Grain shipments from Ukraine’s port of Odesa resumed Monday, the first since Russia invaded its neighbor in late February.
The Sierra Leone-flagged cargo ship Razoni was the first to leave port, carrying more than 26,000 tons of corn bound for Lebanon. In a statement, Turkey’s defense ministry said other unspecified ships would also depart Ukraine on Monday.
On July 20, Sergey Lavrov, minister of foreign affairs for the Russian Federation, declared that Moscow had new objectives in Ukraine, as it now wants to expand its gains beyond the borders of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” by capturing Kherson, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia regions. Lavrov underlined Western military equipment transfer and the alleged need to protect the occupied territories from long-range weapons as main reasons for this shift (TSN, June 20).
US secretary of state will visit Pretoria, Kinshasa and Kigali weeks after Russia’s Lavrov visited the continent.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel next month to South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, the Department of State announced on Friday, as Washington ramps up diplomacy in Africa to counter a Russian charm offensive.
Even as Moscow’s war machine crawls across Ukraine’s east, trying to achieve the Kremlin’s goal of securing full control over the country’s industrial heartland, Ukrainian forces are scaling up attacks to reclaim territory in the Russian-occupied south.
The shipments of Russian-made hypersonic missile systems Zircon to the Russian armed forces will start in the coming months, President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday.
Russian forces launched a missile attack on the Kyiv area for the first time in weeks Thursday and pounded the northern Chernihiv region as well, in what Ukraine said was revenge for standing up to the Kremlin.
Europe was facing an energy crisis even before the drama emerged about the Nord Stream 1 pipeline reopening from Russia to Germany.
While natural gas started flowing again on Thursday after the major pipeline shut down for 10 days of maintenance, Europe will still struggle to keep homes warm and industry humming this winter.
Three days after US President Joe Biden’s trip to the Middle East, Tehran hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 19. This tripartite meeting was held within the framework of the seventh summit of the heads of states of the Astana Peace Process for Syria. The three parties announced that the next meeting will be held in Russia before the end of 2022. But what were the motivations of Turkey, Russia and Iran in attending the summit? And what are the summit’s consequences on the Syrian crisis?
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s four-country Africa swing attracted a great deal of attention in Western media outlets, which framed his trip as a diplomatic campaign intended to prove that the West’s efforts to isolate Russia have obvious limits. In Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, and the Republic of Congo, Lavrov sought to deflect responsibility for the serious food and fuel disruptions resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and position Moscow as a champion of state sovereignty and independence. It’s an audacious claim from a country currently engaged in a campaign to annex part of its neighbor. Meanwhile, the world waits for Russia to lift its blockade on Ukrainian grain and allow ships to pass through the Black Sea.
In the Shadow of War, the FSB Embraces Stalin’s Methods
Since the spring of 2022, a terrifying new force has coursed through Russian society. Activists who have protested the “special operation” in Ukraine are being rounded up. Opponents of the regime and even ordinary citizens who have had unauthorized foreign contacts are being thrown into Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, where in Stalinist times, political prisoners were tortured and executed. Special border agents have been interrogating and intimidating Russians who are trying to leave or return. But even those who have made it out are not safe; exiles who have spoken out are being investigated, and their relatives in Russia are being harassed by the regime. And security police are cracking down on Russian companies that buy foreign rather than Russian raw materials and hardware.