A former U. S. soldier captured through separatists in Ukraine said he fired while fighting on the Ukrainian side, Russia’s RIA news firm reports.
Alexander Drueke, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and his compatriots Andy Huynh, of Hartselle, Alabama, disappeared this month while fighting near Kharkiv.
In a video interview with the RIA news agency, Mr. Drueke said his fighting experience in Ukraine was limited to the day he captured Kharkiv, Ukraine’s largest city at the time.
“My struggle delights here with that project that day,” Mr. Drueke.
“I didn’t fire a shot. I hope this plays a role in the pain I have or don’t have. “
The Kremlin said it can rule out that the two captured men could be sentenced to death if they were attempted in a domain controlled by Russian proxies who have occupied vast swathes of territory since 2014.
Relatives of the captured Americans say they are not mercenaries and that they went to Ukraine as volunteers in April to repel Russian forces.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia would react “in kind” if NATO set up infrastructure in Finland and Sweden after the Nordic countries signed an agreement paving the way for NATO membership.
Putin, quoted through Russian news agencies, said he may simply not rule out “tensions emerging” in Moscow’s relations with Helsinki and Stockholm over its NATO membership.
Commenting on the strike at the shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, Putin went on to say that Russia “attacks civilian targets,” news firm IFAX reports.
Putin’s comments come a day after NATO’s best friend Turkey lifted its veto on Finland and Sweden’s offer to join the alliance after the three nations agreed to protect each other’s security.
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By Dominic Waghorn, Editor-in-Chief, International Affairs
It’s a bad day for Vladimir Putin and one of his strategic goals.
He says he is fighting this war because of the risk of NATO enlargement.
It now has thousands of other NATO troops in its bordering countries and two once resolutely impartial countries joining the alliance.
Sweden and Finland will now join NATO, alarmed by what happened to Ukraine at the hands of the Russian invasion.
His candidacy will be presented as soon as possible, which will have to be infuriating for Ukrainians who also need to register in the alliance, although they know that it will probably never be carried out anytime soon.
And there are doubts about the value paid by Sweden and Finland and probably other members of the alliance to triumph over Turkey’s objections to its membership.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he received everything he sought from the new accession donations.
Above all, the Turks sought promises from the Swedes and Finns about the Kurds.
The Turks claim that the two countries agreed to fully cooperate with Turkey in the PKK, the militant organization that has been fighting for an independent Kurdish in Turkey since the 1980s.
But they say Sweden and Finland also agreed not to help the YPG, the predominantly Kurdish organization that has led the fight against the Islamic State in northern Syria in alliance with the West. The Turks are terrorists.
The Turks claim that the two countries have agreed to “share intelligence in the fight against terrorism and organized crime. “
To what extent will this come with the intelligence gathering on the Kurds?
There are another 100,000 people in the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden, joining PKK supporters.
Turkey wasted no time in extraditing 33 Kurds from Finland and Sweden who described them as suspected terrorists.
The Kurds are also concerned that Turkey will view the deal as a way to renew attacks on the Kurdish enclave of Rojava in northern Syria.
The Turkish president threatened to launch a new invasion in northern Syria to retake YPG-controlled cities.
The United States sees the organization as an ally. Turkey sees it as an extension of the PKK.
Canada is in talks with its allies in Europe about how to “step up” and export oil and fuel from its east coast to ease energy constraints and offer an option to Russian energy imports from Europe.
The country’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, told reporters today: “It is vital that Canada intervenes and helps our European friends who face very difficult realities of power. “
“We want to do this in a way that also addresses the climate change factor. And those are precisely the conversations we are having, especially with the Germans and also with the Spaniards. “
The city of Lysychansk, which is the last major domain of the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine that is still under Ukrainian control, continues to face a spate of attacks as Russian forces visit the region.
Russian troops and their separatist allies occupy 95% of Luhansk and roughly part of Donetsk, the two provinces that make up the predominantly Russian-speaking Donbass.
Here, Sky’s special envoy, Alex Crawford, visits the city besieged by the Russian invaders.
Vladimir Putin has ambitions to seize “most of Ukraine,” a senior U. S. intelligence official said today.
Avril Haines, the U. S. director of national intelligence, told a Commerce Department conference, “We continue to be in a position where we look at President Putin and believe that he has the same political goals that we had before, which is that he needs to take the maximum of Ukraine. “
Haines also said the picture of the war remained “quite bleak” and that U. S. intelligence agencies were still “quite bleak. “The U. S. saw three scenarios imaginable in the short term.
Most likely, this is a sour clash in which Russian forces would only have made more profits, while other scenarios included a major Russian advance and Ukraine managing to stabilize the front lines.
“In short, the picture is still bleak,” Haines said.
Rescuers are still searching for another 20 people after a Russian airstrike on a shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk.
Teams continued to search for debris in the domain after the attack, which killed at least 18 other people on Monday.
The press secretary of Ukraine’s state emergency services, Svitlana Rybalko, said that in addition to the dead, investigators had discovered fragments of 8 other bodies.
Several survivors are being treated for skull fractures and amputated limbs.
“The police can’t say for sure how many victims there are. Therefore, we have not yet located the bodies and framed the fragments,” Rybalko said.
“We are now cleaning at the very epicenter of the explosion. Here we can hardly find bodies as such. “
Following the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of a “terrorist state” that commits “daily terrorist acts. “
However, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova rejected what she called a “blatant provocation” through the Ukrainian government to shift the duty of the missile attack on the mall to the Russian military.
“Unfortunately, all those fakes have been reproduced and distributed,” Zakharova said.
British surveillance aircraft could help secure sea lanes to lose Ukraine’s grain, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said.
Wallace told reporters at the NATO summit in Madrid that the Rivet Joint or P8 Poseidon aircraft could patrol black Sea spaces if an agreement is reached to allow grain ships to leave stranded Ukrainian ports.
But he downplayed the possibility of sending Royal Navy warships to the Black Sea.
He said: “We have to put this into perspective, even when Ukraine is at full speed in its ports, it’s around 3 million tonnes per month. They have 23 million tons to ship. “
“So you have to manage expectations. If there is a ceasefire in the Black Sea or if there is a passage, it will not be like ‘oh, you can have it for six weeks, it is rarely very beneficial for Russia’. I mean, you might not get much in return.
“What the Turks seek to do is, with the UN, to define the main points with the Russians to do so.
“It’s about getting Ukrainian grain out of Ukraine.
“It’s not about helping the stolen grain, allowing Russian ships with stolen grain to leave the Black Sea, because the Ukrainians would possibly not buy that and they won’t raise anything for that.
“So we have to see what we can do. Britain’s role in this domain may simply be ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), we can only with surveillance, we can simply rivet Joint, the P8s in the southern component of the Black Sea to protect.
“The Turks have everything they want about mine hunting. We know the design of minefields. So I think all those things are possible. “
“But we are going to send our ships to the Black Sea, because that would mean asking the Turks to lift the blockade on foreign warships or other fleets. “
US President Joe Biden today thanked Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan for striking a deal with Finland and Sweden that would allow the two Nordic countries to soon become NATO candidates.
Speaking at a NATO summit in Madrid, Biden said: “I want to thank you especially for what you’ve done, putting the stage in position with respect to Finland and Sweden, and all the paintings you’re going to check to get the grain out. “of Ukraine
“You are doing a job. “