MEXICO CITY (AP) — What should have been a five-minute time-saving walk from Mexico’s National Palace to the Education Ministry for President Claudia Sheinbaum has become a symbol of what Mexican women face every day after a video captured a drunk man groping the country's first woman president.
On Wednesday, gender violence catapulted to the highest-profile platform, and Sheinbaum used her daily press briefing to say that she had pressed charges against the man.
She also called on states to scrutinize their laws and procedures to make it easier for women to report such assaults and said Mexicans needed to hear a “loud and clear, no, women’s personal space must not be violated.”
Sheinbaum said she felt a responsibility to press charges for all Mexican women. “If this is done to the president, what is going to happen to all of the young women in our country?”
Indeed, if Mexico’s president is not exempt from street harassment, then it’s not difficult to imagine what women with hourslong commutes on public transportation are experiencing daily.
Andrea González Martínez, 27, who works for Mexican lender Nacional Monte de Piedad, said she has been harassed on public transportation, in one case the man followed her home.
“It happens regularly, it happens on public transportation,” she said. “It’s something you experience every day in Mexico.”
Her coworker, Carmen Maldonado Castillo, 43, said she has witnessed it.
“You can’t walk around free in the street,” she said.
Sheinbaum said Wednesday that she had similar experiences of harassment when she was 12 years old and using public transportation to get to school, and understands the problem is widespread.
“I decided to press charges because this is something that I experienced as a woman, but that we as women experience in our country,” she said.
The incident immediately raised questions about the president’s security, but Sheinbaum dismissed any suggestion that she would increase her security or change how she interacts with people.
She explained that she and her team had decided to walk from the National Palace to the Education Ministry to avoid a 20-minute car ride in city traffic.
Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada had announced overnight that the man had been arrested.
Brugada used some of Sheinbaum’s own language about being elected Mexico’s first woman president to emphasize that harassment of any woman – in this case Mexico’s most powerful – is an assault on all women.
When Sheinbaum was elected, she said that it wasn’t just her coming to power, it was all women.
Brugada said that was “not a slogan, it’s a commitment to not look the other way, to not allow misogyny to continue to be veiled in habits, to not accept a single additional humiliation, not another abuse, not a single femicide more.”
Lilian Valvuena, 31, said she didn’t think Sheinbaum had really taken violence against women seriously until her firsthand experience yesterday. She hopes that work to better train police to respond will follow.
“They have to prepare them,” she said. “They don’t know what protocols to follow.”
Marina Reyna, executive director of the Guerrero Association against Violence toward Women, said that watching the video she initially worried that Sheinbaum had minimized the assault, continuing to smile and talk calmly to the man. But she hoped the president's willingness to talk about it Wednesday would change how such cases are handled, after years of activists highlighting the issue.
“You lose confidence in the institutions,” Reyna said. “The people stop going to report it, because when you report it nothing happens.”
A World Health Organization report this year revealed that one in three women in the Americas has experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner or by a third party at some point in their lives.
In the first seven months of this year cases of femicide in Mexico dropped almost 40%, compared to the same period in 2024, and intentional injuries against women decreased by 11%, according to figures from the Federal Security Secretariat.
Reyna indicated that the violence suffered by Mexican women is related to impunity, which she estimated at over 70%, and added that this situation leads women not to report crimes.
From 2019 to 2024, only 20% to 30% of women experiencing violence in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Peru and Uruguay used state services specifically designed for them, according to a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) on femicide in the region.
Political scientist Manuel Pérez Aguirre, a researcher at the Seminar on Violence and Peace at the College of Mexico academic center, argued that in the case of the president, there must be a “truly exemplary punishment” that serves as a clear message to sexual aggressors in Mexico.
Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum gives a morning press conference at the National Palace in Mexico City, Monday, Nov. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared Tuesday that Russia has not “broken Ukrainians” nor triumphed in its war, four years after an invasion that has severely tested the resolve of Kyiv and its allies and fueled European fears about the scale of Moscow’s ambitions.
In a show of support, more than a dozen senior European officials headed to the Ukrainian capital to mark the grim anniversary of the conflict, which has killed tens of thousands of people, upended life for millions of Ukrainians, and created instability far beyond its borders.
Zelenskyy said his country has withstood the onslaught by Russia’s bigger and better equipped army, which over the past year of fighting captured just 0.79% of Ukraine’s territory, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. Russia now holds nearly 20% of Ukraine.
“Looking back at the beginning of the invasion and reflecting on today, we have every right to say: We have defended our independence, we have not lost our statehood,” Zelenskyy said on social media, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “not achieved his goals.”
“He has not broken Ukrainians; he has not won this war,” Zelenskyy said.
Despite the show of defiance, Ukraine has struggled to hold off Russia's onslaught, and the war has brought widespread hardship for Ukrainian civilians. Russia’s aerial attacks have devastated families and denied civilians power and running water.
Putin made no mention of the anniversary nor did he say how the war was going when he spoke at a meeting in Moscow of top officials of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, on Tuesday.
However, he told them that the threat of Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil has grown. Ukraine has increasingly deployed long-range drones that it has developed to strike oil refineries, fuel depots and military logistics hubs more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) inside Russia.
As the war of attrition enters its fifth year, a U.S.-led diplomatic push to end the largest conflict on the continent since World War II appears no closer to a peace deal.
Negotiations are stuck on what happens to the Donbas, eastern Ukraine’s industrial heartland that Russian forces mostly occupy but have failed to seize completely, and the terms of a postwar security arrangement that Kyiv is demanding to deter any future Russian invasion.
The U.N. General Assembly called Tuesday for an immediate ceasefire and a comprehensive peace in Ukraine, rejecting a U.S. attempt to eliminate language stressing the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Washington supports an immediate ceasefire, U.S. Deputy Ambassador Tammy Bruce said before the vote, but opposed language stressing Ukraine’s territorial unity because it would “distract” from the peace talks.
The 193-member General Assembly approved the original wording 107-12, with the United States among the 51 countries abstaining.
At a makeshift memorial in Kyiv’s central square, where thousands of small flags and portraits show photos of fallen soldiers, Zelenskyy said he would like U.S. President Donald Trump to visit and witness for himself Ukrainian suffering.
“Only then can one truly understand what this war is really about,” Zelenskyy said. When later asked how four years of war had changed him, Zelenskyy said, “I don't have time for friends or friendships.”
Trump, who once vowed to end the war in a day, has repeatedly changed his tone toward Putin and Zelenskyy over the past year: sometimes criticizing the Ukrainian leader's negotiating position while reaching out to the Russian leader and at others lashing out at Putin for heavy barrages and appearing more sympathetic to the Ukrainian predicament.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that the invasion would continue in pursuit of Moscow's goals. They include a demand that Ukraine renounce its bid to join NATO, sharply cut its army, and cede vast swaths of territory.
Zelenskyy said he expected a fresh round of U.S.-brokered talks with Russia within the next 10 days.
The number of soldiers killed, injured or missing on both sides could reach 2 million by spring, with Russia sustaining the largest number of troop deaths for any major power in any conflict since World War II, a report last month from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated.
European leaders see their countries’ own security at stake in Ukraine amid concerns that Putin may target them next.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote on X that “for four years, every day and every night has been a nightmare for the Ukrainians — and not just for them, but for us all. Because war is back in Europe.”
“We will only end it by being strong together, because the fate of Ukraine is our fate,” he added.
Putin believes that time is on the side of his bigger army, Western officials and analysts say — and that Western support will trail off and that Ukraine’s military resistance will eventually crumble. Already Trump has ended new military aid to Ukraine — though other NATO countries now buy American weapons and give them to Kyiv.
But French President Emmanuel Macron described the war as “a triple failure for Russia: military, economic, and strategic.” The war “has strengthened NATO — the very expansion Russia sought to prevent — galvanized Europeans it hoped to weaken, and laid bare the fragility of an imperialism from another age,” Macron said on X.
The European Union has also sent financial aid, but has sometimes met with reluctance from members Hungary and Slovakia.
While NATO countries have come to Ukraine’s aid, Russia has been helped by North Korea, which has sent thousands of troops and artillery shells; Iran, which has provided drone technology; and China, which the United States and analysts say has provided machine tools and chips.
Among the European officials visiting Kyiv on Tuesday were President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and Finnish President Alexander Stubb, as well as seven prime ministers and four foreign ministers.
Zelenskyy later said von der Leyen assured him that Ukraine would receive the first tranche of a 90 billion euro loan by the spring despite Hungary's attempts to block it.
The only American listed among the official guests in Kyiv ceremonies was Lt. Gen. Curtis Buzzard, a U.S. officer who represents NATO in Ukraine.
British Armed Forces Minister Al Carns said Russia's war on Ukraine was “the most defining conflict” in decades, bringing a “revolution in military affairs,” especially through the rapid development of drone technology. Drones now cause the vast majority of battlefield casualties, he said.
Both sides face challenges in finding enough troops and are increasingly turning to uncrewed aerial drones that can attack far from the front lines, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies said in its annual report on the global military situation.
“Given both sides’ reliance on external support for materiel, decisions taken in foreign capitals will play an important role in shaping the war’s trajectory,” the think tank added.
The United Kingdom on Tuesday announced a new package of military and humanitarian support for Ukraine, including sending teams of British military medics to instruct their Ukrainian counterparts.
The cost of rebuilding war-battered Ukraine would amount to almost $588 billion over the next decade, according to World Bank, the European Commission, the United Nations and the Ukrainian government. That is nearly three times the estimated nominal GDP of Ukraine for last year, they said in a report Monday.
Associated Press reporters across Europe and at the United Nations contributed to this story.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Relatives of those killed during the Russian occupation stand near the Wall of Remembrance during a ceremony to mark the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in Bucha, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
A woman sits in front of a grave of her relative during memorial service for fallen Ukrainian soldiers during a ceremony to mark the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in Bucha, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
European Commissioner for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Maria Virkkunen, left, and European Commissioner for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy Stephane Sejourne, center, stand after an address by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy via video link, during an extraordinary plenary session held for the fourth anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, at the European Parliament in Brussels, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Marius Burgelman)
A woman place flowers at the memorial to the fallen Ukrainian soldiers on Independence Square to mark the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, left, European Council President Antonio Costa, center, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pass by St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)
A woman place flowers at the memorial to the fallen Ukrainian soldiers on Independence Square to mark the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, centre, is welcomed by Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, centre right, as she arrives in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)
From left: Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere talk in the train during their journey from Poland's Medyka to Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)
Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, centre, is welcomed by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife Olena Zelenska, left, before a service at St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)
