Belarus leader says ‘situation is now seriously stalemate’
Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict, the authoritarian leader of Belarus has said.
Alexander Lukashenko, who is an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, described the current state of the conflict as “head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying”.
“There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position,” he said.
In other news:
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A third round of Ukrainian-backed peace talks opened in Malta, but without Moscow, which condemned it. In a statement afterwards, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said 66 countries had taken part, proof that his plan “has gradually become global”. It follows similar meetings in Jeddah and Copenhagen, with the Ukrainians hoping to eventually hold a summit at the level of heads of state.
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Russia’s forces around the Donetsk oblast town of Avdiivka have “likely suffered” some of its highest casualty rates of 2023 so far, according to the UK Ministry of Defence’s intelligence update.
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The report follows the Ukrainian president’s claims on Friday that Russian forces lost at least a brigade’s worth of troops attempting to advance on Avdiivka.
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The head of the office of the president of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, has praised Qatar’s role in facilitating the return of four Ukrainian children from Russian captivity earlier this month.
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Ukraine and the Netherlands began talks on a bilateral agreement on security guarantees in Malta, Andriy Yermak also announced. It is the sixth country to start bilateral negotiations with Ukraine on security guarantees.
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Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Mykola Tochytskyi, has pointedly accused Russia of having a history of “provoking” and “stoking” hybrid conflicts across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
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“We warned that turning a blind eye to [Russian] violation of international peace and security would fuel conflicts in the world,” Tochytskyi said, amid the Israel-Hamas war. Volodymyr Zelenskiy has previously expressed fears that the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel could threaten military support for Ukraine.
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Russia’s foreign ministry claimed a Ukrainian drone crashed into a nuclear waste storage facility at the Kursk nuclear power plant in western Russia, damaging its walls.
Key events
A fire broke out in early hours today at the Afipsky oil refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region, local emergency authorities said, after social media reports of powerful blasts.
Baza and Shot, two Russian news outlets with good security sources, said that the fire at the refinery, which lies 50 miles (80km) east of the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, one of Russia’s most important oil export gateways, was caused by a drone attack.
Earlier, Russia’s defence ministry, without providing much detail, said its air defence systems destroyed 36 Ukraine-launched drones over the Black Sea and the north-western part of the Crimean Peninsula. Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
The Krasnodar region is connected to Crimea – which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014 – via the illegal, Russian-built Kerch bridge. The bridge has been closed by Ukrainian attacks several times.
Schooling will move to online starting from tomorrow in Ukraine’s central city of Vinnytsia after a Hepatitis A outbreak sent scores of children and adults to the hospital, the country’s chief sanitary official said .
“The main thing now is to establish the centre of the outbreak and the causes in order to stop the spread of the viral Hepatitis A among the population as soon as possible,” chief sanitary doctor of Ukraine Ihor Kuzin wrote on Facebook on Saturday, Reuters reports.
Kuzin, who also serves as Ukraine’s deputy health minister, said 141 people in the city and the region were in a hospital. Vinnytsia, which had a pre-war population of around 370,000, is the administrative centre of the Vinnytsia region in central Ukraine.
“So far, there is no single cause of the outbreak,” Kuzin said. “We are analysing the centers of spread and are working with the population, in particular to establish a circle of contact persons.”
Russia would confiscate European assets if frozen funds ‘stolen’ by EU
Russia would confiscate assets belonging to EU states it deems unfriendly if the bloc “steals” frozen Russian funds in a drive to fund Ukraine, a top ally of President Vladimir Putin said today.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said on Friday that the EU executive was working on a proposal to pool some of the profits derived from frozen Russian state assets to help Ukraine and its post-war reconstruction.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the State Duma, the Russian lower house of parliament, said Moscow would retaliate in a way that would be more costly to the bloc if the EU moved against Russian assets, many of which are held in Belgium, Reuters reported.
“A number of European politicians, led by the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, have once again started talking about stealing our country’s frozen funds in order to continue the militarisation of Kyiv,” the close Putin ally said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.
“Such a decision would require a symmetrical response from the Russian Federation. In that case, far more assets belonging to unfriendly countries will be confiscated than our frozen funds in Europe.”
He claimed that EU politicians were considering the move “in an effort to hold on to their jobs and because of the poor financial situation to which they had led their countries.”
Von der Leyen said on Friday that the value of frozen Russian sovereign assets was €211 billion and said that the bloc had decided that Russia must pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction. The EU clearing house in Brussels, Euroclear, has reportedly earned more than €3bn this year from frozen Russian assets which it is holding due to EU sanctions.
More on that news that Putin ally and Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is calling for Ukraine and Russia to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict.
Lukashenko, who provided his country’s territory as a launch pad for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said that Ukraine’s demands for Russia to quit its territory needs to be resolved at the negotiating table “so nobody dies”.
“We need to sit down at the negotiating table and come to an agreement,” Lukashenko said in a question and answer video posted on the website of the Belarusian state news agency BelTA. “As I once said: no preconditions are needed. The main thing is that the ‘stop’ command is given.”
Russian forces have kept pushing this week near the ruined Donetsk city of Avdiivka suffering heavy losses, the US White House has said, but the vast frontline in Ukraine has moved little in the past year despite Kyiv’s gruelling months-long offensive.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy reiterated yesterday at a gathering of over 60 national security advisers that his 10-point peace plan, which includes calls for the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, is the only way to end the war.
Belarus leader says ‘situation is now seriously stalemate’
Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict, the authoritarian leader of Belarus has said.
Alexander Lukashenko, who is an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, described the current state of the conflict as “head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying”.
“There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position,” he said.
In other news:
-
A third round of Ukrainian-backed peace talks opened in Malta, but without Moscow, which condemned it. In a statement afterwards, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said 66 countries had taken part, proof that his plan “has gradually become global”. It follows similar meetings in Jeddah and Copenhagen, with the Ukrainians hoping to eventually hold a summit at the level of heads of state.
-
Russia’s forces around the Donetsk oblast town of Avdiivka have “likely suffered” some of its highest casualty rates of 2023 so far, according to the UK Ministry of Defence’s intelligence update.
-
The report follows the Ukrainian president’s claims on Friday that Russian forces lost at least a brigade’s worth of troops attempting to advance on Avdiivka.
-
The head of the office of the president of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, has praised Qatar’s role in facilitating the return of four Ukrainian children from Russian captivity earlier this month.
-
Ukraine and the Netherlands began talks on a bilateral agreement on security guarantees in Malta, Andriy Yermak also announced. It is the sixth country to start bilateral negotiations with Ukraine on security guarantees.
-
Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Mykola Tochytskyi, has pointedly accused Russia of having a history of “provoking” and “stoking” hybrid conflicts across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
-
“We warned that turning a blind eye to [Russian] violation of international peace and security would fuel conflicts in the world,” Tochytskyi said, amid the Israel-Hamas war. Volodymyr Zelenskiy has previously expressed fears that the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel could threaten military support for Ukraine.
-
Russia’s foreign ministry claimed a Ukrainian drone crashed into a nuclear waste storage facility at the Kursk nuclear power plant in western Russia, damaging its walls.
