Tag: europe

Ukrainian officials say 10 people have been injured in the attack on the eastern border city.

Russian strikes on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, have killed six civilians and injured 10 people, regional officials said.

Ukraine’s national police said the attack early on Saturday was launched by drones. It published pictures of blazes that had broken out on city streets and next to buildings.

“As of this morning, there are 6 dead and 10 wounded as a result of the night strike on Shevchenkivskyi district,” Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov said on the Telegram messaging app.

“The attack hit residential areas – at least nine high-rise buildings, three dormitories, a number of administrative buildings, a shop, a petrol station, a service station and cars were damaged,” he said.

Photos released by police on Telegram showed several fires in civilian areas, including near a residential high-rise. The strike took place just after midnight, according to local news reports.

Ukraine’s military said on Facebook that its air defences destroyed 28 of 32 drones and three of six missiles launched by Russia.

Meanwhile, police said there were no casualties in a separate attack on Mala Danylivka, a village on Kharkiv’s northwest outskirts.

Air raid alerts remained in effect for Kharkiv and most of the country, including the capital Kyiv, for several hours after the strikes.

Kharkiv, the capital of the region of the same name, lies just 30km (19 miles) from the border with Russia and has come under frequent bombardment since Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022.

The attacks have intensified in the past few weeks. On Wednesday, a drone attack on the city killed four people and badly damaged apartment blocks.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, told the news outlet Politico in an interview published on Thursday, that he saw Kharkiv as the most likely target for any new Russian offensive in May or June.

Ukrainian officials have urged the country’s allies to supply more anti-aircraft defence systems, in particular modern US-made Patriot systems.

US military aid to Ukraine has been drying up, with a $60bn funding package currently stalled in Congress, amid fierce opposition from Republicans.

As the war enters its 772nd day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Saturday, April 6, 2024.

Fighting

• The Ukrainian military launched a swarm of drones at the Morozovsk airbase, which it claimed destroyed six Russian warplanes, significantly damaged eight other jets, along with killing or injuring 20 members of the Russian military base. Russia said its air defences downed 53 Ukrainian drones – the majority of which targeted the southern Rostov region – and only a power substation was damaged.
• An overnight Russian drone strike on Kharkiv killed six people and wounded 11 others, according to officials in Ukraine’s second largest city. Ukraine said Iranian-made Russian drones carried out the attack, hitting multiple high-rise buildings, dormitories and a petrol station.
• Pro-Russian separatists in Moldova claimed that an explosive drone hit a military base under their control close to the Ukrainian border, targeting a radar station that suffered minor damage. They did not directly blame Ukraine.
• The Russian Ministry of Defence claimed that its troops managed to take control of the settlement of Vodiane in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Russian state media also said soldiers entered the suburbs of Chasiv Yar near Bakhmut.
• At least three people were killed and 13 wounded after Russia fired five missiles on Ukraine’s southern city of Zaporizhzhia, the regional governor said.

Diplomacy

• US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned of “significant consequences” for China if its companies provide material support for Russia in its war against Ukraine.
• The Kremlin slammed a claim by French President Emmanuel Macron that Russia is attempting to sabotage the Paris Olympics through a disinformation campaign, calling it “wholly unfounded”.
• British Foreign Secretary David Cameron is expected to visit the United States next week in order to persuade Republican politicians to approve a $60bn package of aid for Ukraine that they have delayed in the US Congress for months.
• Japan is adding 164 new industrial products to the list of items that it is banning from being exported to Russia. The items include lithium-ion batteries, vehicle engine oil, gas pipes and optical equipment.
• Russia’s Investigative Committee has claimed that images on the phone of one of the suspects of the deadly attack on a concert hall near Moscow earlier this month contain pro-Ukraine data, including individuals in Ukrainian military attire.

Weapons

• Lithuania’s Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte said the Baltic state would spend two million euros ($2.16m) to buy about 3,000 Lithuanian-made quadcopter drones for Ukraine, and would also help set up three recovery centres for Ukrainian soldiers.

Whatever the exact territorial outcome of the war in Ukraine, the political outcome is already clear – Russia has lost its gambit to create a vassal state and buffer zone in Eastern Europe, because Ukraine’s Westward course is now irreversible.

That was one of the key messages of an international symposium of diplomats and academics who gathered at Cambridge University under the auspices of the Centre for Geopolitics on Thursday, April 4. The focus was the Maidan Revolution of 2013, which overthrew Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych and set the country on a path towards Europe, but it also dwelled on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.

“Putin has lost Ukraine. It has become crystal clear. He has invaded their sovereignty and they have resisted him,” said Baroness Catherine Ashton, who was the European Union’s first foreign policy chief between 2009 and 2014, and held frequent talks with Yanukovych and Putin during the turbulent months of the uprising. “All those years before he was losing them, and now he’s lost them completely.”

The Maidan protests started on the evening of November 21, 2013, when Yanukovych decided not to sign an association agreement with the European Union, which had been under negotiation for seven years, opting instead for a free trade deal with Moscow.

“I remember that evening very well,” said Argita Daudze, Latvia’s ambassador to Ukraine at the time, who was hosting a reception that day. “Ukrainian foreign ministry officials joined us late and they were in a very bad mood.”

“Ukrainian society in 2013 was living in certain hopes that closer ties with the EU would bring more order and faster economic development in Ukraine,” said Daudze. “It seemed the notion of Europe started to become an answer to many problems that Ukrainian lawmakers were facing — and became a synonym of a good life for the common people.”

As the protests against Yanukovych grew, “the atmosphere was fantastic – it was families, young people, NGO leaders, journalists, a spectrum of people from across society in Kyiv,” recalled Ashton, who visited the gathering crowds.

“And it was very, very cold, so you know people are committed … there was a clear sense this was a movement of people who were not going to go away.”

The spontaneity and length of the uprising belied the Russian argument that it had been engineered by Western officials.

But it’s not just Ukraine that is pinning its hopes on benefits from stronger ties with the EU.  Ashton believes the experience of absorbing Ukraine is transforming the European Union, too. “It’s made the EU stronger in foreign policy terms … more coherent,” she told Al Jazeera.

Foreign and defence policy remain national competences, requiring unanimity for action at the EU level, but Ashton said European willingness to work together was “absolutely extraordinary” and had increased since her tenure.

During the Maidan uprising, for example, many EU members were still deferential towards Russia. “Many people considered the Polish official reaction as too timid,” said Lukasz Kulesa, deputy head of research at the Polish Institute of International Affairs. “[Then-Foreign Minister Radoslav] Sikorsky told Ukrainians to agree to a compromise with Yanukovych.”

Even after Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula the following March, European officials advised Ukraine not to use arms against Russians, and Germany agreed with Russia to build the Nordstream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea that would circumvent Ukraine.

Poland is now one of Ukraine’s most unequivocal allies, Germany has abandoned Nordstream, and the EU has imposed a dozen sanctions packages against Russia and is this year putting in place predictable, multiyear military and financial aid to Ukraine.

“The EU has never understood how strong it is,” said Ashton. “As an economic power, it is enormous, and it doesn’t yet really get that it has the capability to use that incredible economic strength to achieve things.” It was high time, she said, for EU leaders to start forming security strategies for the next 50 years.

In December, the EU invited Ukraine and Moldova to start their membership processes, and that, too, was seen as a form of security.

Vygaudas Usackas, the EU ambassador to Moscow in 2013-17, called for “an unprecedented political decision by both Europeans and NATO to expedite negotiations of Ukraine’s membership of the EU and invite Ukraine to join NATO at the Washington summit” in July. Both processes normally take several years, but membership would strengthen Ukraine’s hand in negotiations with Russia to end the war, whenever they took place, Usackas said.

For the same reason, he called for the deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine and “immediate and urgent, massive military and financial support to Ukraine so it regains the momentum and can talk to the enemy from a position of strength”.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg this week reportedly proposed a NATO aid package that would send $100bn in military assistance to Ukraine over five years.

These coordinated policies among EU and European NATO members stand in contrast to US congressional lawmakers beholden to presidential hopeful Donald Trump, who have frozen aid to Ukraine this year, throwing even more responsibility on European shoulders.

“This is the greatest success of Russia’s political warfare,” Mark Voyager, a lecturer in international relations at Kyiv American University, told Al Jazeera. “I believe Mr Trump most certainly is in some shape or form an asset for the Kremlin. Whether it was his visits in the late Soviet period or his Miss Universe affairs in Moscow or his business dealings with Trump Tower, financial personal entanglements, I believe the Russians have something quite substantial on him.”

Investigations in the US, however, have so far failed to turn up evidence that Moscow holds any compromising information about Trump that could make the former US president susceptible to political pressure from Moscow.

Whatever Trump’s reasons for seeking to cut off aid to Ukraine, Daudze called to mind the results of not standing up to Russia during and after the second world war, when Stalin’s armies swept across Eastern Europe, ending the brief interwar independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

“Politicians of Baltic states decided not to fight and to accept Soviet promises not to touch their sovereignty,” she said. “In the context of a world war, we could not expect help from other countries and we lost our freedom.”

A nine-year-old boy and two journalists were among those injured in the attack, the regional governor said.

At least three people have been killed after Russia fired five missiles on Ukraine’s southern city of Zaporizhzhia, the regional governor said.

“What marks today’s strikes: first, there were two missile strikes, and then, about 40 minutes later, there were other strikes at the same place – just as rescuers, police started working,” Governor Ivan Fedorov said on national television.

Thirteen people were wounded, including a nine-year old boy, and four were hospitalised in grave condition. Two journalists were among the wounded.

At least three apartment blocks, 10 private houses, shops and an unidentified industrial facility were also damaged, Fedorov said.

Images from the site, shared by Fedorov and the interior ministry, captured shattered windows of a cafe and a small shop.

Ukraine’s air force issued a ballistic missile raid alert for the region, part of which is occupied by Russia.

Moscow has recently stepped up usage of ballistic missiles that are harder to intercept.

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant

Meanwhile on Friday, Russian officials accused Ukraine of attacking the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

The Russian state-run RIA news agency quoted the facility’s press service as saying Ukrainian military drones attacked the power plant but caused no damage to its critical infrastructure.

“Recently, Ukrainian forces’ combat drones have been flying in the area of the Zaporizhzhia NPP. In particular, arrivals were recorded today in the area of the cargo port and nitrogen-oxygen station No. 2 of the Zaporizhzhia NPP,” RIA quoted the press service as saying.

There was no immediate public comment on the Russian allegations from Ukraine, and the attack could not be independently verified.

In the past, both sides in the two-year-old war have accused each other of shelling the plant.

The six reactors at the Zaporizhzhia plant, held by Russia and located close to the front line of the war in Ukraine, are not in operation, but the plant relies on external power to keep its nuclear material cool and prevent a catastrophic accident.

Front-line fighting

Earlier on Friday, Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had downed 53 Ukrainian drones.

It said “terrorist attacks with aerial drones” were foiled, adding that 44 of them were downed or intercepted in Rostov, where Russia’s Ukraine campaign headquarters is located.

Ukraine has for months launched drone attacks on several border regions as it tries to push back Russia’s advancing forces.

On Friday, a Ukrainian security source told the AFP news agency a drone attack on the Morozovsk air base in Rostov region destroyed at least six Russian planes and “another eight were heavily damaged”. Moscow did not mention the specific attack and the claims could not be independently verified.

Also on Friday, Ukraine warned that a key front-line town of Chasiv Yar in the eastern Donetsk region was coming under “constant fire” from advancing Russian troops.

And Moscow said it had captured the small village of Vodiane, on the outskirts of Donetsk city.