“Victory in the borscht war is ours!” Minister of Culture Oleksandr Tkachenko wrote in the Telegram news service. The soup is now “officially Ukrainian”. However, the 56-year-old assured: “We will share borscht and its recipes with all civilized countries in the world.” Ukraine will also win the war against Russia “as in the war over borscht”.

Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dschaparowa also celebrated the decision. “Ukrainian borscht has been de-Russianized,” the 39-year-old wrote on Twitter.

The Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reacted irritably. “What’s next? Recognition of pork as a “Ukrainian national product”?” she wrote on Telegram. Other Russian officials commented that the decision did not give Ukraine an exclusive right to the soup. Borscht variants are prepared in many countries in Eastern Europe.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee had argued that the displacement caused by the war left many people unable to cook or grow vegetables for borscht. However, the inability to gather together to cook undermines the social and cultural well-being of a community.

New figures on pension taxation: In 2021, taxes had to be paid on almost 65 percent of all statutory, private or company pensions. That is almost 10 percent more than in 2015.

Chocolate maker Barry Callebaut has found salmonella at a plant in Wieze, Belgium. Production was stopped and delivery interrupted, as the Swiss company announced on Thursday.

Two baggage employees at Düsseldorf Airport gave an online portal an insight into their everyday lives. “Everything is much more extreme than it can be read in the press,” says one of the current situation. And he thinks things are about to get a whole lot worse.