[ad_1]
Key events
Russia hit military target overnight in Khmelnytskiy – governor
Russia hit a military target in Ukraine’s western region of Khmelnytskiy in airstrikes early on Monday and rescuers are still fighting to contain fires, the regional governor said.
“At the moment, work is continuing to contain fires in storage facilities for fuel and lubricants and munitions,” Reuters reports the Khmelnytskiy regional governor’s office wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
The precise location has not been specified, but the Tass report of the incident further quotes the governor saying “Five aircraft were put out of action, work has begun to repair the runway.”
Khmelnytskiy is in the west of Ukraine, some considerable distance from the frontline.
Foreign investors who left Russia after selling their businesses there between March 2022 and March 2023 withdrew about $36 billion from the country, the state RIA news agency has reported according to Reuters, citing analysis of data from the Central Bank.
Scores of the world’s biggest companies have left or scaled back their operations in Russia in response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Last week, the central bank played down the impact of foreign company exits, saying that around 200 sale deals had been completed in the March 2022-23 period, with just 20% involving large asset sales, those in excess of $100 million.
Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has said that if any other country wants to join a Russia-Belarus union there could be “nuclear weapons for everyone.”
Russia moved ahead last week with a plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, in the Kremlin’s first deployment of such warheads outside Russia since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, spurring concerns in the West.
Reuters reports:
In an interview published on Russia’s state television late on Sunday, Lukashenko, president Vladimir Putin’s staunchest ally among Russia’s neighbours, said that it must be “strategically understood” that Minsk and Moscow have a unique chance to unite.
“No one is against Kazakhstan and other countries having the same close relations that we have with the Russian Federation,” Lukashenko said.
“If someone is worried … (then) it is very simple: join in the Union State of Belarus and Russia. That’s all: there will be nuclear weapons for everyone.”
He added that it was his own view – not the view of Russia.
Russia and Belarus are formally part of a Union State, a borderless union and alliance between the two former Soviet republics.
EPA photographer Oleg Petrasyuk has captured some touching images of couples saying farewell at the station in Kramatorsk , Donetsk. Ukrainian servicemen only have ten days of annual leave and so loved ones often try to meet them closer to the frontline in order to make the most of the time.
Russia’s interior ministry has put US senator Lindsey Graham on a wanted list, Russian news agency TASS has reported.
Graham visited Kyiv last week and met president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, telling the Ukrainian leader that US military aid to the country was “the best money we’ve ever spent”. Russia criticised his remarks, accusing him of praising the murder of Russians.
Reuters reports on the spat:
The release by the Ukrainian president’s office of Graham’s complete remarks showed there was no such link.
Graham said he was visiting on the 457th day of a war that Russia had assumed would be completed within three days and Graham said Ukrainians resisting the invasion reminded him of “our better selves in America. There was a time in America that we were this way, fighting to the last person, we were going to be free or die.”
“Now you are free,” Zelenskiy responded in the encounter. “And we will be.”
Graham replied: “And the Russians are dying.”
Zelenskiy then added: “Yes, but they came to our territory. We are not fighting on their territory.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and other Russian officials directly linked Graham‘s praise for the benefits of US assistance to his comments on Russians dying in the conflict.
Initial extracts of the conversation released by Zelenskiy’s office had not made clear that the two remarks were made in different parts of the conversation.
Peskov castigated the senator in comments to the Shot Telegram channel, saying: “It is difficult to imagine a greater shame for a country than having such senators.”
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev called Graham, a 67-year-old Republican, an old fool.
“The old fool Senator Lindsey Graham said that the United States has never spent money so successfully as on the murder of Russians,” Medvedev said. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
Thousands of children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year, Peter Beaumont reports.
According to the Ukrainian government, 16,226 children have been deported to Russia, of whom 10,513 have been located, and more than 300 have returned. Some fear the numbers of missing could be an underestimate.
Unaccompanied children, some whose parents were killed during the siege of Mariupol, have disappeared into a Kremlin-sanctioned system now under investigation by the international criminal court.
Peter spoke to one family whose experience shed light on another aspect of the removal of Ukrainian children to Russia: how friends and even relatives have taken children, sometimes for mercenary reasons.
Wagner boss Yevgheny Prigozhin “appears to have again indirectly undermined Russian president Vladimir Putin’s authority and regime”, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has written in its latest analysis of the conflict.
The US-based think tank bases its assertion on the response given by Prigozhin to a journalist asking about Russian state media’s ban on any discussion of Wagner. Prigozhin said that officials could have benefited from their historic ability to censor information if Russia had not declared war on Ukraine. He then shifted to addressing a single, unnamed official:
If you are starting a war, please have character, will, and steel balls – and only then you will be able to achieve something.
Real achievements in building bridges, new buildings and metro stations would allow the official to stop lying, he said.
His comments were “likely targeted at Putin whom the Russian state media has routinely portrayed as a leader minutely involved with small infrastructure projects and the lives of ordinary Russian people,” the think tank said.
His criticism may have come because Putin has failed to give him a reward promised for the seizure of Bakhmut, the ISW suggested.
More than 40 missiles and drones were shot down over Kyiv early Monday, Serhii Popko, the head of the city’s military administration, has said on Telegram. Some damage was caused by falling debris but there were no casualties in what was Russia’s 15th assault on the city this month.
Russia was trying to exhaust the country’s air defences with the increased attacks, Popko said, adding: “the enemy is trying to keep the civilian population in deep psychological tension.”
Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko added: “Another difficult night for the capital. But, thanks to the professionalism of our defenders, as a result of the air attack of the barbarians in Kyiv, there was no damage or destruction of infrastructural and other objects, [or] multi-apartment residential buildings.”
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine with me, Helen Livingstone.
The Ukrainian capital Kyiv has endured a second night of aerial assault, after suffering the largest drone attack since the beginning of the Russian invasion on Sunday. Two people died in that attack after which Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked the country’s air defence forces, saying he was “grateful to each and every person”.
Air raid sirens sounded again in the early hours of Monday, with Kyiv mayor Vitaliy Klitschko reporting explosions in the Holosiiv, Podilsk, Sviatoshyn and Shevchenkivskyi districts. A house in Podilsk and a deserted building in Sviatoshyn caught fire but there were no injuries, according to Klitschko.
Rescuers also rushed to an apartment in Shevchenkivskyi after reports of smoke but it turned out to be a case of “badly burnt food on the stove,” he said. “This also happens…”
In other key developments:
-
Zelenskiy has put forward a bill that would sanction Russian ally Iran for 50 years due to its role in supplying Moscow with weapons, including hundreds of drones. If passed by Ukraine‘s parliament, the bill would stop Iranian goods transiting through Ukraine and ban use of its airspace, as well as imposing trade, financial and technology sanctions against Iran and its citizens.
-
The death toll from a Russian missile attack on a medical facility in Dnipro on Friday has risen from two to four people, according to the region’s governor.
-
Russian attacks near the eastern city of Bakhmut, the scene of heavy fighting in recent months, have abated slightly over the weekend, according to a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military.
-
Western countries left Belarus no choice but to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons and had better take heed not to “cross red lines” on key strategic issues, a senior Belarusian official was quoted as saying. Alexander Volfovich, state secretary of Belarus’ Security Council, said it was logical that the weapons were withdrawn after the 1991 Soviet collapse as the United States had provided security guarantees and imposed no sanctions. “Today, everything has been torn down. All the promises made are gone forever,” the Belta news agency quoted Volfovich as telling an interviewer on state television.
-
The EU’s spokesperson for foreign affairs and security policy, Nabila Massrali, has said Russia “will be held accountable” for attacks on civilian areas. “[Russian] leadership & perpetrators will be held accountable. We remain committed to help Ukraine defend itself,” she wrote on Twitter.
-
The Russian ambassador to the UK, Andrei Kelin told the BBC that the west’s supplying of weapons to Ukraine risked escalating the conflict to levels not yet seen. Russia has “enormous resources and we haven’t just started yet to act very seriously”, he said.
-
Russia said its air defence systems destroyed several drones as they approached the Ilsky oil refinery in the Krasnodar region near the Black Sea on Sunday. “Several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) tried to approach the territory of the Ilsky oil refinery in the Krasnodar Krai,” the region’s emergency officials said on the Telegram messaging channel. “All of them were neutralized, the infrastructure of the plant was not damaged.” It was not possible to verify the report.
-
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has appointed a panel to investigate US allegations that a Russian ship collected weapons from a naval base near Cape Town last year, the presidency said in a statement. The allegations have caused a diplomatic row between the US, South Africa and Russia and called into question South Africa’s non-aligned position on the Ukraine conflict.
With Agence France-Presse and Reuters
[ad_2]
Source link
(This article is generated through the syndicated feed sources, Financetin neither support nor own any part of this article)
