The US president warned Thursday against this risk, for the first time since the Cold War, because of threats to use nuclear weapons by Russia, whose troops are under pressure by the Ukrainian counter-offensive. kyiv continues to gain ground, especially in the South and East. Ukrainian troops have already taken over most of the Kharkiv region in the northeast, and important logistics nodes such as Izium, Kupyansk and Lyman (East).
The American president said he wondered about a way out for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin: “How can he get out of this? How can he position himself in such a way that he neither loses face nor loses a significant portion of his power in Russia? And to warn: “We have not faced the prospect of an apocalypse since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis” in 1962.
Faced with stubborn Ukrainian resistance fueled by Western military aid, Vladimir Putin alluded to the atomic bomb in a televised speech on September 21. He said he was ready to use “all means” in his arsenal against the West, which he accused of wanting to “destroy” Russia. “It’s not a bluff,” he assured.
“Only since October 1, and in the Kherson region alone, more than 500 km2 of territory and dozens of localities have been liberated,” Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday evening. Speaking a few hours earlier before the European leaders gathered at the summit, the Ukrainian president called for the continuation of military aid to kyiv so that “the Russian tanks do not advance on Warsaw or even on Prague”.
The main reconquests are in the Kharkiv region, in the northeast. On the front, Ukrainian soldiers interviewed by AFP said they finally saw “the light at the end of the tunnel” thanks to their recent successes, after more than seven months of a grueling war.
The nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia (south), the largest in Europe, is “obviously” Ukrainian, despite its formal appropriation by Moscow, said Thursday the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi. The latter also reaffirmed the “very clear” possibility of a nuclear accident. “For us, it is obvious that it belongs to (the Ukrainian operator) Energoatom since it is a Ukrainian installation”, he declared during a press conference in kyiv, after being received by the President Volodymyr Zelensky and before traveling to Moscow.
Volodymyr Zelensky spoke Thursday during a videoconference with Australian think tank Lowy Institute. “What should NATO do? Eliminate the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons. But above all, I appeal once again to the international community, as before February 24: preventive strikes, so that they know what will happen to them if they use them,” the Ukrainian leader said.
Several senior Russian officials strongly criticized these remarks by the Ukrainian president on Thursday evening. “Such statements are nothing but a call to start a new world war with monstrous and unpredictable consequences,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by the Ria Novosti agency as saying. For her part, the spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy, Maria Zakharova, accused the West of “stirring up a nuclear war”. The Ukrainian presidency split a message explaining that Volodymyr Zelensky’s remarks were misunderstood and that he was talking about sanctions, not nuclear strikes.
The “European Political Community” was born: 44 leaders from the continent met on Thursday in Prague (Czech Republic), in an unprecedented format which highlighted the growing isolation of Vladimir Putin seven months after the start of the offensive Russian in Ukraine.
“It’s a very old idea that may be becoming a reality,” said French President Emmanuel Macron, who launched the project in May. He recalled that the “CPE” was a gathering much larger than the European Union, with 17 countries invited in addition to the 27 members of the bloc. During the final press conference, the French Head of State welcomed “the unity of 44 European countries” which “very clearly expressed their condemnation of Russian aggression (…) and their support for Ukraine”.
“We are working on several requests, with several member states of the European Union, in particular on new Caesars,” Emmanuel Macron said at a press conference in Prague. More specifically, it would be a question of supplying kyiv with six to twelve additional Caesar guns, taken from an order intended for Denmark, a source familiar with the matter told AFP. France is also studying the possibility of delivering 20 Bastion armored vehicles to kyiv. Since the beginning of the conflict, France has provided 18 Caesar guns of 155 mm with a range of 40 km, mounted on trucks, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, forward armored vehicles (VAB), fuel, individual equipment and about fifteen 155 mm TRF1 towed guns to Ukraine.
Two Russians arrived by sea in Alaska on Tuesday and claim asylum in the United States, several officials in this Arctic region very close to Russia confirmed on Thursday, a few weeks after the “partial mobilization” ordered by Vladimir Putin to continue the war in Ukraine. “Two Russian citizens arrived on a beach near Gambell”, a village on the American island of St. Lawrence, located in the Bering Sea, about 65 kilometers from the Russian coast, announced Alaska senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan in a joint statement. The case of these two Russians is being examined “in accordance with applicable American immigration laws”, he said.
The Secretary General of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Christophe Deloire, inaugurated on Thursday a new stele bearing 66 new names of journalists who died in the past two years in the exercise of their functions at the Reporters memorial in Bayeux.
Among the victims of the year 2021-2022 are the American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the Ukrainian photojournalist Maks Levin or the French image reporter Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff, whose relatives, present at the ceremony, have spoke as part of the 2022 Bayeux Prize for War Correspondents. He “did not give his life for the information, it was taken from him,” said the French reporter’s mother.
