France has been accused of helping to fund Vladimir Putin’s war effort by continuing to import nuclear fuel from Russia.
Greenpeace on Friday called it “scandalous” that uranium was still being bought by European companies to be used in nuclear power stations across the continent.
The campaigning charity this week filmed the arrival of dozens of drums of uranium, both raw and enriched, from Russia at the northern French port of Dunkirk.
The air is warm and buttery as workers knead mounds of raisin-flecked dough inside the Kexerei bakery in Dresden. This is the busiest time of year but, like every other business and household in the country, the firm’s bills are going up, diminishing the festive cheer.
“Wages have increased drastically, energy costs have risen, as have the prices for our ingredients – butter has doubled in price,” says owner Matthias Walther. “I can’t pass all that on to the customers.”
It’s an issue that preoccupies the German government too. Wary of the impact on the economy, it’s spending around €300bn ($310bn; £260bn) on measures aimed at shielding people and industry from higher prices, particularly soaring energy bills.
Parcels containing animal eyes have been sent to six Ukrainian embassies in Europe, its foreign ministry says.
Spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said the “blood-soaked” packages were found in Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Croatia, and Austria.
It is not clear who sent the packages to the embassies and consulates.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba believes a “well-planned campaign of terror and intimidation of Ukrainian embassies and consulates” is taking place.
#Ukraine: In the East, the Ukrainian 66th Mechanized Brigade struck a Russian tank with an ATGM, damaging it.
Another Russian armoured vehicle and transport truck were also hit and destroyed. pic.twitter.com/ZZkQ4ZU3ZR
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) November 30, 2022
After nine months of war in Ukraine, all Nato countries are short of shells — but thanks to cuts and complacency the situation is particularly acute in Germany
In the basement of an east Berlin hotel, a couple of curious punters eye up a rocket-powered spy plane designed to hurtle through the lower reaches of space at more than five times the speed of sound.
Nearby, a suited man with an expression of childlike absorption pilots a tiny swarm drone with minute precision through the keyboard of a MacBook Air.
A colonel from the Mongolian army, decked out in a sky-blue dress uniform with magnificent golden braids, looks a little lost next to a Lockheed Martin stand bristling with swishy avionics.
I suggest they fall back to the Reichs Chancellery.
Despite Russian president Vladimir Putin’s 83 percent approval rating, his deceptions about losses in Ukraine and gradual increases in the costs of sanctions make him vulnerable to a Western campaign of information warfare. Putin must now deliver victory or face being removed. Skeptics warn that any perceived foreign interference in Russian society will trigger a defensive nationalism that neutralizes any of the effects of Western-influenced agitation. They will highlight the consistent failure of contemporary psychological warfare units in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and will point to NATO’s collective indifference toward learning about Islamic political culture as a cause that led to those failures.
TikTok is hosting dozens of videos that glorify violence by Russia’s Wagner Group of mercenaries and they have been viewed more than a billion times, according to a new report.
Wagner has sent mercenaries into Ukraine in big numbers.
US-based NewsGuard, which focuses on online misinformation, says some of the videos appear to show the execution of a former Russian mercenary.
TikTok has said it will act against any content violating its policies.
The number of Russians in favour of continuing the war in Ukraine has fallen dramatically, with just one in four now supporting the conflict, according to leaked Kremlin opinion polls.
In July, 57 per cent of respondents said they wanted to see Russian troops remain in Ukraine. That figure has fallen to 25 per cent. Support for negotiations to end the nine-month conflict has risen from 32 per cent to 55 per cent.
#Ukraine: A Russian T-80BV was destroyed by Ukrainian forces, presumably in the East. pic.twitter.com/CckdDXMJ8h
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) November 28, 2022
The Ukrainian government has said a scheme it created for Russian soldiers to surrender is getting up to 100 enquiries a day.
The “I Want To Live” project was started in September.
By calling a hotline or entering details through messenger apps, Russian troops can arrange the best way to surrender to Ukrainian forces.
Officials in Kyiv say they’ve had more than 3,500 contacts from invading personnel, as well as their families.
#Ukraine: In the East, the Ukrainian 66th Mechanized Brigade struck a Russian tank with an ATGM, damaging it.
Another Russian armoured vehicle and transport truck were also hit and destroyed. pic.twitter.com/ZZkQ4ZU3ZR
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) November 30, 2022
The man-made famine has been buried from the beginning — and not just by its perpetrators.
Maria Katchmar was 7 when the troops came to her farm.
The soldiers entered her home in Cherkasy Oblast — a region of Ukraine along the Dnieper River — and immediately began to break everything. Windows and doors. Paintings and linens. Even pots for cooking. Her father was ordered to drown his livestock. When he refused, he was sent to Siberia — and the Soviet troops confiscated the animals anyway.
With the family’s two cows, chickens, and pigs gone, Maria’s mother left to find food, leaving her 10 children to fend for themselves for nearly a month.
WASHINGTON, Nov 29 (Reuters) – Russia is firing unarmed cruise missiles that were designed to carry nuclear warheads at targets in Ukraine to try to deplete Kyiv’s stocks of air defenses, a senior U.S. military official said on Tuesday.
The official, who declined to be named, was asked about a Nov. 26 assessment by Britain’s military intelligence which said that Russia was “likely” removing nuclear warheads from cruise missiles and firing the unarmed munitions into Ukraine.
#Ukraine: Ukrainian Artillery fire knocked out two Russian tanks and a BMP-1/2 infantry fighting vehicle in the East. pic.twitter.com/XiEVqObh8q
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) November 29, 2022
Pope Francis has sparked fury in Russia over an interview in which he suggested that Chechen and Buryat members of its armed forces showed more cruelty in Ukraine than ethnic Russian soldiers.
In an interview with the Catholic magazine America published Monday, the pope said that soldiers from Buryatia, where Buddhism is a major religion, and the Muslim-majority Chechnya republic, were “the cruellest” while fighting in Ukraine.
“Generally, the cruellest are perhaps those who are of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryats and so on,” he said.
Fighting around the key eastern Ukraine town of Bakhmut has descended into a bloody morass with hundreds of dead and injured reported daily, as neither Russian or Ukrainian forces were able to make a significant breakthrough after months of fighting.
As Russia moved fresh formations to the area in recent weeks, including reinforcements previously in the Kherson region, the fighting in the Bakhmut sector has descended into trench warfare reminiscent of the first world war.
Over the weekend, images emerged of Ukrainian soldiers in flooded, muddy trenches and battlefields dotted with the stumps of trees cut down by withering artillery barrages.
#Ukraine: The first footage of a 105mm M101 howitzer, supplied by 🇱🇹 Lithuania to Ukraine earlier this year, in action with the AFU. Although these are older designs, more artillery is always useful-which is why Soviet WW2-era 85mm D-44 guns still make appearances. pic.twitter.com/2tQvMQ5Lkd
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) November 27, 2022
Two-thirds of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have depleted their stockpiles by sending weapons to Kiev, according to an alliance official. Even larger NATO states are struggling to meet the demands of Ukraine’s war effort.
The New York Times reported on Sunday the North Atlantic alliance is struggling to meet Kiev’s battlefield needs. According to one NATO official, 20 out of 30 members are “pretty tapped out” regarding their ability to supply Ukraine with additional weapons. While larger states like the US, France, Germany, and Italy have the ability to arm Ukraine, those governments have also resisted sending specific weapons systems requested by Kiev.
The German government has decreed that office temperatures should be limited to a maximum of 19 degrees C. But was this overhasty? It’s already clear that many employers and office workers need to turn the heating up.
In the southwestern German city of Ludwigsburg, the thermometer has recently been registering just 6 C (42.8 F) in the morning. But it isn’t a whole lot warmer inside the local branch of the savings bank.
Here, in this town of 90,000 just north of Stuttgart, the bank clerks are serving customers in a room heated to a bracing 19 C (66.2 F), the temperature that, for several weeks now, has defined German working life.
Since September 1, the whole country has been turning down the heating to save energy. Measures will remain in place until February 28, and people are getting creative in order not to freeze. This Ludwigsburg bank equipped its 500 employees with gray fleece jackets; black woolen gloves complete the look for the well-swaddled bank cashiers at the counter … Welcome to Germany’s new winter reality.
Antifa activists brawled with police on Saturday during an attempt to disrupt a protest against the sanctions war with Russia.
Chaos hit the streets of the German city of Leipzig on Saturday after an attempt by Antifa to violently disrupt a march protesting the Western sanctions war with Russia, their impact on citizens, and the war in Ukraine more generally.
Die Polizei Jagd die Demonstrant*innen durchs Viertel, Steine fliegen #le1809 #wirsindallelinX pic.twitter.com/oLwC2N3UuF
— Leon Enrique Montero (@le0nenrique) September 18, 2021
