KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The Russian military says the flagship of its Black Sea fleet sank while being towed to a port after being badly damaged.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the Moskva sank Thursday in a storm after being gutted by fire. The ministry previously said that a fire on the warship set off some of its weapons and forced the crew to evacuate.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused European countries that continue to buy Russian oil of “earning their money in other people’s blood”.
In an interview with the BBC, President Zelensky singled out Germany and Hungary, accusing them of blocking efforts to embargo energy sales, from which Russia stands to make up to £250bn ($326bn) this year.
There has been a growing frustration among Ukraine’s leadership with Berlin, which has backed some sanctions against Russia but so far resisted calls to back tougher action on oil sales.
Buy Russian oil, send Ukraine weapons to fight the Russians. Watch Trudeau as he uses Ukraine’s crisis to further his anti-human green agenda.
Why should I support an effort to do myself harm? It don’t make no sense.
Iran’s efforts to conclude a revised nuclear deal with the Biden administration could result in the Kremlin receiving a windfall of half-a-billion dollars to fund its war effort against Ukraine.
That is the conclusion reached by Western security officials who are becoming increasingly concerned by the discussions taking place between Moscow and Tehran about deepening their cooperation once the nuclear deal has been signed.
Iran has already engaged in detailed discussions with Moscow about helping Russia to evade Western sanctions by giving it access to Tehran’s sophisticated financial sanctions-busting network.
Russia’s defence ministry said it was investigating what happened to its flagship cruiser Moskva after Ukraine said it had hit the vessel with an anti-ship missile, forcing its crew to abandon ship.
The ministry denied reports the warship had sunk to the bottom of the Black Sea. It said the Moskva had “retained buoyancy”, with fires extinguished and the crew transferred to another vessel.
Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s chief spokesperson, was unable to give the cause of the explosion on the warship, saying: “I can’t tell you anything. This is a topic for the ministry of defence.”
#Ukraine:❗️ShKH vz. 77 DANA 152mm self-propelled howitzers are already in Ukraine – seems a batch of them was recently delivered from the Czech Republic. The amount of supplied howitzers is currently unknown, however as seen they are already deployed/tested by the Ukrainian army. pic.twitter.com/zGQPklmiwW
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 13, 2022
#Ukraine: Rare combat footage of FGM-148 Javelin in action in Ukraine – a Russian BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launcher being destroyed by the US-supplied anti-tank guided missile. pic.twitter.com/Z0OJb9rzjo
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 13, 2022
I have found it almost impossible to look away from the images of the carnage unleashed by Russian troops on occupied Ukrainian towns. Overcome with numbness, I masochistically zoom in on the photos of victims, studying every face, or whatever is left of it. All I can think is: “They have done this before. They are doing it again.”
The indiscriminate shelling, the looting, the evidence of rape, torture and executions, and, above all, the sense of enthusiasm with which these war crimes are being carried out are painfully familiar. In recent days, my mind has kept wandering to another photo, taken 18 years ago in Rigakhoy village in Chechnya by my mum, human rights activist Natalya Estemirova. It shows the corpses of five tiny, grey-faced children, all siblings, lined up according to height. The oldest is five years old, the youngest – twins – were not even 12 months old. The children and their mother, Maydat Tsintsayeva, were killed in a deliberate bombing by the Russians on 9 April 2004.
Police Chief Vitaliy Lobas was sitting at a child’s desk in an abandoned school in Bucha, collecting the details of the bodies.
Every few minutes, Chief Lobas, who has broad shoulders and short dark hair, and rarely uses an unnecessary word, received a call on his mobile phone, and the brief conversations went the same: a location, a few details, a phone number of a relative or friend.
Before the Russians came, Lobas was an ordinary local police chief, the head of Buchanksy District 1, who spent his days dealing with ordinary local crime and the occasional murder. Since the liberation of Bucha, he has spent his days in this abandoned school classroom, where school posters still hang on the walls, coordinating the massive operation to find the dead.
The Ukrainian leader wants weapons, not penitent visits from has-been leaders
Today, a train is headed for Kyiv, carrying the four presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They would have been five, except that the Ukrainians slapped down a proposal that they be accompanied by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany, accusing him of having been too close to Russia for too long.
“Putin’s assault has been so vicious that we all now understand that the world’s democracies — including our own — can be safe only once the Russian tyrant and his armies are entirely vanquished.”
A veteran human rights lawyer who prosecuted the trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic says Russians could be tried for war crimes over their actions in Ukraine.
Geoffrey Nice, who prosecuted several cases at The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service that building a war crimes indictment relating to Ukraine “is a substantial task” but “not necessarily” difficult.
Results of the vote to suspend Russia from the UNHRC show again that the UN General Assembly has completely lost its moral compass.
The UN General Assembly completely lost its moral compass when it voted on 7 April for Russia’s suspension from the Human Rights Council – with only 93 of its 193 member Nations voting to do so.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters he thinks it’s “absolutely right” more people are using the word genocide to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but stopped short of using the word himself.
“There are official processes around determinations of genocide, but I think it’s absolutely right that more people be talking and using the word genocide in terms of what Russia is doing, what Vladimir Putin has done,” Trudeau said at a news conference in Laval, Que.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is forcing a long-overdue reevaluation of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s legacy of appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Questions are being belatedly asked — and grudgingly answered — about many aspects of Merkel’s failed Russia policy, including her decisions to block Ukraine’s prospective membership of NATO, gut the German military, undermine the transatlantic alliance, and institutionalize Germany’s overdependence on Russian energy supplies.
A growing number of commentators in Germany and elsewhere are saying that Merkel’s years-long deference to Putin made his invasion of Ukraine possible, and some are even accusing Germany of being complicit in the war.
I am getting a bit tired of the Ukraine – Russia conflict. What sort of war has half of Europe still sucking on Russia’s tit for gas?
Trudeau and Freedolph appear solely interested in using the conflict as a front for pushing their ludicrous green agenda.
Aman, cigarette jammed into his mouth, carries a land mine off a road. A woman teases a tank driver with threats of witchcraft. A coastguard responds to the threat of bombardment with the now infamous line “Russian warship, fuck off”. The people in these viral videos, as in many others that have emerged from Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s barbaric invasion, are doing the same three things: they are showing incredible courage in defending their homeland, they are speaking Russian, and they are swearing.
More than 1,000 Ukrainian marines defending the besieged port city of Mariupol have surrendered, Moscow has said, as the presidents of four countries bordering Russia head to Kyiv in a show of support for Ukraine.
In one of the most critical battles of the war, Russia’s defence ministry said on Wednesday 1,026 soldiers from Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade, including 162 officers, had “voluntarily laid down their arms” near the city’s Ilyich iron and steelworks.
There was no independent confirmation of the claim.
Analysis: Looming battle in Donbas to shape course of Russia’s war in Ukraine
LONDON, April 13 (Reuters) – Russia is beefing up its forces for a new assault on Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, setting the stage for a protracted battle that is certain to inflict heavy losses on both sides as the Russians try to encircle Ukraine’s fighters, analysts said.
Military analysts are wary of predicting who will win the battle for Ukraine’s industrial heartland of Donbas, a crucial conflict that will likely be brutal and ultimately define the course of the war.
#Ukraine: Indirect fire from the 14th Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Army striking Russian targets, observed from both TB-2 and commercial drones.
Although what is hit is very unclear, it appears that 3+ vehicles are damaged or destroyed. pic.twitter.com/xQGGJzwZMM
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 13, 2022
#Ukraine: A projectile launched by the Ukrainian troops hitting the side of what appears to be Russian BTR-80 armored personnel carrier in #Mariupol. It is likely to be damaged. pic.twitter.com/lTpkWP1FAW
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 13, 2022
A “Stalinist” mass purge of Russian secret intelligence is under way after more than 100 agents were removed from their jobs and the head of the department responsible for Ukraine was sent to prison.
In a sign of President Putin’s fury over the failures of the invasion, about 150 Federal Security Bureau (FSB) officers have been dismissed, including some who have been arrested.
All of those ousted were employees of the Fifth Service, a division set up in 1998, when Putin was director of the FSB to carry out operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union with the aim of keeping them within Russia’s orbit.
