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Tag: Russia-Ukraine war

  • UAE president to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Tuesday

    UAE president to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Tuesday

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    Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan heads to Moscow for talks after OPEC+’s oil-production cut announcement and as the war in Ukraine rages.

    United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan will travel to Russia on Tuesday to meet President Vladimir Putin with energy and war likely topping the agenda.

    The announcement on the UAE’s state news agency WAM on Monday came less than a week after OPEC+, a group of oil producers that includes the UAE and Russia, agreed to steep cuts in oil production in defiance of US pressure.

    It plans to slow production by two million barrels per day – its largest supply cut since 2020.

    The presidents will also meet as the Russian invasion of Ukraine threatens world energy supplies.

    “During his visit, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed will discuss with President Putin the friendly relations between the UAE and Russia along with a number of regional and international issues and developments of common interest,” the WAM report said.

    The oil production cut by Saudi-led OPEC and its Russia-led allies has further strained relations between Washington and its traditional Gulf allies in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, sources say.

    The White House suggested last week that it was reviewing its relationship with Saudi Arabia as it seeks ways to reduce OPEC’s control over energy prices.

    UAE Minister of Energy Suhail al-Mazroui has said the production cut was “technical, not political”.

    US President Joe Biden’s administration had pushed hard to prevent it, hoping to keep a lid on petrol prices ahead of November’s elections, in which his Democratic Party could lose control of Congress.

    Biden flew to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in July for a Gulf summit to try to mend relations with Saudi Arabia but left without securing a deal for higher oil production. Ties have been strained between the kingdom and the Biden administration since it took office.

    Ukraine war

    The UAE has maintained a neutral stance towards Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.

    Emirati presidential adviser Anwar Gargash said in March the Gulf state believes “taking sides would only lead to more violence”, and its priority was to “encourage all parties to resort to diplomatic action”.

    The UAE is a longtime US ally, and its stance on the Ukraine conflict reflects an attempt to balance relations in a new world order under which Moscow and Beijing are equally important to the Gulf state, analysts say.

    Meanwhile, the production cut by OPEC+ could spur a recovery in oil prices, which have dropped to about $90 a barrel from $120 months ago.

    Saudi Arabia and other members of OPEC+ have said they seek to prevent volatility rather than to target a particular oil price.

    US officials are considering the release 10 million barrels of oil from the country’s strategic petroleum reserve next month to “protect American consumers and promote energy security”.

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  • Live Updates: Russia-Ukraine War

    Live Updates: Russia-Ukraine War

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    BRUSSELS — The European Union joined an international chorus of criticism and condemnation following the Russian missile attacks across Ukraine early Monday.

    “Russia once again has shown to the world what it stands for. It is terror and brutality,” said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “I know Ukrainians will not be intimidated. And Ukrainians know that we will stand by your side, their side as long as it takes.”

    EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders had to be rushed to an underground shelter as he was visiting the Ukraine capital Kyiv to assess evidence of possible war crimes with local officials.

    EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said such acts have “no place” in the 21st century.

    European Parliament President Roberta Metsola called the attacks “sickening. It shows the world, again, the regime we are faced with: One that targets indiscriminately. One that rains terror & death down on children.”

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    KEY DEVELOPMENTS:

    Putin calls Kerch Bridge attack “a terrorist act” by Kyiv

    ‘War crime:’ Industrial-scale destruction of Ukraine culture

    Indian minister says Ukraine war serves no one’s interests

    Singer driven from Belarus for speaking out tries to rebuild

    Follow all AP stories on the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

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    MOSCOW — Russian war bloggers and political commentators lauded Monday’s attacks but and argued that the strikes on energy infrastructure should incur lasting damage to Ukraine.

    The hawkish Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, who has long pushed for ramping up strikes on Ukraine, said he is now “100 percent happy.” He taunted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying “we warned you that Russia hasn’t even started it in earnest.”

    Margarita Simonyan, the head of the state-funded RT television, cheered the strikes on her messaging app channel and said Ukraine had crossed a red line that by attacking the bridge to Crimea.

    Andrei Kots, a war correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, the top Russian tabloid, voiced hope that Monday’s strikes were “a new mode of action to the entire depth of the Ukrainian state until it loses its capacity to function.”

    “It was just one massive attack on Ukraine’s infrastructure,” noted Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin Moscow-based political analyst. “The Russian public wants massive attacks and the full destruction of the infrastructure that could be used by the Ukrainian army.”

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    TALLINN, Estonia — Several thousand Russian troops will be stationed in Belarus, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko announced Monday.

    Speaking at a meeting with defense and security officials, Lukashenko said Belarus will host the Russian soldiers. He did not give a specific number, but said they would not number a mere one thousand.

    “Be prepared to take in these people in the nearest future and place them where necessary, in accordance to our plan,” Lukashenko told them.

    Russia used the territory of Belarus as a staging ground to send troops into Ukraine. Moscow and Minsk have maintained close economic and military ties.

    Ukrainian military analysts worry that the Belarusian military could invade Ukraine from the north in order to draw Kyiv’s forces from the east and south.

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    MOSCOW — A top Russian official said Monday that Moscow will try to oust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government.

    Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin, said that Russia, along with protecting its people and borders, should “aim for the complete dismantling of Ukraine’s political regime.”

    He alleged that “the Ukrainian state in its current configuration with the Nazi political regime will continue to pose a permanent, direct and clear threat to Russia.”

    Russia has repeatedly sought to cast the government of the Ukrainian president, who is Jewish, of Nazi inclinations, claims which have been mocked by Ukraine and its allies.

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    MOSCOW — Russia’s Defense Ministry said that strikes waged against Ukraine on Monday hit all the designated targets.

    The ministry spokesman, Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said the Russian military launched “massive strikes on military command and communication facilities and energy infrastructure of Ukraine.”

    “The goals behind the strikes have been fulfilled, all the designated facilities have been struck,” he said. Konashenkov didn’t offer any details, and his statement couldn’t be independently confirmed.

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    BERLIN — Germany has condemned a barrage of Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities and promised help in repairing damage to civilian infrastructure.

    Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s spokesman, Steffen Hebestreit, said the German leader assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the solidarity of the Group of Seven industrial powers in a phone call on Monday.

    He said that “Germany will do everything to mobilize additional help and, in particular, to help with the repair and rebuilding of damaged and destroyed civilian infrastructure, for example electricity and heating supplies.”

    Germany currently chairs the G-7. Hebestreit said the group’s leaders will hold a video conference Tuesday on the situation, which Zelenskyy will join.

    Germany said in June that it would provide IRIS-T air defense systems to Ukraine. Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said Monday that the first of four systems will be ready “in the coming days.”

    She said Monday’s attacks underlined the importance of the quick delivery of air-defense systems.

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    MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a series of strikes Monday across Ukraine came in retaliation against the Ukrainian attack on a bridge to Crimea and other attacks in Russia that he described as “terrorist” actions.

    Putin said the Russian military launched precision weapons from the air, sea and ground to target key energy and military command facilities.

    He warned that if Ukraine continues to mount “terrorist attacks” on Russia, Moscow’s response will be “tough and proportionate to the level of threats.”

    The intense, hours-long attack marked a sudden military escalation by Moscow. It came a day after Putin called the explosion Saturday on the huge bridge connecting Russia to its annexed territory of Crimea a “terrorist act” masterminded by Ukrainian special services.

    The missile strikes across Ukraine marked the biggest and most widespread Russian attacks in months. Putin, whose partial mobilization order earlier this month triggered an exodus of hundreds of thousands of men of fighting age from Russia, stopped short of declaring martial law or a counter-terrorist operation as many expected.

    ———

    Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said he and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to create a joint “regional grouping of troops,” but offered no details as to where or when such a grouping might be deployed.

    Lukashenko’s statement follows his repeated claims that Ukraine is plotting an attack on Belarus. At a meeting with military and security officials on Monday, the Belarusian leader reiterated that “carrying out strikes on the territory of Belarus is not just being discussed, it is being planned in Ukraine.”

    Lukashenko added that the Belarusian government was warned “through unofficial channels” about the alleged plans to attack.

    In more than seven months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there has been no indication that Kyiv’s forces are planning an attack on Belarus.

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    Moldova’s deputy prime minster says three cruise missiles launched Monday morning from Russian ships in the Black Sea on Ukraine crossed Moldova’s airspace.

    Nicu Popescu, who is also the minster of foreign affairs and European integration, said he had summoned the Russian ambassador for an explanation.

    Moldova’s defense ministry said the three missiles crossed over the northern part of the country, and that they “posed a danger to the infrastructure (of Moldova) and, in particular, to civil aircraft flying over the country’s airspace.”

    Moldova, a former Soviet republic which shares a border with Ukraine to the south, has been a strong supporter of Ukraine during the war.

    Russian troops have occupied its breakaway Transnistria region since 1991, when the region fought a brief war for independence from Moldova with Moscow’s support.

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    KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces launched dozens of missiles and Iranian-built drones against Ukraine.

    “They want panic and chaos. They want to destroy our energy system,” Zelenskyy said in a video address on Telegram.

    He also said that Russia is “trying to destroy us and wipe us off the face of the earth.”

    The General Staff of the Ukraine Armed Forces said 75 missiles were fired against Ukrainian targets, with 41 of them neutralized by air defenses.

    Zelenskyy said that the attacks Monday morning were clearly timed to inflict the most damage.

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    KYIV, Ukraine — At least eight people were killed and 24 were injured in one of the strikes in Kyiv, said Rostyslav Smirnov, an advisor to the Ukrainian ministry of internal affairs.

    Explosions on Monday rocked multiple cities across Ukraine, including missile strikes on the capital Kyiv for the first time in months.

    The attacks came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin called a Saturday explosion on the huge bridge connecting Russia to its annexed territory of Crimea a “terrorist act” masterminded by Ukrainian special services.

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    DNIPRO, Ukraine — A telecommunications building was hit in the central city of Dnipro, one of several strikes that caused at least three deaths.

    Bystanders said that two rockets hit the building in the western end of the city. A heavily damaged bus could be seen on the street in front of the building, which was strewn with rubble and broken glass.

    Oleksandr Shuklin, a construction worker who was working on a site just adjacent to the strike, said he’d seen one person who had died and another that was taken away by ambulance with injuries. He said he believed the strikes across Ukraine on Monday were Russian retaliation for the explosion on the Kerch bridge on Saturday.

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    KYIV, Ukraine — Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko says that there are casualties and damage to several objects of critical infrastructure as a result of strikes on the Ukrainian capital on Monday.

    The strikes on Kyiv injured several residents who were seen on the streets with blood on their clothes and hands. A young man wearing a blue jacket was sitting on the ground as a medic wrapped a bandage around his head.

    A woman with bandages wrapped around her head had blood all over the front of her blouse. Several cars were also damaged or completely destroyed.

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    KHARKIV, Ukraine — The eastern city of Kharkiv was struck multiple times Monday morning, knocking out power in parts of the city.

    Mayor Ihor Terekhov said that the energy infrastructure building was hit. There is no electricity and water in some of the districts of the city.

    The strikes come two days after a series of explosions rocked the city on Saturday, sending towering plumes of illuminated smoke into the sky and triggering a series of secondary explosions.

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    KYIV, Ukraine — Multiple explosions rocked Kyiv early Monday following months of relative calm in the Ukrainian capital as other cities across Ukraine also came under attack.

    Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported explosions in the city’s Shevchenko district, a large area in the center of Kyiv that includes the historic old town as well as several government offices.

    Lesia Vasylenko, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, posted a photo on Twitter showing that at least one explosion occurred near the main building of the Kyiv National University in central Kyiv.

    The spokesperson for Emergency Service in Kyiv told the AP that there are killed and wounded people. Rescuers are now working in different locations, said Svitlana Vodolaga.

    Ukrainian media reported explosions in a number of other locations, including the western city of Lviv that has been a refuge for many people fleeing the fighting in the east, as well as Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr and Kropyvnytskyi.

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  • Russia unleashes missile barrage against Ukraine: What to know

    Russia unleashes missile barrage against Ukraine: What to know

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    Dozens of explosions have rocked cities across Ukraine, including the capital, Kyiv, in an intensification of Russia’s attacks that could spell a major escalation in the nearly eight-month war.

    “This morning, 75 missiles were launched. 41 of them were neutralised by our air defence,” General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, wrote on Twitter on Monday.

    The barrage of strikes killed several civilians in Kyiv, according to initial reports by Ukrainian officials.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country had launched long-range missiles against Ukrainian energy, military and communications infrastructure, in retaliation for an attack on the bridge linking Russia to the annexed Crimean peninsula on Saturday.

    “This morning, on the advice of the defence ministry and according to a plan from the general staff, a massive strike was carried out with high-precision, long-range weapons… on energy, military command and communications facilities in Ukraine,” Putin said during a meeting with his security council.

    He repeated, without providing evidence, his assertion that Ukraine and its NATO backers were behind still-unexplained ruptures to the Nord Stream gas pipelines which run from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea.

    Putin also accused Ukraine of attempting to carry out an attack against a nuclear power plant in Russia and against the TurkStream gas pipeline.

    “If such attempts continue there will be responses that will be harsh and correspond to the level of threats made against the Russian federation,” he added.

    After the first early morning strikes in Kyiv, more loud explosions were reported in a number of other locations, including the western city of Lviv, near the border with Poland, as well as the city of Dnipro, closer to the front lines in the east.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia is “trying to destroy us and wipe us off the face of the earth”.

    The strikes came as the Kremlin reels from humiliating battlefield setbacks amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive in recent weeks.

    How bad was Kyiv hit?

    Kyiv city police said at least five people had been killed and 12 wounded in the capital, while a preliminary announcement by Rostyslav Smirnov, an adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, said at least eight people were killed and 24 were wounded in just one of the strikes in the city.

    Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands, reporting from Kyiv, said the death toll was “very likely to go up considerably”.

    “Kyiv hasn’t experienced anything like this in months; people stopped paying attention to the air raid sirens, so it’s a very, very different reality this morning,” he added.

    The blasts took place in the Shevchenko district, a large area in the centre of Kyiv that includes the historic old town as well as several government offices, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

    At one of Kyiv’s busiest road junctions, a massive crater had been blown in the intersection. Cars were destroyed, buildings were damaged and emergency workers were on the scene. Two cars and a van near the crater were wrecked, blacked and pitted from shrapnel.

    Residents were seen on the streets with blood on their clothes and hands. A young man wearing a blue jacket sat on the ground as a medic wrapped a bandage around his head. A woman with bandages wrapped around her head had blood all over the front of her blouse. Several cars were also damaged or completely destroyed. Air raid sirens sounded repeatedly across the country.

    The Kyiv metro stopped running as people took shelter in its stations. Power and water supplies were knocked out in numerous areas.

    What happened elsewhere?

    Elsewhere, Ukrainian officials said Russia targeted civilian areas and energy infrastructure as air raid sirens sounded in every region of Ukraine, except Russia-annexed Crimea, for four straight hours.

    Ukrainian media also reported explosions in a number of other locations, including Lviv, Kharkiv, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr and Kropyvnytskyi.

    Kharkiv was hit three times, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said. The strikes knocked out the electricity and water supply.

    Energy infrastructure was also hit in Lviv, Regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyi said.

    What might have prompted the escalation?

    The hits came a day after Putin called the explosion on the Kerch Bridge to Crimea a “terrorist act” carried out by Ukrainian special services.

    The strategic military supply line and emblem of Moscow’s claims on Crimea was partially destroyed. The speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the Duma, called it “an act of war”.

    Commentators on Russian television called for retaliation against Ukraine as Russia’s military leadership faced increasing public criticism for the first time following setbacks on the battlefield.

    Russia’s Security Council was scheduled to meet on Monday to discuss the incident. Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said before the meeting that Russia should kill the “terrorists” responsible for the attack.

    “Russia can only respond to this crime by directly killing terrorists, as is the custom elsewhere in the world. This is what Russian citizens expect,” he was quoted as saying by the state news agency TASS.

    Monday’s strikes also came days after Putin appointed General Sergey Surovikin to lead the war effort in Ukraine, following the sacking of two senior Russian military commanders.

    The general is known for being totally “ruthless” in the Russian military, according to a report by the Jamestown Foundation, a US defence policy think-tank.

    Is Russia losing the war in Ukraine?

    Russia has faced major setbacks on the battlefield since the start of September, with Ukrainian forces bursting through the front lines and recapturing territory in the northeast and the south.

    Thousands of Russian soldiers retreated from the eastern front-line area in recent days, leaving behind major destruction. Bomb craters, burned-out vehicles and corpses were strewn along roads leading towards the eastern front.

    Ukrainian forces last week achieved their biggest breakthrough in the country’s south since the war began on February 24, bursting through Russian defences and advancing rapidly along the Dnieper River, threatening supply lines for thousands of Russian troops.

    Western weaponry has helped the Ukraine military win back more territory in the past month than Russian forces seized in five months.

    Putin responded to the losses by ordering a mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of reservists, proclaiming the annexation of occupied territory and threatening repeatedly to use nuclear weapons.

    Amid reports of ineligible men being called up for the draft, Russia’s first public mobilisation since World War II stoked public anger and triggered a string of rare criticism among Putin’s allies.

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  • Russia strikes Kyiv, multiple Ukrainian cities; many dead

    Russia strikes Kyiv, multiple Ukrainian cities; many dead

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    KYIV, Ukraine — Russia unleashed a lethal barrage of strikes against multiple Ukrainian cities Monday, smashing civilian targets including downtown Kyiv where at least eight people were killed.

    The intense, hours-long attack marked a sudden military escalation by Moscow. It came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin called a Saturday explosion on the huge bridge connecting Russia to its annexed territory of Crimea a “terrorist act” masterminded by Ukrainian special services.

    At least eight people were killed and 24 were injured in just one of the Kyiv strikes, according to preliminary information, said Rostyslav Smirnov, an adviser to the Ukrainian ministry of internal affairs.

    The sustained barrage on major cities hit residential areas and critical infrastructure facilities alike, portending a major surge in the war amid a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in recent weeks. It came a few hours before Putin was due to hold a meeting with his security council, as Moscow’s war in Ukraine approaches its eight-month milestone and the Kremlin reels from humiliating battlefield setbacks in areas it is trying to annex.

    Blasts struck in the capital’s Shevchenko district, a large area in the center of Kyiv that includes the historic old town as well as several government offices, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

    Some of the strikes hit near the government quarter in the symbolic heart of the capital, where Parliament and other major landmarks are located. A glass tower housing offices was significantly damaged, most of its blue-tinted windows blown out.

    Residents were seen on the streets with blood on their clothes and hands. A young man wearing a blue jacket sat on the ground as a medic wrapped a bandage around his head. A woman with bandages wrapped around her head had blood all over the front of her blouse. Several cars were also damaged or completely destroyed. Air raid sirens sounded repeatedly across the country and in Kyiv.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces launched dozens of missiles and Iranian-built drones against Ukraine.

    The General Staff of the Ukraine Armed Forces said 75 missiles were fired against Ukrainian targets, with 41 of them neutralized by air defenses.

    The targets were civilian areas and energy facilities in 10 cities, Zelenskyy said in a video address. “(The Russians) chose such a time and such targets on purpose to inflict the most damage,” Zelenskyy said.

    The morning strikes sent Kyiv residents back into bomb shelters for the first time in months. The city’s subway system stopped train services and made the stations available once more as bomb shelters.

    While air raid sirens have continued throughout the war in Ukraine’s major cities across the country, in Kyiv and other areas where there have been months of calm many Ukrainians had begun to ignore their warnings and go about their normal business.

    That changed on Monday morning. The attacks arrived in Kyiv at the start of the morning rush hour, when commuter traffic was beginning to pick up. At least one of the vehicles struck near the Kyiv National University appeared to be a commuter minibus, known as a “marshrutka,” and a popular albeit often crowded alternative to the city’s bus and metro routes.

    Nearby, at least one strike landed in the popular Shevchenko Park, leaving a large hole near a children’s playground.

    Lesia Vasylenko, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, posted a photo on Twitter showing that at least one explosion occurred near the main building of the Kyiv National University in central Kyiv.

    Elsewhere, Russia targeted civilian areas and energy infrastructure as air raid sirens sounded in every region of Ukraine, except Russia-annexed Crimea, for four straight hours.

    Associated Press journalists in Dnipro city saw the bodies of multiple people killed at an industrial site on the city’s outskirts. Windows in the area had been blown out and glass littered the street. A telecommunications building was hit.

    Ukrainian media also reported explosions in a number of other locations, including the western city of Lviv that has been a refuge for many people fleeing the fighting in the east, as well as in Kharkiv, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr and Kropyvnytskyi.

    Kharkiv was hit three times, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said. The strikes knocked out the electricity and water supply. Energy infrastructure was also hit in Lviv, Regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyi said.

    Three cruise missiles launched against Ukraine from Russian ships in the Black Sea crossed Moldova’s airspace, the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Nicu Popescu complained.

    A day earlier, Putin had called the attack on the Kerch Bridge to Crimea a terrorist act carried out by Ukrainian special services. In a meeting Sunday with the chairman of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Putin said “there’s no doubt it was a terrorist act directed at the destruction of critically important civilian infrastructure.”

    The Kerch Bridge is important to Russia strategically, as a military supply line to its forces in Ukraine, and symbolically, as an emblem of its claims on Crimea. No one has claimed responsibility for damaging the 12-mile (19-kilometer) -long bridge, the longest in Europe.

    Amid the onslaught, Zelenskyy said on his Telegram account that Russia is “trying to destroy us and wipe us off the face of the earth.”

    The attacks appeared set to bring a fresh bout of international condemnation for Russia.

    German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s spokesman, Steffen Hebestreit, said the Group of Seven industrial powers will hold a videoconference Tuesday on the situation which Zelenskyy will address. Germany currently chairs the G-7.

    Ukrainian Foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba broke off his Africa tour and headed back to Ukraine, saying on Twitter the attacks represented “terror on peaceful Ukrainian cities.”

    Some feared Monday’s attacks may just be the first salvo in a renewed Russian offensive. Ukraine’s Ministry of Education announced that all schools in Ukraine must switch to online classes at least until the end of this week.

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    Sabra Ayres in Kyiv, Vasilisa Stepanenko in Kharkiv, and Justin Spike and Yesica Fisch in Dnipro contributed to this story.

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    Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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  • Explosions rock central Kyiv in apparent missile strikes

    Explosions rock central Kyiv in apparent missile strikes

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    Two explosions rocked Kyiv early Monday following months of relative calm in the Ukrainian capital.

    Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitchko reported explosions in the city’s Shevchenko district, a large area in the center of Kyiv that includes the historic old town as well as several government offices.

    Lesia Vasylenko, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, posted a photo on Twitter showing that at least one explosion occurred near the main building of the Kyiv National University in central Kyiv.

    The spokesperson for Emergency Service in Kyiv told the AP that there are killed and wounded people. Rescuers are now working in different locations, said Svitlana Vodolaga.

    The number of casualties is not yet known.

    The explosions were heard by AP journalists and appeared to be the result of missile strikes. Also on Monday morning, Associated Press journalists reported hearing explosions in the center of Dnipro city.

    Recent fighting has focused on the regions just north of Crimea, including Zaporizhzhia, where six missiles were launched overnight Saturday from Russian-occupied areas of the Zaporizhzhia region.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday called the attack that damaged the huge bridge connecting Russia to its annexed territory of Crimea “a terrorist act” masterminded by Ukrainian special services.

    Also read: Vladimir Putin accuses Ukraine of Crimea bridge blast; calls it terrorism

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  • Explosions rock Kyiv in apparent missile strikes

    Explosions rock Kyiv in apparent missile strikes

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    Two explosions rocked Kyiv early Monday following months of relative calm in the Ukrainian capital

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  • Putin accuses Ukraine of Crimea bridge blast ‘terrorism’

    Putin accuses Ukraine of Crimea bridge blast ‘terrorism’

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    Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine of being behind the Kerch bridge explosion, masterminding an “act of terrorism” that destroyed part of the crucial link between Russia and the annexed territory of Crimea, as calls grow for reprisals.

    The bridge, which holds important strategic and symbolic value to Russia, was partly damaged on Saturday by what Moscow has said was a truck bomb. Road and rail traffic on the 19km (12-mile) bridge was temporarily halted, hindering a vital supply route for Russia’s armed forces battling a renewed Ukrainian counteroffensive.

    “There is no doubt. This is an act of terrorism aimed at destroying critically important civilian infrastructure,” Putin said on Sunday in a video posted on the Kremlin’s Telegram channel.

    “This was devised, carried out and ordered by the Ukrainian special services.”

    Putin is due to convene a meeting of the country’s security council on Monday with the body’s Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev saying that Russia should kill the “terrorists” responsible for the attack.

    “Russia can only respond to this crime by directly killing terrorists, as is the custom elsewhere in the world. This is what Russian citizens expect,” the former president was quoted as saying by the state news agency Tass.

    The damage to the bridge came amid battlefield defeats for Russia in the east and south, and growing concern over the use of nuclear weapons. Russia last month formally annexed four areas of Ukraine following hastily-organised referendums that breached international law, and Putin has repeatedly warned that any attack on Russia could provoke a nuclear response.

    Putin made the accusation against Ukraine during a meeting with Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, who presented the findings of an inquiry into the bridge blast and subsequent fire.

    Bastrykin said the truck had travelled through Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia and Russia’s Krasnodar region before reaching the bridge. Among those who helped in the attack were “citizens of Russia and foreign countries,” Bastrykin added in the video on the Kremlin’s Telegram channel.

    In Kyiv, presidential adviser Mikhail Podolyak called Putin’s accusation “too cynical even for Russia”.

    “Putin accuses Ukraine of terrorism?” he said. “It has not even been 24 hours since Russian planes fired 12 rockets into a residential area of Zaporizhzhia, killing 13 people and injuring more than 50. No, there is only one state terrorist and the whole world knows who he is.”

    Zaporizhzhia targeted

    Podolyak was referring to attacks on the city of Zaporizhzhia in the early hours of Sunday morning that brought down part of a large apartment building.

    The missiles were launched from Russian-occupied areas of the Zaporizhia region, according to the Ukrainian air force. The region is one of the four Russia annexed, although the capital remains under Ukrainian control.

    Oleksandr Kovalenko, a military analyst and head of the website Information Resistance, told Espreso TV website, a prominent digital broadcaster in Ukraine, that Russia may intensify attacks on civilian targets following the Crimea bridge blast.

    “This probably means missile attacks on border areas — Sumy and Chernihiv regions. It could also mean using missiles and [Iranian-made] Shahed-136 drones to hit even deeper into Ukrainian territory,” he said.

    There was morning shelling on Sunday night into Monday, with some people injured when an apartment building in Zaporizhzhia was hit, regional Governor Oleksandr Starukh said early on Monday.

    Zaporizhzhia city — 52km (32 miles) from Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant which Russia has occupied since shortly after the invasion — has been under frequent shelling in recent weeks, with 19 people killed on Thursday.

    Russia denies targeting civilians.

    The White House on Sunday declined direct comment on the bridge blast but said the United States would continue to arm Ukraine.

    Rescuers and residents remove debris in a residential area of Zaporizhzhia that was badly damaged by a Russian attack [Stringer/Reuters]

    Ukraine has recaptured more than 1,170 square kilometres (450 square miles) of land in its southern Kherson region since a counteroffensive against Russia began in late August, a military spokesperson said on Sunday.

    Ukraine achieved lightning success with its offensive in the northeast, but its advance in the south has been slower.

    Recent fighting has focused on the regions just north of Crimea, including Zaporizhzhia.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lamented the latest attack. “Again, Zaporizhzhia. Again, merciless attacks on civilians, targeting residential buildings, in the middle of the night,” he wrote.

    “From the one who gave this order, to everyone who carried out this order: They will answer,” he added.

    Moscow has appointed a new commander to lead the war, air force chief Sergey Surovokin, and announced plans to mobilise some 300,000 reservists in a move that has prompted many Russian men to flee their country.

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  • Ukraine nuclear plant reconnected to grid after line was cut

    Ukraine nuclear plant reconnected to grid after line was cut

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    The U.N. nuclear watchdog says an external power line to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the biggest in Europe, has been repaired after shelling disconnected the facility from the grid and forced it to resort to emergency diesel generators

    BERLIN — An external power line to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — the biggest in Europe — was repaired on Sunday after shelling disconnected the facility from the grid and forced it to resort to emergency diesel generators, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said.

    The International Atomic Energy Agency said the 750-kilovolt line was reconnected to the plant on Sunday evening following repair work by Ukrainian engineers. That enabled the plant to start switching off the generators that had kicked in to provide it with power after the line — its last connection to the grid — was cut early Saturday.

    IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi tweeted that the reconnection was “a temporary relief in a still-untenable situation.”

    The plant has been held by Russian forces for months, but operated by Ukrainian employees. All six reactors at the site are shut down but they still require electricity for cooling and other safety functions.

    Grossi has spent weeks pushing for the establishment of a “nuclear safety and security protection zone” around the plant. He says he will travel to Russia and then see Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an effort to realize that plan.

    Grossi condemned attacks “in areas that could affect the safety and security” of the plant, including in nearby Enerhodar and in the Ukrainian-held provincial capital of Zaporizhzhia.

    “Almost every day now, there is shelling in the region where the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is located and where the plant workers and their families live,” he said. “The shelling must stop, immediately. It is already having an impact on the nuclear safety and security situation at the plant.”

    Ukrainian operating staff told IAEA experts that a convoy of five trucks carrying “vital additional diesel fuel supplies” is currently in the city of Zaporizhzhia and plans to cross the front line to reach the plant on Monday, the agency said. The site currently has diesel reserves for about 10 days. Separately, a supply of diesel provided by the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom has arrived in Enerhodar, the IAEA added.

    Zaporizhzhia is one of four regions in Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin has annexed in violation of international laws.

    Putin signed a decree Wednesday declaring that Russia was taking over the nuclear plant. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry called it a criminal act and said it considered Putin’s decree “null and void.” Ukraine’s state nuclear operator, Energoatom, said it would continue to operate the plant.

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  • Putin calls Kerch Bridge attack “a terrorist act” by Kyiv

    Putin calls Kerch Bridge attack “a terrorist act” by Kyiv

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    ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Russian news reports say President Vladimir Putin is calling the attack on the Kerch Bridge to Crimea a terrorist act carried out by Ukrainian special services.

    “There’s no doubt it was a terrorist act directed at the destruction of critically important civilian infrastructure,” Putin said in a video of a meeting Sunday with the chairman of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin.

    Bastrykin said he had opened a criminal case into an act of terrorism.

    Bastrykin said Ukrainian special services and citizens of Russia and other countries took part in the act.

    “We have already established the route of the truck” that Russian authorities have said set off a bomb and explosion on the bridge, he said. Bastrykin said the truck had been to Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia, Krasnodar (a region in southern Russia) and other places.

    THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

    ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — The couple cowered under a blanket before dawn Sunday when they heard missiles headed again for their city, which has suffered repeated barrages as Russian and Ukrainian forces battle for control of territory that Moscow has illegally annexed.

    “There was one explosion, then another one,” Mucola Markovich said. Then, in a flash, the fourth-floor apartment he shared with his wife was gone, the 76-year-old said, holding back tears.

    The overnight Russian missile strikes on the city of Zaporizhzhia brought down part of a large apartment building, leaving at least a dozen people dead.

    “When it will be rebuilt, I don’t know,” Markovich said. “I am left without an apartment at the end of my life.”

    The strikes come as Russia has suffered a series of setbacks nearly eight months after invading Ukraine in a campaign many thought would be short-lived. In recent weeks, Ukrainian forces have staged a counteroffensive, retaking areas in the south and east, while Moscow’s decision to call up more troops has led to protests and an exodus of tens of thousands of Russians.

    The latest setback for Moscow was an explosion Saturday that hit a huge bridge linking Russia with the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed eight years ago. The attack on the Kerch Bridge damaged an important supply route for the Kremlin’s forces, and was a blow to Russian prestige.

    Recent fighting has focused on the regions just north of Crimea, including Zaporizhzhia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lamented the latest attack in a Telegram post.

    “Again, Zaporizhzhia. Again, merciless attacks on civilians, targeting residential buildings, in the middle of the night,” he wrote. At least 19 people died in Russian missile strikes on apartment buildings in the city on Thursday.

    “From the one who gave this order, to everyone who carried out this order: They will answer,” he added.

    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called the attacks on civilians a war crime and urged an international investigation.

    The six missiles used in Sunday’s overnight attack were launched from Russian-occupied areas of the Zaporizhzhia region, the Ukrainian air force said. The region is one of four Russia claimed as its own this month, though its capital of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.

    Stunned residents watched from behind police tape as emergency crews tried to reach the upper floors of a building that took a direct hit. A chasm at least 12 meters (40-feet) wide smoldered where apartments had once stood.

    In an adjacent apartment building, the missile barrage blew windows and doors out of their frames in a radius of hundreds of feet. At least 20 private homes and 50 apartment buildings were damaged, city council Secretary Anatoliy Kurtev said.

    In the immediate aftermath, the city council said 17 people were killed, but later revised that down to 12. Regional police reported on Sunday afternoon that 13 had been killed and more than 60 wounded, at least 10 of them children.

    Tetyana Lazunko, 73, and her husband, Oleksii, took shelter in the hallway of their top-floor apartment after hearing air raid sirens. The explosion shook the building and sent their possessions flying. Lazunko wept as the couple surveyed the damage to their home of nearly five decades.

    “Why are they bombing us? Why?” she said.

    About 3 kilometers (2 miles) away in another neighborhood ravaged by a missile, three volunteers dug a shallow grave for a German shepherd dog killed in the strike, its leg blown away by the blast.

    Russian officials did not immediately comment on the strikes. Defense officials have similarly avoided direct mention of the blast that damaged the Kremlin’s prized Crimea bridge.

    Some nationalist bloggers have begun to levy rare criticism at Russian Vladimir Putin for failing to address the bridge attack, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted.

    Abbas Gallyamov, an independent Russian political analyst and a former speechwriter for Putin, said the Russian president, who formed a committee Saturday to investigate the bridge explosion, had not responded forcefully enough to satisfy angry war hawks. The attack and response, he said, has “inspired the opposition, while the loyalists are demoralized.”

    “Because once again, they see that when the authorities say that everything is going according to plan and we’re winning, that they’re lying, and it demoralizes them,” he said.

    Putin personally opened the Kerch Bridge in May 2018 by driving a truck across it as a symbol of Moscow’s claims on Crimea. The bridge, the longest in Europe, is vital to sustaining Russia’s military operations in southern Ukraine.

    No one has claimed responsibility for damaging it.

    Traffic over the bridge was temporarily suspended after the blast, but both automobiles and trains were crossing again on Sunday. Russia also restarted car ferries service.

    Crimea is a popular vacation resort for Russians. People trying to drive to the bridge and onto the Russian mainland on Sunday encountered hours-long traffic jams.

    “We were a bit unprepared for such a turn,” said one driver, Kirill Suslov, sitting in traffic. “That’s why the mood is a bit gloomy.”

    The Institute for the Study of War said videos of the bridge indicated the damage from the explosion “is likely to increase friction in Russian logistics for some time” but not cripple Russia’s ability to equip its troops in Ukraine.

    Hours after the explosion, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that the air force chief, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, would now command all Russian troops in Ukraine.

    Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military said Sunday that fierce clashes were taking place around the cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russian forces have claimed some recent territorial gains. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not acknowledge any loss of territory but said “the most tense situation” had been observed around those two cities.

    And in the devastated Ukrainian city of Lyman, which was recently recaptured after a months-long Russian occupation, authorities were searching for the bodies of more civilians. Mark Tkachenko of the Kramatorsk district police said Lyman has become a “humanitarian crisis” that could still hold further grim discoveries like mass graves.

    ———

    Schreck reported from Kyiv.

    ———

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  • ‘Dozens killed or injured’ in Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia

    ‘Dozens killed or injured’ in Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia

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    Ukraine’s military says overnight shelling caused severe damage to residential buildings in the city.

    Dozens of people have been killed in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia after the Russian military shelled the city during the night, the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces says.

    “Overnight, the Russian occupiers cynically struck the residential buildings and civil infrastructure,” the military’s central command said on its Facebook page on Sunday.

    “Information about victims is being confirmed, but it is already known about dozens of dead or injured.”

    Earlier, city official Anatoliy Kurtev said at least 17 people had been killed in an overnight bombardment.

    “As a result of an overnight missile attack on Zaporizhzhia, apartment buildings and roads in a residential area of the city have been damaged,” local official Anatoliy Kurtev, the secretary of the city’s administration, wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

    “At this time, 17 people are known to have died.”

    Russia is under increasing pressure on the battlefield in Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces continue to push forward in a counteroffensive that began in the Kharkiv region at the beginning of last month.

    On Saturday, Moscow announced a new commander for the war, air force chief Sergey Surovikin, after last month announcing the annexation of four occupied areas, in breach of international law, and the mobilisation of some 300,000 reservists.

    The city of Zaporizhzhia is about 125km (80 miles) from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which Russia occupied shortly after invading Ukraine on February 24.

    The plant lost its last external power source in the early hours of Saturday morning amid renewed artillery fire and is now reliant on emergency diesel generators to cool the reactors and meet other safety requirements.

    All six reactors at Europe’s biggest nuclear plant are shut down.

     

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  • Truck bomb hits bridge to Crimea, hurts Russian supply lines

    Truck bomb hits bridge to Crimea, hurts Russian supply lines

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    KYIV, Ukraine — An explosion Saturday caused the partial collapse of a bridge linking the Crimean Peninsula with Russia, damaging a key supply artery for the Kremlin’s faltering war effort in southern Ukraine. Russian authorities said a truck bomb caused the blast and that three people were killed.

    The speaker of Crimea’s Kremlin-backed regional parliament immediately accused Ukraine of being behind the explosion, though Moscow didn’t apportion blame. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly threatened to strike the bridge and some lauded the destruction, but Kyiv stopped short of claiming responsibility.

    The explosion risked a sharp escalation in Russia’s eight-month war, with some Russian lawmakers calling for Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare a “counterterrorism operation” in retaliation, shedding the term “special military operation” that had downplayed the scope of fighting to ordinary Russians.

    Such a move could be used by the Kremlin to further broaden the powers of security agencies, ban rallies, tighten censorship, introduce restrictions on travel and expand a partial military mobilization that Putin ordered last month.

    Hours after the explosion, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that the air force chief, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, would be named commander of all Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. It was the first official appointment of a single commander for all Russian forces in Ukraine.

    Surovikin, who over the summer was placed in charge of Russian troops in southern Ukraine, had led Russian forces in Syria and was accused of overseeing a brutal bombardment that destroyed much of the city of Aleppo.

    Moscow, however, continues to suffer battlefield losses.

    On Saturday, a Kremlin-backed official in Ukraine’s Kherson region announced a partial evacuation of civilians from the southern province, one of four illegally annexed by Moscow last week, amid an ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive. Kirill Stremousov told Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti agency that young children and their parents, as well as the elderly, could be relocated to two southern Russian regions because Kherson was getting “ready for a difficult period.”

    The 19-kilometer (12-mile) Kerch Bridge across the Kerch Strait that links the Black Sea with the Sea of Azov is a tangible symbol of Moscow’s claims on Crimea and has provided an essential link to the peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The $3.6 billion bridge, the longest in Europe, opened in 2018 and is key to sustaining Russia’s military operations in southern Ukraine.

    While Russia seized the areas north of Crimea early during its invasion of Ukraine and built a land corridor to it along the Sea of Azov, Ukraine is pressing a counteroffensive to reclaim those lands.

    Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said that a truck bomb caused seven railway cars carrying fuel to catch fire, resulting in the “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge.” A man and a woman riding in a vehicle across the bridge were killed by the explosion, Russia’s Investigative Committee said. It didn’t provide details on the third victim or what happened to the truck driver.

    The blast occurred even though all vehicles crossing the bridge undergo checks for explosives by state-of-the-art control systems, drawing a stream of critical comments from Russian war bloggers who urged Moscow to retaliate by striking Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.

    The truck that exploded was owned by a resident of the Krasnodar region in southern Russia. Russia’s Investigative Committee said investigators searched the man’s home and were looking at the truck’s route.

    Train and automobile traffic over the bridge was temporarily suspended. Automobile traffic resumed Saturday afternoon on one of the two links that remained intact from the blast, with the flow alternating in each direction and vehicles undergoing a “full inspection procedure,” Crimea’s Russia-backed regional leader, Sergey Aksyonov, wrote on Telegram.

    Rail traffic is expected to resume Saturday night, the Russian Transport Ministry said, while passenger ferry links between Crimea and the Russian mainland were being relaunched Sunday.

    The Russian Defense Ministry said troops in the south were receiving necessary supplies through the land corridor along the Sea of Azov and by sea. Russia’s Energy Ministry said Crimea has enough fuel for 15 days.

    Putin was informed about the explosion and he ordered the creation of a government panel to deal with the emergency.

    The speaker of Crimea’s Kremlin-backed regional parliament blamed Ukraine for the explosion, but downplayed the severity of the damage and said the bridge would be promptly repaired.

    Leonid Slutsky, head of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of Russian parliament, said “consequences will be imminent” if Ukraine is responsible.

    Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Russian Communist Party, said the “terror attack” should serve as a wake-up call.

    “The long-overdue measures haven’t been taken yet, the special operation must be turned into a counterterrorist operation,” he said.

    Sergei Mironov, the head of the Just Russia faction in parliament, said that Russia should respond to the explosion on the bridge by attacking key Ukrainian infrastructure including power plants, bridges and railways.

    The statements, especially from Zyuganov and Slutsky, may herald a decision by Putin to declare a counterterrorism operation.

    The parliamentary leader of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party on Saturday stopped short of claiming that Kyiv was responsible but appeared to cast it as a consequence of Moscow’s takeover of Crimea.

    “Russian illegal construction is starting to fall apart and catch fire. The reason is simple: if you build something explosive, then sooner or later it will explode,” said David Arakhamia, the leader of the Servant of the People party.

    The Ukrainian postal service announced that it would issue stamps commemorating the blast like it did after the sinking of the Moskva, a Russian flagship cruiser, by an Ukrainian strike.

    The secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, tweeted a video with the Kerch Bridge on fire and a video with Marilyn Monroe singing her famous “Happy Birthday Mr. President” song. Putin turned 70 on Friday.

    In Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said “the reaction of the Kyiv regime to the destruction of civilian infrastructure shows its terrorist nature.”

    Local authorities in Crimea made conflicting statements about what the damaged bridge would mean for residents and their ability to buy consumer goods. The peninsula is a popular destination for Russian tourists year-round and home to Sevastopol, a key city and a naval base. A Russian tourist association estimated that 50,000 tourists were in Crimea on vacation at the time of the blast.

    Elsewhere, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has lost its last remaining external power source as a result of renewed shelling and is now relying on emergency diesel generators.

    The blast on the bridge occurred hours after explosions rocked the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Saturday, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and triggering a series of secondary explosions.

    Ukrainian officials accused Russia of pounding Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with surface-to-air missiles and said at least one person was wounded. The strikes targeted two largely residential neighborhoods, the governor said.

    Kharkiv resident Tetiana Samoilenko’s apartment caught fire in the attack. She said she was in the kitchen when the blast struck, sending glass flying.

    “Now I have no roof over my head. Now I don’t know what to do next,” the 80-year-old said.

    ———

    Stepanenko reported from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Francisco Seco contributed from Kharkiv.

    ———

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  • UN: Ukraine nuclear power plant loses external power link

    UN: Ukraine nuclear power plant loses external power link

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    The U.N. nuclear watchdog says that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the biggest in Europe, has lost its last remaining external power source as a result of renewed shelling and is now relying on emergency diesel generators

    BERLIN — Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the biggest in Europe, has lost its last remaining external power source as a result of renewed shelling and is now relying on emergency diesel generators, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Saturday.

    The International Atomic Energy Agency said that the plant’s link to a 750-kilovolt line was cut at around 1 a.m. Saturday. It cited official information from Ukraine as well as reports from IAEA experts at the site, which is held by Russian forces.

    All six reactors at the plant are shut down but they still require electricity for cooling and other safety functions. Plant engineers have begun work to repair the damaged power line and the plant’s generators — not all of which are currently being used — each have sufficient fuel for at least 10 days, the IAEA said.

    “The resumption of shelling, hitting the plant’s sole source of external power, is tremendously irresponsible,” IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said in a statement.

    Grossi visited Kyiv on Thursday. He said he will soon travel to Russia, then make another trip to Ukraine, to further his effort to set up a “nuclear safety and security protection zone” around the plant, which he has advocated for weeks.

    “This is an absolute and urgent imperative,” he said. The IAEA didn’t apportion blame for the shelling.

    Zaporizhzhia is one of four regions that Russian President Vladimir Putin has annexed in violation of international laws. While the nuclear plant has been under Russian control for months, the city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.

    Putin signed a decree Wednesday declaring that Russia was taking over the plant. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry called it a criminal act and said it considered Putin’s decree “null and void.” Ukraine’s state nuclear operator, Energoatom, said it would continue to operate the plant.

    ———

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  • Biden’s ‘Armageddon’ talk edges beyond bounds of US intel

    Biden’s ‘Armageddon’ talk edges beyond bounds of US intel

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s warning that the world is at risk of a nuclear “Armageddon” was designed to send an unvarnished message that no one should underestimate the extraordinary danger if Russia deploys tactical nuclear weapons in its war against Ukraine, administration officials said Friday.

    The president’s grim assessment, delivered during a Democratic fundraiser on Thursday night, rippled around the globe and appeared to edge beyond the boundaries of current U.S. intelligence assessments. U.S. security officials continue to say they have no evidence that Vladimir Putin has imminent plans for a nuclear strike.

    Biden veered into talk about Ukraine at the end of his standard fundraising remarks, saying that Putin was “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.”

    “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he added. He suggested the threat from Putin is real “because his military is — you might say — significantly underperforming.”

    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday did not directly respond to a question about whether Biden had gone into the event intending to invoke Armageddon, as the White House sought to clarify the president’s off-the-cuff comments.

    She told reporters: “Russia’s talk of using nuclear weapons is irresponsible and there’s no way to use them without unintended consequences. It cannot happen.” She added that “if the Cuban missile crisis has taught us anything, it is the value of reducing nuclear risk and not brandishing it.”

    Biden’s national security team for months has warned that Russia could use weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine as it has faced a series of strategic setbacks on the battlefield. But the president’s remarks were the starkest warnings yet by the U.S. government about the nuclear stakes.

    One U.S. official said Biden was also trying to warn against underestimating the danger any level of tactical nuclear weapons.

    There’s some concern in the administration that Russia has determined it can use its nuclear arsenal in a manner short of a “full-blown” nuclear attack on Ukraine and face only limited reaction from U.S. and Western allies who are determined to keep the Ukraine conflict from turning into a broader war, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss administration thinking

    Putin has repeatedly alluded to using his country’s vast nuclear arsenal, including last month when he announced plans to conscript Russian men to serve in Ukraine.

    “I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction … and when the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, to protect Russia and our people, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal,” Putin said. “It’s not a bluff.”

    In Europe, leaders sought to turn down the volume after Biden’s stark warning.

    Asked about Biden’s remarks, French President Emmanuel Macron said it was crucial to speak with care on the nuclear threat.

    “I have always refused to engage in political fiction, and especially … when speaking of nuclear weapons,” Macron said at a EU summit in Prague. “On this issue, we must be very careful.”

    European Council President Charles Michel told reporters that leaders take “every escalation very seriously,”

    “Threats will not intimidate us,” Michel said. “Instead, we are going to remain calm. We are going to keep cool heads and we will, each time, denounce the irresponsible character of these threats.”

    Jean-Pierre reiterated on Friday the U.S. has “not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture nor do we have indications that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons.”

    It’s not the first time that Biden’s comments have appeared to push against the margins of U.S. policy.

    Last month, Biden, in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview, said that “U.S. forces, U.S. men and women, would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. ”

    The White House said after the interview that U.S. policy toward Taiwan hasn’t changed. That policy says Washington wants to see Taiwan’s status resolved peacefully but doesn’t say whether U.S. forces might be sent in response to a Chinese attack.

    In March, as he wrapped up a speech in Warsaw, Biden seemed to call for the ouster of Putin, saying, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Before Biden could even board Air Force One to begin the flight back to Washington, aides were scrambling to clarify that he wasn’t calling for an immediate change in government in Moscow.

    Earlier that month, Biden called Putin a “war criminal” for the Russian onslaught in Ukraine before the White House walked back the comments. The White House had been avoiding applying the “war criminal” label to Putin, because it requires investigation and an international determination.

    After Biden used the term, his then-press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the president was “speaking from his heart” and clarified that the administration acknowledged there is a process for making a formal determination.

    As for Biden’s latest eyebrow-raising remarks, “People sort of say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s Biden. You know, he says this stuff,’” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, and a veteran of nuclear policy research.

    “But overseas countries are saying, ‘Whoa, this is what the U.S. president says,”’ Kristensen said. “And so that means we have to be really careful about using big words” that in themselves can escalate nuclear tensions unintentionally.

    Biden’s strong choice of words could have an have an unintended impact with Russia, Kristensen said, the biggest problem with the president’s latest comments.

    “It’s quite clear to me that Putin will be looking at this and say to himself ’Wow, you know, I got their attention now. So they’re really afraid.’”

    ___

    Associated Press writers Sylvie Corbet in Prague, Lorne Cook in Brussels and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed reporting. Boak reported from Hagerstown, Maryland.

    ___

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  • Ukrainian authorities take stock of ruins in liberated Lyman

    Ukrainian authorities take stock of ruins in liberated Lyman

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    LYMAN, Ukraine — Ukrainian authorities are just beginning to sift through the wreckage of the devastated city of Lyman in eastern Ukraine as they assess the humanitarian toll, and possibility of war crimes, from a months-long Russian occupation.

    Few of the buildings in the city in the Donetsk region — an area which Moscow illegally claimed as Russian territory last week following a staged “referendum” — have survived without damage, and most houses are without basic utilities.

    Walls around the town bear graffitied reminders of the four-month occupation by Russian troops, with words like “Russia,” “USSR” and “Russian World” scrawled on surfaces that are riddled by bullets.

    Mark Tkachenko, communications inspector for the Kramatorsk district police of the Donetsk region, said Friday that authorities are still searching for the bodies of civilians amid the destruction, and trying to determine causes of death.

    “They will look at when people died and how they died. If it was in the period when the city was occupied and they have injuries from Kalashnikov rifles, then of course, it’s a war crime,” Tkachenko told The Associated Press.

    While it is still unclear how many died in the city since it was overrun by Russian forces in May, he said, Lyman today has become a “humanitarian crisis” which could still hold further grim discoveries.

    “Some people died in their houses, some people died in the streets, and the bodies are now being sent to experts for examination,” he said. “For now we are looking for grave sites, and there are probably mass graves.”

    The road approaching Lyman, which Russians used as a strategic logistics and transport hub during its occupation, is littered with miles of desolation left behind from intense fighting as Ukrainian troops pressed to retake it late last week.

    The forests surrounding the city were decimated by the fighting, and the burned out and twisted wreckage of dozens of vehicles lined the road which was pockmarked by craters from falling rockets.

    Tetyana Ignatchenko, spokeswoman for the Donetsk regional administration, said the city’s civilian infrastructure had been “completely destroyed,” and that an effort was ongoing to clear it of the bodies of Russian soldiers abandoned during their army’s retreat.

    “Police and criminologists are working, looking for Russian bodies and collecting them in the streets and forests. There are very many of them because the occupiers didn’t bring them with them,” Ignatchenko said.

    As they left Lyman, Russian soldiers placed mines on the bodies of some of their fallen comrades, set to explode when Ukrainian authorities attempted to clear them, said Tkachenko of the Kramatorsk district police. Some had exploded, but caused no injuries.

    As Ukrainian authorities entered the city, they found that many civilian residents had been killed by shelling while others, mostly older people, had died during the Russian occupation because of a lack of food and medicine, Tkachenko said.

    Looting of civilian homes by Russian soldiers, he said, was widespread.

    Anatolii, 71, a Lyman resident who lined up in the city’s central square Friday to receive humanitarian aid, said Russian soldiers generally left people his age alone, but that he had heard rumors of prolonged detentions of civilians and that his daughter’s home had been robbed.

    “I was looking after my daughter’s house when they came over and opened the house with a crowbar and stole everything that they needed and escaped,” he said. “What could I say, and to whom? Could I fight with them? No.”

    The liberation of Lyman came as the latest in a series of gains by Ukrainian forces as part of successful counteroffensive operations in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Kherson regions.

    Even as Ukraine has recovered thousands of square miles of territory in the last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed treaties to illegally annex the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Western leaders decried the move as illegitimate and a reckless escalation of the war, which began on Feb. 24.

    As Ukrainian forces moved back into liberated cities and towns, they discovered some instances of mass graves and torture sites, such as those recently observed by AP journalists in recaptured settlements in the Kharkiv region.

    In one liberated city, Izium, an AP investigation uncovered 10 separate torture sites.

    Ukrainian media earlier reported the discovery of a mass grave in Lyman, but authorities on site wouldn’t confirm or deny its existence and wouldn’t elaborate further, saying only that investigations were ongoing.

    But Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko on Friday said that two burial sites had been found in Lyman, including around 200 individual civilian graves and a mass grave with an undetermined number of bodies.

    On Friday, Tetyana, who didn’t want to give her last name, wheeled a hand cart full of squashes toward her house on the outskirts of Lyman on a street where most houses bore damage from the fighting.

    Her home had been heavily damaged in a Russian attack, she said, pointing at what used to be a window in her kitchen from when a rocket came through the wall.

    “I was at home and fell into the bathroom, and my daughter was in the hallway. How we weren’t killed, I don’t know,” she said. “The storage shed is destroyed, the roof was destroyed, but now we’ve repaired it. Here you see the doors are also damaged.”

    Tetyana pointed to a pair of green trousers she was wearing, and several camouflage coats hanging on hooks outside her house. She’d found the Russian uniforms, she said, “laying around. All my stuff was destroyed so I have nothing to wear.”

    Daria Yevheniivna, 15, said that while she had spent most of the occupation at home in hiding, she now feels a new sense of hope that her city can be salvaged.

    “Everything got better,” she said. “It became very calm. I don’t hear shooting anymore, and I can sleep in the house, not in the cellar. People became more kind.”

    Anatolii, who also didn’t give his last name, complained as he spoke on the central square that some of his neighbors only watched Russian television, which he said had “messed with their heads.” He has tried to influence them, he said, but without success.

    “There are some people who were waiting for the Russians, but I am Ukrainian, and we don’t like them,” he said.

    “War is war. This is a real war,” he said. “Russians shout that it’s a special operation, but it’s only a special operation for them. For us, it’s a real war.”

    ———

    Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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  • Large fire reported on key bridge linking Russia to Crimea

    Large fire reported on key bridge linking Russia to Crimea

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    KYIV, Ukraine — Russian state-backed media are reporting that a fire has occurred on the bridge linking mainland Russia with the Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula.

    RIA-Novosti and the Tass news agency quoted local Russian official Oleg Kryuchkov as saying an object thought to be a fuel storage tank caught fire and that traffic has been stopped on the bridge.

    Images shared on social media purported to show fire and damage to the span.

    The authenticity of the reports and images could not be immediately verified.

    The crossing is a pair of road and rail bridges that Russia built after it seized and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in violation of international law in 2014.

    The fire occurred hours after explosions rocked the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Saturday, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and triggering a series of secondary explosions.

    Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that the early-morning explosions were the result of missile strikes in the center of the city. He said that the blasts sparked fires at one of the city’s medical institutions and a nonresidential building. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

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  • Multiple explosions rock eastern Ukraine city of Kharkiv

    Multiple explosions rock eastern Ukraine city of Kharkiv

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    KYIV, Ukraine — A series of explosions rocked the eastern Ukraine city of Kharkiv early Saturday, sending towering plumes of illuminated smoke in the sky and triggering a series of secondary explosions.

    The blasts came as Russia concentrated attacks Friday in its increasingly troubled invasion of Ukraine on areas it illegally annexed, while the death toll from earlier missile strikes on apartment buildings in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia rose to 14.

    It was not immediately clear what caused the Kharkiv blasts or what was hit.

    THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

    KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia concentrated attacks Friday in its increasingly troubled invasion of Ukraine on areas it illegally annexed as the death toll from earlier missile strikes on apartment buildings in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia rose to 14.

    In a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his conduct of Europe’s worst armed conflict since World War II, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to human rights organizations in his country and Ukraine, and to an activist jailed in Russia’s ally Belarus.

    Berit Reiss-Andersen, the committee’s chair, said the honor went to “three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence.”

    Putin this week illegally claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory, including the Zaporizhzhia region that is home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, whose reactors were shut down last month.

    Fighting near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has alarmed the U.N.’s atomic energy watchdog, which on Friday doubled to four the number of its inspectors monitoring plant safeguards. An accident there could release 10 times more potentially lethal radiation than the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine 36 years ago, Ukrainian Environmental Protection Minister Ruslan Strilets said Friday.

    “The situation with the occupation, shelling, and mining of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plants by Russian troops is causing consequences that will have a global character,” Strilets told The Associated Press.

    The U.N. watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported more trouble at the plant, saying Friday on Twitter that external power had again been cut off to one of Zaporizhzhia’s shutdown reactors, necessitating the use of emergency backup diesel generators to run safety systems.

    The city of Zaporizhzhia is located 53 kilometers (33 miles) away from the nuclear plant as a crow flies and remains under Ukrainian control. To cement Russia’s claim to the region, Russian forces bombarded the city with S-300 missiles on Thursday, with more attacks reported Friday.

    Ukrainian authorities said the death toll from the strikes on apartment buildings rose to 14 on Friday, while 12 people wounded in the bombardment remained hospitalized.

    Missiles also struck the city overnight, wounding one person, Zaporizhzhia Gov. Oleksandr Starukh said. Russia also used Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones there for the first time and damaged two infrastructure facilities, he said.

    With its army losing ground to a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south and east, Russia has deployed unmanned, disposable Iranian-made drones that are cheaper and less sophisticated than missiles but still can damage ground targets.

    The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Russia’s use of the explosives-packed drones was unlikely to affect the course of the war.

    “They have used many drones against civilian targets in rear areas, likely hoping to generate nonlinear effects through terror. Such efforts are not succeeding,” analysts at the think tank wrote.

    In other Moscow-annexed areas, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported Friday that its forces had repelled Ukrainian advances near the city of Lyman and retaken three villages elsewhere in the eastern Donetsk region. The ministry also claimed that Russian forces had prevented Ukrainian troops from advancing on several villages in the southern Kherson region.

    Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address Friday that this week alone, his military has recaptured 776 square kilometers (300 square miles) of territory in the east and 29 settlements, including six in the Luhansk region, which Putin has annexed. In total, Ukrainian forces have liberated 2,434 square kilometers (940 square miles) of land and 96 settlements since the beginning of its counteroffensive, he said.

    In Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian troops shelled the city of Nikopol overnight, killing one person, wounding another and damaging buildings, natural gas pipelines and electricity systems, the governor reported. Nikopol lies along the Dnieper River across from Russian-held territory near the nuclear power plant. The city has been shelled frequently for weeks.

    The trail of Russia’s devastation and death from areas where its troops retreated became clearer Friday. A report by Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Yevhen Yenin revealed that 530 bodies of civilians have been found in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region since Sept. 7.

    The residents killed during the Russian occupation included 257 men, 225 women and 19 children, with 29 people unidentified, Yenin said. Most of the bodies were found in a previously disclosed mass grave in the city of Izium.

    According to Yenin, the recovered bodies bore signs of gunshots, explosions and torture. Some people had ropes around their necks, hands tied behind their back, bullet wounds to their knees and broken ribs.

    Authorities have identified 22 torture sites in parts of the Kharkiv region that Ukrainian forces recently liberated, said Serhiy Bolvinov, a regional police official.

    In recently recaptured Lyman, workers found 200 individual graves and a mass grave with an unknown number of victims, Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko reported on Telegram. In Sviatohirsk, 24 kilometers (15 miles) from Lyman, 21 bodies of civilians were reburied.

    Russian military equipment and weapons, meanwhile, is getting into Ukrainian hands. Britain’s Ministry of Defense said Friday that Ukrainian forces have captured at least 440 tanks and about 650 armored vehicles since the Russian invasion started Feb. 24.

    “The failure of Russian crews to destroy intact equipment before withdrawing or surrendering highlights their poor state of training and low levels of battle discipline,” the British ministry said. “With Russian formations under severe strain in several sectors and increasingly demoralized troops, Russia will likely continue to lose heavy weaponry.”

    Putin ordered a partial mobilization of Russian army reservists last month to reinforce manpower on the front lines in Ukraine. Mistakes have dogged the military call-up, however, and tens of thousands of men have fled Russia, unwilling to fight Putin’s war.

    That has left Russia desperate for troop reinforcements. The Ukrainian military said Friday that 500 former criminals have been mobilized to reinforce Russian ranks in the eastern Donetsk region, where Ukrainian forces have retaken territory. Law enforcement officers are commanding the new units, the military said.

    Russia’s state news agency Tass reported Friday that a court in the Russian city of Penza had dismissed the first case against a Russian man called up to serve but who refused. The 32-year-old man’s lawyers had argued that the law under which he was charged applies only to conscription evaders, not those subject to the partial mobilization.

    In another sign of trouble, reports have surfaced of poor training and few supplies for the new Russian troops. At least two Russian cities — St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod — announced Friday they were canceling their Russian New Year’s and Christmas celebrations and redirecting that money to buy supplies for Russian troops.

    Under increasing pressure from his own supporters as well as critics, Putin continued to reshuffle his military’s leadership, replacing the commander of Russia’s eastern military district.

    ———

    Associated Press writer Hanna Arhirova in Ukraine contributed to this report.

    ———

    Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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  • Europe hails united stand over Russia’s war in Ukraine

    Europe hails united stand over Russia’s war in Ukraine

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    PRAGUE (AP) — Leaders across Europe hailed on Thursday their united front against Russia’s war on Ukraine at a summit that also saw the heads of old foes Turkey and Armenia meet face-to-face for the first time since they agreed last year to put decades of bitterness behind them.

    The inaugural summit of the European Political Community brought together the 27 European Union member countries, aspiring partners in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, as well as neighbors like Britain — the only country to have left the EU.

    Russia was the one major European power not invited to the gathering at Prague Castle along with Belarus, its neighbor and supporter in the war against Ukraine; a conflict fueling an energy crisis and high inflation that are wreaking havoc on Europe’s economies.

    “Leaders leave this summit with greater collective resolve to stand up to Russian aggression. What we have seen in Prague is a forceful show of solidarity with Ukraine, and for the principles of freedom and democracy,” said U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss.

    Her Belgian counterpart, Alexander De Croo, said “if you just look at the attendance here, you see the importance. The whole European continent is here, except two countries: Belarus and Russia. So it shows how isolated those two countries are.”

    Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins said the fallout from the war is something they all have in common.

    “It’s affecting all of us in the security sense, and its affecting all of us through our economies, through the rising energy costs. So the only way that we can handle this is working together, and not just the European Union. All the European countries need to work together,” he said.

    Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal was in Prague for the meeting, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the leaders by video link.

    “There are no representatives of Russia with us here — a state that geographically seems to belong to Europe, but from the point of view of its values and behavior is the most anti-European state in the world,” Zelenskyy said.

    “We are now in a strong position to direct all possible powers of Europe to end the war and guarantee long-term peace,” he said. “For Ukraine, for Europe, for the world.”

    The new forum is the brainchild of French President Emmanuel Macron and is backed by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. They say it should aim to boost security and prosperity across the continent.

    Critics claim the new forum is an attempt to put the brakes on EU enlargement. Others fear it may become a talking shop, perhaps convening once or twice a year but devoid of any real clout or content.

    “We will never accept (a situation) where this platform brings harm to our accession negotiations,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters. “Our expectation is for the European Political Community to help strengthen and contribute to our relations with the EU.”

    But the host of the event, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, said it had been a success.

    “We don’t replace existing formats of cooperation. We did not adopt any official resolution. We just feel the need of having space for informal exchange of views on ongoing events in Europe and beyond,” Fiala told reporters. He said the next meeting will be held in Moldova, then others in Spain and the U.K.

    The summit did create space for a series of meetings. Erdogan and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held landmark talks. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was also present at what appeared to be an informal gathering of the three leaders.

    Turkey and Armenia, which have no diplomatic relations, agreed last year to start talks aimed at putting decades of enmity behind them and reopen their joint border. Special envoys appointed by the two countries have held four rounds of talks since then.

    Truss, Macron and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte held talks on migration, as the U.K. seeks further help in preventing migrants from reaching its shores without authorization. Macron was even cautiously optimistic that the EU and the U.K. might be able to be put their Brexit differences behind them.

    “I do hope this is a new phase of our common relations and that this is the beginning of the day after,” he told reporters.

    Macron listed topics on which leaders agreed to work by the next summit in Moldova, including protecting “key facilities” like pipelines, undersea cables, satellites. “We need a European strategy to protect them,” he said, after two gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea were apparently sabotaged.

    But some old enmities also found a new forum to air themselves in. Referring to Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Erdogan said that “a certain gentleman became very disturbed” by his remarks in one meeting. Erdogan was also critical of the Greek leadership in Cyprus.

    ___

    Suzan Fraser in Ankara and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.

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  • IMF warns of higher recession risk and darker global outlook

    IMF warns of higher recession risk and darker global outlook

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Two principal economists painted very different pictures Thursday of what the global economy will look like in the coming years.

    Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told an audience at Georgetown University on Thursday that the IMF is once again lowering its projections for global economic growth in 2023, projecting world economic growth lower by $4 trillion through 2026.

    “Things are more likely to get worse before it gets better,” she said, adding that the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February has dramatically changed the IMF’s outlook on the economy. “The risks of recession are rising,” she said, calling the current economic environment a “period of historic fragility.”

    Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, on the other side of town at the Center for Global Development, focused on how the U.S. and its allies could contribute to making longer-term investments to the global economy.

    She called for ambitious policy solutions and didn’t use the word “recession” once. But despite Yellen’s more measured view, she said “the global economy faces significant uncertainty.”

    The war in Ukraine has driven up food and energy prices globally — in some places exponentially — with Russia, a key global energy and fertilizer supplier, sharply escalating the conflict and exposing the vulnerabilities to the global food and energy supply.

    Additionally, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, rising inflation and worsening climate conditions are also impacting world economies and exacerbating other crises, like high debt levels held by lower-income countries.

    Georgieva said the IMF estimates that countries making up one-third of the world economy will see at least two consecutive quarters of economic contraction this or next year and added that the institution downgraded its global growth projections already three times. It now expects 3.2% for 2022 and now 2.9% for 2023.

    The bleak IMF projections come as central banks around the world raise interest rates in hopes of taming rising inflation. The U.S. Federal Reserve has been the most aggressive in using interest rate hikes as an inflation-cooling tool, and central banks from Asia to England have begun to raise rates this week.

    Georgieva said “tightening monetary policy too much and too fast — and doing so in a synchronized manner across countries — could push many economies into prolonged recession.” Maurice Obstfeld, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, recently wrote that too much tightening by the Federal Reserve could “drive the world economy into an unnecessarily harsh contraction.”

    Yellen agreed Thursday that “macroeconomic tightening in advanced countries can have international spillovers.”

    The two economists’ speeches come ahead of annual meetings next week of the 190-nation IMF and its sister-lending agency, the World Bank, which intend to address the multitude of risks to the global economy.

    Georgieva said the updated World Economic Outlook of the fund set to be released next week downgrades growth figures for next year.

    Many countries are already seeing major impacts of the invasion of Ukraine on their economies, and the IMF’s grim projections are in line with other forecasts for declines in growth.

    The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last week said the global economy is set to lose $2.8 trillion in output in 2023 because of the war.

    The projections come after the OPEC+ alliance of oil-exporting countries decided Wednesday to sharply cut production to support sagging oil prices in a move that could deal the struggling global economy another blow and raise politically sensitive pump prices for U.S. drivers just ahead of key national elections in November.

    Yellen said since many developing countries are facing all challenges simultaneously, from debt to hunger to exploding costs, “this is no time for us to retreat.”

    “We need ambition in updating our vision for development financing and delivery. And we need ambition in meeting our global challenges,” she said.

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  • EXPLAINER: How will OPEC+ cuts affect gas prices, inflation?

    EXPLAINER: How will OPEC+ cuts affect gas prices, inflation?

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    FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Major oil-producing countries led by Saudi Arabia and Russia have decided to slash the amount of oil they deliver to the global economy.

    And the law of supply and demand suggests that can only mean one thing: higher prices are on the way for crude, and for the diesel fuel, gasoline and heating oil that are produced from oil.

    The decision by the OPEC+ alliance to cut 2 million barrels a day starting next month comes as the Western allies are trying to cap the oil money flowing into Moscow’s war chest after it invaded Ukraine.

    Here is what to know about the OPEC+ decision and what it could mean for the economy and the oil price cap:

    WHY IS OPEC+ CUTTING PRODUCTION?

    Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman says that the alliance is being proactive in adjusting supply ahead of a possible downturn in demand because a slowing global economy needs less fuel for travel and industry.

    “We are going through a period of diverse uncertainties which could come our way, it’s a brewing cloud,” he said, and OPEC+ sought to remain “ahead of the curve.” He described the group’s role as “a moderating force, to bring about stability.”

    Oil prices had fallen after a summer of highs. Now, after the OPEC+ decision, they are heading for their biggest weekly gain since March. Benchmark U.S. crude rose 3.2% on Friday, to $91.31 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, rose 2.8% to $97.09, though it’s still down 20% from mid-June, when it traded at over $123 per barrel.

    One big reason for the slide is fears that large parts of the global economy are slipping into recession as high energy prices — for oil, natural gas and electricity — drive inflation and rob consumers of spending power.

    Another reason: The summer highs came about because of fears that much of Russia’s oil production would be lost to the market over the war in Ukraine.

    As Western traders shunned Russian oil even without sanctions, customers in India and China bought those barrels at a steep discount, so the hit to supply wasn’t as bad as expected.

    Oil producers are wary of a sudden collapse in prices if the global economy goes downhill faster than expected. That’s what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and during the global financial crisis in 2008-2009.

    HOW IS THE WEST TARGETING RUSSIAN OIL?

    The U.S. and Britain imposed bans that were mostly symbolic because neither country imported much Russia oil. The White House held off pressing the European Union for an import ban because EU countries got a quarter of their oil from Russia.

    In the end, the 27-nation bloc decided to cut off Russian oil that comes by ship on Dec. 5, while keeping a small amount of pipeline supplies that some Eastern European countries rely on.

    Beyond that, the U.S. and other Group of Seven major democracies are working out the details on a price cap on Russian oil. It would target insurers and other service providers that facilitate oil shipments from Russia to other countries. The EU approved a measure along those lines this week.

    Many of those providers are based in Europe and would be barred from dealing with Russian oil if the price is above the cap.

    HOW WILL OIL CUTS, PRICE CAPS AND EMBARGOES CLASH?

    The idea behind the price cap is to keep Russian oil flowing to the global market, just at lower prices. Russia, however, has threatened to simply stop deliveries to a country or companies that observe the cap. That could take more Russian oil off the market and push prices higher.

    That could push costs at the pump higher, too.

    U.S. gasoline prices that soared to record highs of $5.02 a gallon in mid-June had been falling recently, but they have been on the rise again, posing political problems for President Joe Biden a month before midterm elections.

    Biden, facing inflation at near 40-year highs, had touted the falling pump prices. Over the past week, the national average price for a gallon rose 9 cents, to $3.87. That’s 65 cents more than Americans were paying a year ago.

    “It’s a disappointment, and we’re looking at what alternatives we may have,” he told reporters about the OPEC+ decision.

    WILL THE OPEC PRODUCTION CUT MAKE INFLATION WORSE?

    Likely yes. Brent crude should reach $100 per barrel by December, says Jorge Leon, senior vice president at Rystad Energy. That is up from an earlier prediction of $89.

    Part of the 2 million-barrel-per-day cut is only on paper as some OPEC+ countries aren’t able to produce their quota. So the group can deliver only about 1.2 million barrels a day in actual cuts.

    That’s still going to have a “significant” effect on prices, Leon said.

    “Higher oil prices will inevitably add to the inflation headache that global central banks are fighting, and higher oil prices will factor into the calculus of further increasing interest rates to cool down the economy,” he wrote in a note.

    That would exacerbate an energy crisis in Europe largely tied to Russian cutbacks of natural gas supplies used for heating, electricity and in factories and would send gasoline prices up worldwide. As that fuels inflation, people have less money to spend on other things like food and rent.

    Other factors also could affect oil prices, including the depth of any possible recession in the U.S. or Europe and the duration of China’s COVID-19 restrictions, which have sapped demand for fuel.

    WHAT WILL THIS MEAN FOR RUSSIA?

    Analysts say that Russia, the biggest producer among the non-OPEC members in the alliance, would benefit from higher oil prices ahead of a price cap. If Russia has to sell oil at a discount, at least the reduction starts at a higher price level.

    High oil prices earlier this year offset much of Russia’s sales lost from Western buyers avoiding its supply. The country also has managed to reroute some two-thirds of its typical Western sales to customers in places like India.

    But then Moscow saw its take from oil slip from $21 billion in June to $19 billion in July to $17.7 billion in August as prices and sales volumes fell, according to the International Energy Agency. A third of Russia’s state budget comes from oil and gas revenue, so the price caps would further erode a key source of revenue.

    Meanwhile, the rest of Russia’s economy is shrinking due to sanctions and the withdrawal of foreign businesses and investors.

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  • Experts: Russia finding new ways to spread propaganda videos

    Experts: Russia finding new ways to spread propaganda videos

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    Russia has devised yet another way to spread disinformation about its invasion of Ukraine, using digital tricks that allow its war propaganda videos to evade restrictions imposed by governments and tech companies.

    Accounts linked to Russian state-controlled media have used the new method to spread dozens of videos in 18 different languages, all without leaving telltale signs that would give away the source, researchers at Nisos, a U.S.-based intelligence firm that tracks disinformation and other cyber threats, said in a report released Wednesday.

    The videos push Kremlin conspiracy theories blaming Ukraine for civilian casualties as well as claims that residents of areas forcibly annexed by Russia have welcomed their occupiers.

    English-language versions of the Russian propaganda videos are now circulating on Twitter and lesser-known platforms popular with American conservatives, including Gab and Truth Social, created by former President Donald Trump, giving Russia a direct conduit to millions of people.

    In an indication of the Kremlin’s ambitions and the sprawling reach of its disinformation operations, versions of the videos were also created in Spanish, Italian, German and more than a dozen other languages.

    “The genius of this approach is that the videos can be downloaded directly from Telegram and it erases the trail that researchers try to follow,” Nisos’ senior intelligence analyst Patricia Bailey told The Associated Press. “They are creative and adaptable. And they are analyzing their audience.”

    The European Union moved to ban RT and Sputnik, two of Russia’s leading state-run media outlets, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February. Tech companies such as Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram also announced they would ban content from the outlets within the 27-nation EU, undermining Russia’s ability to spread its propaganda.

    Russian attempts to get around the new rules began almost immediately. New websites were created to host videos that make debunked claims about the war. Russian diplomats took on some of the work.

    The latest effort revealed by analysts at Nisos involved uploading propaganda videos to Telegram, a loosely moderated platform that is broadly popular in Eastern Europe and used by many conservatives in the United States. In some cases, watermarks identifying the video as RT’s were removed in a further attempt to disguise their source.

    Once on Telegram, the videos were downloaded and reposted on platforms including Twitter without any labels or other indications that the video was produced by Russian state media. Hundreds of accounts that later posted or reposted the videos were linked by Nisos researchers to the Russian military, embassies or state media.

    Some of the accounts appeared to use fake profile photos or posted content in strange ways that suggested they were inauthentic.

    One example: a Twitter account supposedly run by a woman living in Japan that had a singular interest in Russian propaganda. Instead of posting about a variety of topics such as entertainment, food, travel or family, the account user only posted Russian propaganda videos — and not just in Japanese, but also in Farsi, Polish, Spanish and Russian.

    The account also cited or reposted content from Russian embassies hundreds of times, researchers found, showing again the close relationship between Russian diplomats and the country’s propaganda work.

    When it comes to Russia’s overall disinformation capabilities, Bailey said, the network is “just one piece of a puzzle that is quite large.”

    Twitter labels content that it can identify as coming from Russian state media. Since late February, the company says it’s added labels to more than 900,000 different Tweets that contained links to Russian state outlets like RT. In addition, the platform does not artificially promote content from state media accounts.

    “We use labels to make it clear on Twitter when an account is operated by a state actor, such as a state-backed media outlet, and we will not recommend or amplify Tweets from these types of accounts,” a company spokesperson told The AP.

    More examples of Russian disinformation campaigns have emerged as the war has dragged on.

    Last week, Russia sought to spread a baseless conspiracy theory blaming the U.S. for sabotage to the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

    The same week, Meta announced the discovery of a sprawling Russian disinformation network that created websites designed to look like major European news outlets. Instead of news, the websites carried propaganda intended to drive a wedge between Ukraine and its western allies.

    That operation was the largest of its kind to originate in Russia since the war began, researchers concluded.

    “The network exhibited an overarching pattern of targeting Europe with anti-Ukraine narratives and expressions of support for Russian interests,” according to a report from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which helped identify the network disabled by Meta.

    ___

    Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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