Did you miss the latest events on the war in Ukraine? Do not panic, 20 minutes takes stock for you every evening at 7:30 p.m. Who did what ? Who said what? Where are we ? The answer below:
news of the day
The horror, always. A new excruciating video showing the beheading of a suspected Ukrainian prisoner of war angered Ukraine on Wednesday, with President Volodymyr Zelensky denouncing a new exaction by Russian “monsters”.
Usually, Russian officials limit themselves to denying any involvement of Russian soldiers in war crimes, and accuse Ukraine of orchestrating the scenes. This time, Dmitri Peskov, considered the images “horrifying”, but questioned their veracity. After Volodymyr Zelensky, other Ukrainian cadres strongly condemned this act. In a tweet, the head of Ukrainian diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba considered that Russia was “worse than the Islamic State”. “We will find these monsters (…) They will be punished”, commented Vassyl Maliouk, head of the Ukrainian security service.
International reactions have rocketed. The UN said it was “horrified” by the beheading video, while the European Union will hold war criminals to account. Caution, all the same: AFP was not able to immediately verify the authenticity of the video, or where and when it could have been filmed. Ukrainian authorities have said they are trying to identify the victim.
sentence of the day
There are no French forces engaged in operation in Ukraine. The documents cited do not come from the French armies and are subject to caution. »
This is the declaration of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces. He denied on Wednesday the deployment of French forces in Ukraine, as did London, which questioned information on the presence of members of its secret services, on the strength of a leak of classified American documents.
British media, including the BBC and the Guardian, quoted a document, dated March 23, referring to the deployment in Ukraine of 50 members of British special forces alongside counterparts from other Western countries, including France. According to the Guardian, the document suggests that half of the Western special forces present in Ukraine between February and March would be British. “We do not comment on documents whose sources and veracity are uncertain,” added the French Ministry of the Armed Forces.
The number of the day
18. Like the number of billions of pounds sterling (20.4 billion euros) of Russian assets frozen by London since the start of the war in Ukraine. The United Kingdom announced on Wednesday new sanctions against relatives of Russian oligarchs, including members of the entourage of Roman Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov, accused of having helped them to conceal their assets.
‘There is nowhere to hide,’ British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly warned in a statement, saying the UK will cut off ‘the Russian elite’ from assets its members ‘thought they had succeeded in to hide “.
The trend of the day
Belarus has extradited to Russia a father separated from his daughter and sentenced to two years in prison after a cartoon criticizing the offensive in Ukraine, in a case that has become a symbol of repression, a specialized NGO announced on Wednesday.
Alexei Moskaliov, a 54-year-old father raising his daughter Maria alone and originally from Efremov, south of Moscow, had fled his house arrest at the end of March, just before a court imposed a two-year prison sentence on him for having “discredited” the Russian army.
He was then arrested in Belarus, a neighboring country and ally of Russia. Since the beginning of March, Alexei Moskaliov has been separated from his daughter, who has been placed in a home for minors. Last week, authorities said the girl had been returned to her estranged mother. The father also risks losing his parental rights in another lawsuit.