The rail and road bridge from mainland Russia to the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014, has been pictured in flames the morning after President Vladimir Putin’s 70th birthday.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia attacked the Ukrainian president’s hometown with suicide drones on Sunday, and Ukraine pushed ahead with its counteroffensive after taking back control of a strategic eastern city.
Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia defended the referendums, claiming that more than 100 international observers from Italy, Germany, Venezuela, and Latvia who observed the voting recognized the outcomes as legitimate.
Ukraine claims it has Russian forces in the key eastern city of Lyman completely surrounded, and that they have eliminated close to 60,000 Russian personnel since February.
Invoking history ranging from the U.S. war in Iraq in the early 2000s to the 20th-century Cold War to a 19th-century U.S. policy that essentially proclaimed American influence over the Western Hemisphere, Lavrov portrayed the U.S. as a bully that tries to afford itself “the sacred right to act with impunity wherever and wherever they want” and can’t accept a world where others also advance their national interests.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced the beginning of a partial military conscription in a speech on Wednesday in which he accused the West of “nuclear blackmail” and trying to “destroy” Russia.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) – Poland´s top leaders celebrated the opening Saturday of a new – albeit unfinished – canal that they say will mean ships no longer must secure Russia´s permission to sail from the Baltic Sea to the ports of the Vistula Lagoon.
Russia has complained that the failure to invite its representatives to the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II is “blasphemous” and “profoundly immoral”.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s home city of Kryvyi Rih has been flooded after Russian strikes against hydraulic structures burst a major dam.
Ursula von der Leyen, the German defence minister turned unelected leader of the European Commission, said the European Union will not be “complete” until Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and the Western Balkans are absorbed by it.
Much of Ukraine, particularly in and around the region of the second city of Kharkiv (Kharkov), was plunged into darkness after missile strikes on energy infrastructure.
BRUSSELS (AP) – Weapons stocks in the European Union are running low as member countries continue to sends arms and ammunition to Ukraine, the bloc’s top diplomat warned Monday as he urged EU nations to better coordinate their spending on military materiel.
Tens of thousands of ‘Czech Republic First’ protesters are on the streets of Prague demanding their government adopt a neutral posture in the Ukraine war as energy prices go out of control.
The Kremlin’s refusal to declare a state funeral reflects its uneasiness about the legacy of Gorbachev, who has been venerated worldwide for bringing down the Iron Curtain but reviled by many at home for the Soviet collapse and the ensuing economic meltdown that plunged millions into poverty.
Six months into a war that has killed thousands of Ukrainians and displaced over 12 million more, most of the pledges to drop Russian investments — some made with great fanfare during news conferences — have gone unfulfilled.
The Associated Press found more than 3,600 shipments of wood, metals, rubber and other goods have arrived at U.S. ports from Russia since it began launching missiles and airstrikes into its neighbour in February.
NIKOPOL, Ukraine (AP) – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which hits the half-year mark this week, has already killed some 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers, a general said, and the fighting Monday showed no signs that the war is abating.
Darya Dugina, daughter of the Russian nationalist philospher Alexander Dugin, sometimes described as “Putin’s brain”, has died after a car her father was due to travel in exploded.
BERLIN (AP) – Latvia’s parliament on Thursday declared Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” for attacks on civilians during the war in Ukraine and urged other countries to follow suit.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia and Ukraine accused each other Friday of shelling a prison in a separatist region of eastern Ukraine, an attack that reportedly killed dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war captured after the fall of Mariupol, the
UNITED NATIONS (AP) – The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Friday there should no longer be any doubt that Russia intends to dismantle Ukraine “and dissolve it from the world map entirely.”
(AFP) – Russian energy giant Gazprom suspended gas supplies to Latvia on Saturday following tensions between Moscow and the West over the conflict in Ukraine and sweeping European and U.S. sanctions against Russia.
The first few hundred recruits are receiving instruction at sites across Britain in the first phase of a programme that aims to train up to 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
Muslims make up almost 1 per cent of the population in Ukraine, which is predominantly Orthodox Christian. There is a large Muslim population in Crimea — home to the Crimean Tatars and illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. Numbers there jump to 12 per cent. There is also a sizeable Muslim community in eastern Ukraine, the result of waves of economic migration as the region industrialised and many Muslims immigrated to the Donbas region to work in the mines and factories.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russian forces are managing to “raise true hell” in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland despite reports of them taking an operational pause, a regional governor said Saturday, while the government in Kyiv urged people in Russian-occupied southern areas to evacuate “by all possible means” ahead of a Ukrainian offensive.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia’s defence minister said Russian forces took control Sunday of the last major Ukrainian-held city in Ukraine’s Luhansk province, bringing Moscow closer to its stated goal of seizing all of Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Slovyansk is a city of splintered loyalties. With a large retired population, it is not uncommon to hear older residents express sympathy towards Russia or nostalgia for their Soviet past. There is also distrust of the Ukrainian army and government.
BERLIN (AP) – Fearing Russia might cut off natural gas supplies, the head of Germany’s regulatory agency for energy called on residents Saturday to save energy and to prepare for winter, when use increases.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russian forces are pounding the city of Lysychansk and its surroundings in an all-out attempt to seize the last stronghold of resistance in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province, the governor said Saturday.
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges connected recent Russian missile strikes with G7 and NATO summits, saying Russia was purposely “humiliating the leaders of the West.” he said.
A counter-offensive has pushed Russians out of parts of the southern Kherson region they took early in the war, according to Zelensky.
U.S. Marines have conducted air drops and amphibious landings on Gotland as part of a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea.
LOS ANGELES (AP) – President Joe Biden, speaking to donors at a Democratic fundraiser, said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky “didn’t want to hear it” when U.S. intelligence gathered information that Russia was preparing to invade.
BRUSSELS (AP) – Senior members of the European Union’s parliament are urging EU leaders to make Ukraine and neighbouring Moldova official candidates for joining the 27-nation bloc.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron has warned that Russia should not be humiliated in the Ukraine conflict, implying that this will make it harder to find a way to bring the invasion to an end through diplomacy.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said this week that Ukraine is now losing 60 to 100 soldiers each day in combat. By way of comparison, just short of 50 American soldiers died per day on average in 1968 during the Vietnam War’s deadliest year for U.S. forces.
KHARKIV, Ukraine – Ukrainian authorities are cracking down on anyone suspected of aiding Russian troops under laws enacted by Ukraine’s parliament and signed by President Volodymyr Zelensky after the Feb. 24 invasion.
The controversial Azov Battalion has released a video which it says shows its fighters in Mariupol, which Russia claims to have “liberated”, underground with sheltering civilians.
Russian forces are continuing to apply pressure in the Donbas following their switch in focus from the Kyiv (Kiev) region to Ukraine’s east and south, but British defence officials say counter-attacks are frustrating their progress.
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian troops in southern Ukraine have been carrying out torture and kidnappings, and he called on the world Sunday to respond.
