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Ukraine authorities denies involvement in Nord Stream sabotage
The Ukrainian authorities was not concerned within the sabotage final 12 months of the Nord Stream fuel pipelines within the Baltic Sea, the nation’s defence minister stated on Wednesday.
“This isn’t our exercise,” Oleksiy Reznikov stated in Stockholm earlier than a gathering with EU defence ministers, Agence France-Presse experiences.
A report within the New York Occasions on Tuesday stated US officers had seen new intelligence indicating {that a} “pro-Ukrainian group” was accountable for the sabotage.
Key occasions
Philip Oltermann
Germany’s defence minister has urged warning round experiences that the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged by a pro-Ukrainian group, elevating the opportunity of a false flag operation designed to shift blame for the assault to Kyiv.
“It may simply as simply been a false [flag] operation, designed to shift the blame to pro-Ukraine teams”, Boris Pistorius instructed broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. “The chances are equally excessive”.
In its reporting, German broadsheet Die Zeit stated the passports supplied to rent the yacht utilized by the suspects had been “professionally solid”. Whereas investigators didn’t rule out the opportunity of a false-flag operation, they did contemplate it unlikely, the newspaper wrote.
My colleague Dan Sabbagh is watching armed forces minister James Heappey give proof in parliament within the UK, the place he has been talking concerning the prospect of supplying fighter jets to Ukraine.
EU defence ministers on Wednesday mentioned plans to hurry €1bn value of ammunition to Ukraine and place joint orders for extra to make sure provides maintain flowing.
Ministers assembly with their Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksiy Reznikov, in Stockholm had been debating a push to fulfill Kyiv’s rapid wants and bolster Europe’s defence business for the long run.
“Our precedence primary is air defence techniques, and likewise ammunition, ammunition and once more ammunition,” Reznikov stated as he arrived for the assembly, in accordance with Agence France-Presse.
The primary a part of the plan, as laid out by the EU’s overseas coverage service, envisions utilizing €1bn from the bloc’s joint European peace facility to get member states to ship shells of their shares to Kyiv inside weeks.
There are questions over what number of shells Europe can spare with out leaving itself too weak, and defence ministers had been due to supply particulars.
“I don’t know which is the extent of stockpiles, that’s the reason we’re right here collectively,” stated the EU’s overseas coverage chief, Josep Borrell.
A second a part of the plan is to pool EU and Ukraine calls for to put huge joint orders that may incentivise ammunition producers to ramp up their capability.
The United Nations has stated it believes {that a} viral video exhibiting the obvious execution of a captured Ukrainian soldier by Russian troops could also be genuine.
The footage seems to indicate a detained Ukrainian combatant standing in a shallow trench being shot from a number of automated weapons after saying “Glory to Ukraine”.
“We’re conscious of this video posted on social media that reveals a Ukrainian soldier hors de fight [not in combat] apparently being executed by Russian armed forces. Based mostly on a preliminary examination, we imagine that the video could also be genuine,” a spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Workplace instructed Agence France-Presse.
“Since Russia’s armed assault on Ukraine over a 12 months in the past, the UN Human Rights Workplace has documented quite a few violations of worldwide humanitarian regulation towards prisoners of warfare, together with instances of abstract execution of each Russian and Ukrainian PoW,” she stated. “Neutral and efficient investigations have to be carried out into all these allegations and people accountable held to account.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has vowed to “discover the murderers”. The Ukrainian army named the person within the footage as Tymofiy Mykolayovych Shadura.
Ukraine authorities denies involvement in Nord Stream sabotage
The Ukrainian authorities was not concerned within the sabotage final 12 months of the Nord Stream fuel pipelines within the Baltic Sea, the nation’s defence minister stated on Wednesday.
“This isn’t our exercise,” Oleksiy Reznikov stated in Stockholm earlier than a gathering with EU defence ministers, Agence France-Presse experiences.
A report within the New York Occasions on Tuesday stated US officers had seen new intelligence indicating {that a} “pro-Ukrainian group” was accountable for the sabotage.
Philip Oltermann
Right here is a bit more from Philip Oltermann, who’s reporting on the German overseas minister Annalena Baerbock’s go to to Erbil, Iraq:
Baerbock was requested concerning the Nord Stream experiences at a press convention this morning.
“In fact we’re very intensely following any new experiences and any insights obtained by completely different actors”, she stated. “However the energy of a constitutional democracy is that these official our bodies answerable for shedding mild on one thing can perform their investigations in peace, and that the federal government can attain a verdict on the premise of their work, slightly than prematurely drawing conclusions from [media] experiences.”
Germany’s common prosecutor has been answerable for investigating the sabotaging of the Nord Stream pipeline since October 2022. Investigators in Denmark and Sweden had just lately instructed the UN safety council that their investigations too had not but reached a conclusion, Baerbock stated.
In parallel with a report within the New York Occasions, a number of German media shops together with Die Zeit on Tuesday night reported that official investigators imagine a pro-Ukrainian group to be behind the assault. Die Zeit particularly talked about a yacht on which investigators had discovered traces of explosives, and which had been employed by an organization registered in Poland however was owned by two Ukrainian nationals.
Prigozhin claims Wagner totally management the east of the town of Bakhmut
The press service of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founding father of the Wagner mercenary group which has been main the Russian assault on Bakhmut, has stated Russian forces now totally management the east of the town. The claims haven’t been independently verified.
The Russian state-owned information company Tass experiences that Prigozhin stated in a Telegram message: “The divisions of the Wagner PMC occupied all the japanese a part of Bakhmut. Every little thing east of the Bakhmutka river is totally underneath the management of the Wagner PMC.”
On Tuesday, Prigozhin claimed that between 12,000 and 20,000 Ukrainian troops remained defending the town. The Ukrainian deputy PM Iryna Vereshchuk stated fewer than 4,000 civilians remained in Bakhmut, an industrial metropolis that had a prewar inhabitants of about 70,000 individuals.
Suspilne, Ukraine’s state broadcaster, is quoting Pavlo Kyrylenko, Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk, as saying:
On 7 March, the Russian occupying forces shelled Kostyantynivka 5 instances. On the morning of 8 March, they shelled Avdiivka twice. For the primary time since 24 February 2022, there have been no wounded or lifeless civilians. However residential buildings had been destroyed and broken by shelling.
Philip Oltermann
Philip Oltermann, the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief, experiences:
“In fact we’re following the experiences very intensely,” the German overseas minister, Annalena Baerbock, stated concerning the investigations into the Nord Stream blasts throughout a state go to to Erbil, within the Kurdistan area of Iraq.
She stated the energy of a constitutional democracy was that it typically needed to step again and let official our bodies keep it up with their investigations, “slightly than come to untimely conclusions primarily based on media experiences.”
Baerbock added that Denmark and Sweden had knowledgeable her that their investigations had been nonetheless ongoing.
Listed here are among the newest photos to be despatched to us from Ukraine over the information wires.
We predict the UN common secretary, António Guterres, in Kyiv right now, the place he’ll meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Yesterday, Ukrainian sources stated on-line negotiations with companions had began on an extension of the grain deal, however talks weren’t being held immediately with Russia. Ukraine has beforehand expressed a hope that the deal will probably be prolonged for a 12 months, to present a assure of stability to importers and exporters, and for it to be expanded to incorporate the port of Mykolaiv.
The president of the European Fee, Ursula von der Leyen, has tweeted in reward of Ukrainian girls on Worldwide Ladies’s Day, saying that those that have joined the armed forces have “smashed a glass ceiling over the top of the Russian invaders”.
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