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Some 4. 5 million Ukrainians, more than 10 percent of the pre-war population, were temporarily without power Thursday night due to Russian strikes, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address.
Zelensky said Kyiv and 10 other regions were affected. He suggested the local government save energy and said now is not the time to have windows or illuminated signs.
Ukrainian tanks stationed about 25 km from the town of Kherson, which has been under Russian control for about 8 months, have fought several battles in recent months. Jonathan Walsh and Amar Al Hameedawi of FRANCE 24 followed a team and their unit commander into their firing position. for this report.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday congratulated Benjamin Netanyahu on his victory in the Israeli elections and intends to “open a new page in cooperation” with the new government.
“Ukraine and Israel share not unusual values and challenges, which now require effective cooperation,” Zelensky tweeted, without elaborating. Ukraine has asked Israel to supply air defense systems.
Kyiv on Thursday condemned the “massive forced relocation” of its inhabitants to Russian-occupied regions.
“The direction of the Russian profession has begun the great forced relocation of the population of the Left Bank of the Kherson region (. . . ) to occupied Crimea or Russia,” Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Similar deportations are also taking place. through Russia in the Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk regions, as well as in Crimea. “
Sweden and Finland have met Turkey’s NATO club and the time has come to welcome them to the alliance, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday.
“It is time to welcome Finland and Sweden as full members of NATO,” Stoltenberg said at a news conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Istanbul.
“In those harmful times, it is even more vital to end your membership, in the face of any false impression or miscalculation in Moscow. “
U. S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Thursday that he believes Ukrainian forces can recapture Kherson from Russian forces, perhaps in his most positive comments on the crusade to date.
“On the question of whether the Ukrainians can take the remaining territory on the west side of the Dnipro River and (towards) Kherson, they actually have the ability to do so,” Austin said at a news conference with his South Korean counterpart.
International partners deserve to remain in Ukraine as the country prepares to continue its fight against the Russian invasion in the coming winter months, the European Union’s most sensible diplomat said on Thursday.
“Winter is coming. Putin is waiting for the ‘General Winter’ and the Russian army to arrive,” EU foreign policy leader Josep Borrell warned on the sidelines of an assembly of G7 foreign ministers in the western German city of Münster.
“Now, more than ever, we will have Ukraine, the Ukrainian people. They are fighting, protecting their country and we have an ethical duty to them,” he added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday that his country will not participate in the upcoming G20 summit in Indonesia if Russian President Vladimir Putin is also present.
“If the leader of the Russian Federation participated, Ukraine would participate,” Zelensky said at a news conference with Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou in Kiev. Putin has not yet said whether he will be present.
The U. N. nuclear watchdog said Thursday it found no symptoms of undeclared nuclear activity at three sites in Ukraine that it inspected at Kyiv’s request in reaction to Russian accusations that work is underway on a “dirty bomb. “
“Our technical and clinical assessment of the effects we have so far has shown no symptoms of undeclared nuclear activities and at those 3 sites,” the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement, adding that the environmental samples taken would be analyzed.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday that Ukraine released 107 Russian servicemen in the new prisoner of war between Kyiv and Moscow.
In a statement, the ministry said he would be flown to Moscow for medical treatment.
Earlier, the Russian head of the Russian component of Ukraine’s Donetsk region said Russia would also capture 107 Ukrainian servicemen.
Ukraine has exported 10 million tonnes of grain and other food since the UN and Turkey negotiated a deal in July to resume shipments from war-blocked Russia, UN leader Antonio Guterres said on Thursday as he pushed Russia and Ukraine to expand the pact.
“I call on all parties to their efforts in two areas. First, the renewal and full implementation of the Black Sea Initiative. Secondly, the removal of remaining obstacles to Russian food and fertilizer exports,” he told reporters.
Switzerland has rejected a call through Germany to allow it to re-export Swiss-made munitions to Ukraine, the government said Thursday.
“According to the precept of equivalent remedy in the neutrality law, Switzerland cannot settle for a request to transfer war clothing of Swiss origin to Ukraine while the latter is involved in a foreign armed conflict,” the government said. Said.
U. S. tech giant Microsoft pledged on Thursday to extinguish its “extraordinary” wartime innovation from Kyiv until the end of next year.
Microsoft’s monetary commitment of more than $400 million allows Kyiv to continue Microsoft’s cloud and public knowledge centers across Europe, corporate president Brad Smith announced at the annual Web Summit generation convention in Lisbon, Portugal.
Cloud generation brings resilience and security to Ukrainian operations, Smith said, after Russia attacked Ukrainian knowledge centers with airstrikes in its invasion more than 8 months ago.
Ukraine and Russia are engaged in “a technological war,” according to Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy minister and minister of virtual transformation.
Fedorov, who gave the impression with Smith at a news conference, noted that Delta’s real-time combat control formula evolved in Ukraine. map.
A Moscow-backed separatist leader in eastern Ukraine said a prisoner swap with Kyiv was planned on Thursday, which will lose 107 Russian and pro-Russian soldiers.
“Today we are repatriating 107 of our fighters from Ukrainian dungeons,” Donetsk separatist leader Denis Pushilin said on Telegram, adding that 65 of them arrived here from the separatist territories of eastern Ukraine subsidized through Moscow. “We will return the same number of prisoners to Ukraine. “
The UN delegation to the Joint Coordination Centre (JCC) in Istanbul, which is in charge of overseeing the foreign agreement on the export of Ukrainian grains, on Thursday showed the resumption of vessel traffic and inspections with the Russian delegation.
Russian missile strikes hit electrical infrastructure in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions on Wednesday night, complicating the paintings of the electrical system, Ukrainian grid operator Ukrenergo said on Thursday.
The regions of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk are metal centers. Russian moves have broken about 40 of Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
The Kremlin said on Thursday it had pledged to remain in the Black Sea grain deal, which freed Ukraine’s grain shipments from Russia’s blockade of its Black Sea ports, beyond the current expiration date of Nov. 19.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia still wants to assess whether the deal is underway before deciding whether to expand its stake.
Earlier on Thursday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested the United Nations step up efforts to get Western countries to ease restrictions that Moscow says hamper their own exports of agricultural products and fertilizers, which were also part of the deal.
Moscow on Thursday suggested to the United Nations, which sponsored a deal to free Ukraine’s grain shipments from Russia’s blockade of its Black Sea ports, to comply with parts of the deal aimed at facilitating Russian exports of food and fertilizer.
Russia on Wednesday resumed its participation in the initiative after a four-day suspension, easing pressure on food and easing fears of a new global food crisis.
The agreement will expire on November 19. Moscow has made clear that not enough has been done to ensure it can export its own mass production of food and fertilizer despite the barrage of Western sanctions imposed in reaction to its invasion. from Ukraine
“We still don’t see any effect on one momentary aspect: the removal of barriers to the export of Russian fertilizers and grains,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference in Amman, Jordan.
“We have once again called on the UN secretary-general to fulfil the obligations he has undertaken on his own initiative,” he added. Lavrov. Il said the scenario needs to be resolved “in the very near future. “
Russian agricultural exports fall explicitly under sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union and others, but Moscow says they are severely hampered by restrictions on its financial, logistics and insurance sectors.
The grain export initiative, negotiated through Turkey and the United Nations, was agreed in July for 120 days and Moscow has not explicitly committed to extending it.
Russia had suspended its involvement following an attack on its Sevastopol naval port in Crimea, but reneged on the agreement on Wednesday after getting little response and vowing that, even if it withdrew again, it would not save Ukraine’s shipments to Turkey.
Russia summoned the British ambassador on Thursday over Moscow’s claim that the British military corps of workers was involved in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Crimea.
Ambassador Deborah Bronnert arrived at the Foreign Office shortly after 10:30 local time (07:30 GMT) as a small crowd chanted anti-British slogans and held banners reading “Britain is a terrorist state. “
The UK says allegations similar to the attack are false.
Bronnert was inside the ministry for about 30 minutes, a Reuters reporter at the scene said. There were no indications from Russia or the UK on the main points of what was discussed.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Wednesday that the ambassador will be summoned for a drone strike on Saturday.
After the drone strike, Russia suspended its participation in a UN-brokered Black Sea grain export deal, which it has since joined.
Six grain ships departed Ukrainian ports on Thursday, a day after Russia joined a deal allowing exports to the Black Sea, Turkey’s defense minister said.
“After the resumption of the grain initiative, six ships left Ukraine’s ports,” Defense Minister Hulusi Akar was quoted as saying by the official Anadolu news agency.
Ukraine’s Infrastructure Ministry set the departure of the ships at seven o’clock on Thursday.
The Ukrainian troops are more than 25 kilometers from the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, which they seek to retake. This distance comes from the northwest between Kherson and Mykolaiv, near the city that Moscow’s forces have not captured.
“But if you look to the northeast, along the Dnipro River, the Ukrainian forces are a hundred kilometers away at the farthest point, and the maximum of the front line is still more than 50 kilometers away from the city of Kherson,” reports Gulliver Cragg of FRANCE 24.
“This is where you are in the Kherson area,” Cragg reports.
Ukraine’s Zaporizhzia nuclear power plant has been disconnected from the power grid after Russian bombing broke the remaining high-voltage lines, leaving it with diesel generators, Ukrainian nuclear company Energoatom said on Thursday.
The plant has 1five days of fuel to run the generators, Energoatom said. Blocks five and six of the plant are being put into a bloodless state, he said.
The Russian Defense Ministry justified the resumption by saying it had obtained promises from Ukraine that it would use the Black Sea grain room for anti-Russian military operations.
“The Russian Federation considers that the promises won for the moment seem sufficient and resumes the implementation of the agreement,” the ministry said in a statement.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said it is vital to oppose the “crazy Russian aggression that is destabilizing foreign trade. “
“After 8 months of Russia’s so-called special operation, the Kremlin is not an easy security promise from Ukraine,” Zelensky said in his late-night video speech.
“In fact, this is a remarkable statement. It shows how Russian aggression has been a failure and how strong we all are when we maintain our unity. “
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday hailed “a significant diplomatic outcome for our country and the entire world” after Russia joined a deal allowing Ukrainian grain exports to the Black Sea.
“The implementation of the grain export initiative continues,” he said in his evening speech, after efforts to revive the agreement between Kyiv and Moscow were successfully reached in July.
(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP, REUTERS)