive millions of access to healthcare exacerbating their stress as well as physical and mental health problems.

Some 68 percent of Ukrainians already report a decline in their health compared with the pre-war period, the WHO said, and 46 percent are concerned about their mental health.

The WHO did not specify the number of casualties among ambulance workers, but said that since 2022 it has verified 1,682 attacks on healthcare facilities and workers in Ukraine that have resulted in 128 deaths and 288 injuries of health professionals and their patients.

Children in the line of fire

In an earlier assessment last August, it said the number of attacks was “the highest number WHO has ever recorded in any humanitarian emergency globally”.

“These attacks are a deliberate crime against humanity aimed at destroying civilians and those who stand on the front line fighting for [their] lives,” Ukraine’s Health Ministry said in July 2024.

The statement followed last year’s July 8 strike that killed two hospital workers, wounded eight children and injured hundreds in Okhmatdyd, Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital in Kyiv.

Russia used an X-101 missile that flies low to avoid detection and air defence, manoeuvres mid-flight and hits its target with a 10-metre (33ft) accuracy even if launched from 5,500km (3,420 miles) away.

Moscow routinely denies responsibility for deliberate attacks on healthcare, claiming it only strikes military sites and personnel.

International relief groups say they are aware of the gravity of the situation and are ready to keep supporting Ukraine’s healthcare.

“Unfortunately, these types of situation are not new,” Giorgio Trombatore, regional director for Eastern Europe with Project Hope, an international humanitarian group, told Al Jazeera. “But we are resilient, we’re going to continue.”

The group maintains 13 ambulances in four Ukrainian regions, five of them in Kharkiv – including the one struck by the drone in Kupiansk.

Other ambulances have also encountered drones in recent months, but the teams were not hurt.

“That’s something you cannot escape; eventually you need to be prepared,” Trombatore said. “Luckily, we didn’t report casualties from our team.”

His group also provides helmets and flak jackets, and some of the ambulances are bulletproof – something that helps counter Russia’s tactic of repeated strikes.

In one case, a Russian drone attack killed a civilian and wounded another in the village of Stetsivka in the northern region of Sumy on July 14.

After the ambulance team, supported by Project HOPE, arrived, a second drone exploded 2 metres (7ft) away from the vehicle.

“What saved them is that the vehicle was bulletproof,” Project HOPE’s spokesman Artem Murach told Al Jazeera.

‘Hope and faith’

The city of Kupiansk straddles both banks of the slow and strategically-located Oskil river, and once boasted a dozen factories, several colleges and a population of 22,000.

But days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, the mayor surrendered the town and it became the de facto administrative centre of the Moscow-occupied chunk of the Kharkiv region.

The Russians were kicked out six months later during a daring Ukrainian counter-offensive.

But the town remained within reach of Russian artillery, drones and missiles, which have killed dozens of civilians, wounded hundreds and damaged almost every building.

Most of the residents – along with police officers, fire brigades and government officials – fled Kupiansk in early 2023 when Russian forces began approaching again.

But about 1,200 people – or about 7 percent of the pre-war population – remained.

“They’re scared to leave, they have no relatives to host them, they say, ‘I’d better die here, because it’s home,’” paramedic Raievskyi said.

He is no stranger to Russian pummelling – he lives with his wife in Saltivka, the most shelling-damaged region of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city some 120km (75 miles) east of Kupiansk.

Raievskyi’s ambulance travels up to 1.5 hours to help the sick and the wounded, despite the almost constant shelling and omnipresent drones.

But no matter how severe their wounds are, he and his colleagues can’t treat their patients on the spot, especially if they have been hurt by a drone, because another strike is always a possibility.

One life-saving solution – a portable electronic jamming system that scrambles the drones’ navigation systems – no longer works in the Kharkiv region because Russians attach kilometres-long fibre-optic cables to their loitering munitions.

“Unfortunately, in Kupiansk all the Russian drones are fibre-optic,” his partner Dovzhenko said.

India could face tariffs as high as 25% if it fails to finalise a trade deal with the US this week, President Donald Trump has said.

“Yeah, I think so,” he told reporters on Tuesday when asked whether Delhi would face higher tariffs in the absence of an agreement.

The US has set a 1 August deadline for India and several other countries to either reach a trade agreement or face increased tariffs.

Indian and American officials have been negotiating a trade deal for the past few months, but officials have alternated between sounding optimistic and cautious about when it will be announced.

When asked about what he expected from a potential deal with India, Trump said: “We’re going to see. India has been a good friend, but India has charged basically more tariffs than almost any other country”.

“But now I’m in charge, and you just can’t do that,” he added.

The BBC has reached out to India’s commerce ministry for a comment.

Tariffs are taxes charged on goods imported from other countries. The US president has repeatedly taken aim at India’s high tariffs, branding it a “tariff king” and a “big abuser” of trade ties.

Trump has not yet sent a letter to India setting a new tariff rate – as he has with more than a dozen other trading partners.

Back in April, Trump had announced tariffs of up to 27% on Indian goods, which was later paused.

Since then, both sides have been racing to negotiate an agreement, with officials sometimes sounding positive and at other times, measured.

“We continue to speak with our Indian counterparts. We’ve always had very constructive discussions with them,” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said earlier this week.

He also acknowledged that although he had earlier said a deal with India might be “imminent”, it needed to be understood that Delhi’s trade policy has been “protectionist for a very long time” and has been “premised on strongly protecting their domestic market”.

Greer added that Trump has been focused on securing deals that substantially open other markets to the US.

Agriculture and dairy are among the key sticking points for both countries.

For years, Washington has pushed for greater access to India’s farm sector, seeing it as a major untapped market. But India has fiercely protected it, citing food security, livelihoods and the interests of millions of small farmers.

Last week, Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal told CNBC that the agriculture sector is sensitive for India and that it will make sure that farmers’ interests are “well protected”.

Goyal also told news agencies that India remains “optimistic” about striking a deal with Washington soon.

Speaking to Reuters, he said that India was making “fantastic progress” in talks with the US and that he hoped they were able to “conclude a very consequential partnership”.

Until recently, the US was India’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade reaching $190bn in 2024. Trump and Modi have set a target to more than double this figure to $500bn.

India has already reduced tariffs on a range of goods – including Bourbon whiskey and motorcycles – but the US continues to run a $45bn (£33bn) trade deficit with India, which Trump is keen to reduce.

Follow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

A new law in Brazil could cause “significant environmental harm and human rights violations”, and represents a “rollback for decades” of protections in Brazil, including for the Amazon, a UN expert has told BBC News.

Plans to speed up approvals for development projects were criticised by Astrid Puentes Riaño, a UN special rapporteur, as the country prepares to host the COP30 climate summit this year.

Lawmakers passed plans to simplify environmental licences for infrastructure including roads, dams, energy and mines this month, though the president has not formally approved the bill.

Critics have dubbed it the “devastation bill” and say it could lead to environmental abuses and deforestation.

Proponents say a new nationwide licensing regime would simplify the long and complex process that companies face to prove to authorities that planned developments do not cause unacceptable environmental harm.

Under the changes, some developers would be able to self-declare their environmental impact through an online form for projects deemed smaller – a move supporters say would reduce bureaucracy but critics feel is a major concern.

Ms Riaño told the BBC she feared the lighter regulations would “apply to some mining projects” and will “impact the Amazon region”.

She also said was “very worried” about plans for automatic renewal of some projects’ licences where no major changes have occurred, saying: “This will prevent environmental impact assessments from being done on these projects. Some of the projects will include mining projects or infrastructure projects where a full assessment is needed.

“It will also cause deforestation. Modifications or continuations of projects might mean deforestation in the Amazon without a proper assessment.”

A lot of deforestation and land-clearing in the Amazon has been driven by agriculture and mining, sometimes illegally – but Ms Riaño said the bill is “going backwards” on efforts to prevent that.

Her intervention comes two months after new analysis was published showing vast swathes of the Amazon were destroyed in 2024, with forest fires fuelled by drought adding to man-made deforestation pressures.

Under the new law, environmental agencies would have 12 months – extendable to 24 – to make a decision about whether to grant a licence for strategic projects. If that deadline was missed, a licence could be automatically granted.

Supporters say this would give businesses certainty by preventing delays that have plagued projects, including hydroelectric dams for clean energy, or rail lines to transport grain.

Ms Riaño said she understood the need for more efficient systems but assessments must be “comprehensive” and “based on the science.”

The law would also relax the requirement to consult indigenous or traditional quilombola communities – descendents of Afro-Brazilian slaves – in some situations unless they are directly impacted.

UN experts raised concerns that fast-tracking assessments could remove some participation and affect human rights.

Supporters of the bill say it will encourage economic development, including for renewable energy projects, held to grow the economy, and reduce costs for businesses and the state.

But critics fear weakening environmental protections could increase the risk of environmental disasters and violate indigenous rights.

In particular, UN experts argue it could contradict constitutional rights guaranteeing the right to an ecologically balanced environment – which means legal challenges could lie ahead.

The Senate and Chamber of Deputies have approved the bill and it is now pending presidential approval.

President Lula da Silva has until 8 August to decide whether to approve or veto the new law.

Brazil’s Environment and Climate Change minister, Marina Silva, has strongly opposed the bill, condemning it as a “death blow” to environmental protections.

But she has been at odds with the president on other issues in the past, including proposals to explore oil drilling in the Amazon basin.

Even if the president vetoes it, there is a chance the conservative-leaning congress could try to overturn that.

Brazil’s Climate Observatory has called the bill the “biggest environmental setback” since Brazil’s military dictatorship, in which the construction of roads and agricultural expansion led to increased Amazon deforestation and the displacement of many indigenous people.

Ms Riaño said scientists in Brazil estimate the bill “will lift protections for more than 18 million hectares in the country, the size of Uruguay,” adding “the consequences are huge”.