Amnesty International on Monday (June 13) accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine. Not, this time, in Boutcha, near kyiv, but in Kharkiv, where hundreds of civilians are said to have perished under carpet bombs. During an in-depth investigation, the human rights NGO claims to have found evidence showing that in seven attacks on neighborhoods in Ukraine’s second largest city in the north-east of the country, forces Russians have used 9N210 and 9N235 type cluster bombs and cluster mines, two categories prohibited by international treaties.
Titled ‘Anyone can die at any time’, the report shows how Russian forces have killed and caused immense damage by relentlessly bombarding residential areas of Kharkiv since the start of the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. .
“People have been killed in their homes and on the streets, on playgrounds and in cemeteries, as they waited in line for humanitarian aid or shopping for food and medicine,” Donatella said. Rovera, crisis and conflict researcher at Amnesty headquarters. Ukrainian justice has opened more than 12,000 war crimes investigations in the country since the start of the Russian invasion, according to the prosecution.
Russian troops have chased the Ukrainian army from the center of Severodonetsk, a key city in eastern Ukraine that the two armies have been fighting over for weeks, the Ukrainian general staff announced on Monday. “With artillery support, the enemy carried out an assault on Severodonetsk, achieved partial success and pushed our units back from the city center. Hostilities are continuing,” the army said in its published morning update. on Facebook.
Sergei Gaïdaï, governor of the Lugansk region – of which Severodonetsk is the administrative center for the part controlled by the Ukrainian authorities – confirmed that the Ukrainian forces had been pushed back from the city center. “The street fights continue (…) the Russians continue to destroy the city”, he wrote Monday morning on Facebook, posting photos of buildings in ruins or in flames.
Russian shelling targeted the Azot chemical plant where civilians are sheltering, and hit sewage treatment plants in the city, he added. In the nearby town of Lysychansk, three civilians including a six-year-old boy have died in shelling over the past 24 hours, according to the governor.
Taking Severodonetsk would open up Moscow’s route to another major Donbass city, Kramatorsk, an important step to conquering the entire Russian border region, partly held by pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
Russia earned 93 billion euros in fossil fuel export revenues in the first 100 days of its war against Ukraine, most of it going to the EU, research center report says independent published on Monday, and which particularly pinpoints France.
This publication from the Center for research on energy and clean Air (CREA), based in Finland, comes as Ukraine urges Westerners to cut off all trade with Russia to stop feeding the Kremlin’s war chest. The European Union recently decided on a gradual embargo – with exceptions – on its oil imports. Russian gas, on which it is very dependent, is not currently concerned.
Russia’s revenues come first from the sale of crude oil (46 billion), followed by gas transported by gas pipelines (24 billion), then petroleum products, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and finally coal. While some countries have made significant efforts to reduce their imports (Poland, Finland, Baltic countries), others have on the contrary increased their purchases: China, India, United Arab Emirates or… France, according to the CREA. “While the EU is considering stricter sanctions against Russia, France has increased its imports, to become the biggest buyer of Russian LNG in the world”, underlines Lauri Myllyvirta, analyst of the CREA.
These are also cash purchases and not under long-term contracts, which means that France knowingly decided to use Russian energy despite the invasion of Ukraine, estimates the specialist.
He was Vladimir Putin’s first head of government. But even in his worst nightmares, Mikhail Kasyanov could not have imagined his former leader embarking on the invasion of Ukraine. “The Putin I knew was different,” says Mikhail Kassianov during a rare interview, by videoconference, with AFP.
Mikhail Kassianov, Prime Minister from 2000 to 2004 before going to the opposition, estimates that the war could last up to two years, but still believes that Russia will resume a “democratic path” one day. Aged 64, the former minister of Vladimir Putin, who worked for the rapprochement between Moscow and Western countries, explains that he did not think, like many Russians, that a war would break out.
He explains that he finally understood what was looming three days before the invasion, when Vladimir Putin convened in a well-ordered staging the members of his Security Council for a meeting broadcast on television. “When I watched that meeting of the Russian Security Council, I finally understood that yes, there would be a war,” he says.
The connection between the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporijjia (south), under Russian control since the beginning of March, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been restored, announced kyiv and the IAEA.
It had been lost on May 30, “when the Russians cut off the Ukrainian mobile telephone operator Vodafone at Energodar”, site of the power station, “with which the IAEA has a data transmission contract”, affirmed the Ukrainian operator, Energoatom, in a press release published on Saturday evening on Telegram. The IAEA confirmed Sunday evening, in a press release posted on Twitter, that “the transfer of data” had been restored “today after a technical interruption of almost two weeks”.
“However, teletransmission does not replace the physical presence, at regular intervals, of IAEA inspectors in the power plants to verify nuclear materials”, underlined the Director General of the Agency, Rafael Grossi. He says he is “pursuing his efforts” to organize “as soon as possible” a visit to the Zaporijjia power plant, which Ukraine opposes as long as the site is occupied by the Russians.
