Ukraine’s state nuclear power agency has said that a worker at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant was wounded and radiation-monitors were damaged in renewed shelling of the plant on Russian-controlled territory, while Russian authorities have accused Kyiv’s forces of carrying out the overnight attack.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday the Western military alliance has the joint tasks of both supporting Ukraine in its fight against a Russian invasion and to prevent the conflict from spreading into a war between Russia and NATO.
Every visit by a foreign leader to Iran draws considerable attention, not to mention criticism, in Israel. A visit, however, by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the leader of a global power working to establish an anti-American axis, is cause for greater concern. While bilateral cooperation between Russia and Iran is not unprecedented, Israel has hoped such relations would remain limited in scope due to the engrained competition between the two for influence in Syria and Moscow’s fear of getting too close to a “regional pariah.” As recently as 2018, some Israeli experts and policymakers even hoped that Russia would “squeeze Iran out of Syria” for Israel’s benefit.
Moscow’s Disastrous Invasion of Ukraine Will Reinforce the Norm Against War
When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he had ordered a “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24, Europe had been substantially free of international war for nearly 80 years. That is likely the longest the once most warlike of continents has gone without such a war at least since the days of the Roman Empire.
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.