Did you miss the latest events on the war in Ukraine? 20 minutes takes stock for you every evening at 7:30 p.m. Between the strong declarations, the advances on the front and the results of the battles, here are the main points of the day.
The fact of the day
Russian bombings have killed at least three civilians and injured around 15 others in southern and eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities said Thursday. An airstrike hit a residential building in the town of Mykolaivka in the eastern region of Donetsk, causing the death of a woman whose body was found in the rubble, according to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.
In the Kherson region (south), a taxi driver died when his vehicle was hit by gunfire and his two passengers were injured and taken to hospital, announced the head of the regional military administration. In the morning, Russian fire also targeted the village of Monatchynivka, in the Kharkiv region (north-east), causing the death of a woman who was in a car near a medical establishment, police explained. regional.
Furthermore, a Russian military plane crashed this Thursday off the coast of Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula annexed in 2014 by Russia, and the pilot had time to eject. “He was recovered by Sevastopol rescuers at a distance of 200 meters from the shore. His life is not in danger,” indicated the local governor installed by Moscow.
The number of the day
Two. This is the number of suspected spies arrested by the Ukrainian security services (SBU) this Thursday. The first would be a man wanting to join the Ukrainian army as a chaplain to transmit military intelligence to Moscow.
Second arrested man is accused of being recruited by Russia to collect information on a Ukrainian army hospital and power plant in the east-central Dnipropetrovsk region
Today’s statement
“ Russian officials seem to be pretty good dung merchants »
The insult was signed this Thursday by John Kirby, the spokesperson for the United States Security Council. This White House representative also criticized the Russian state for spreading “absurd propaganda” about the attack in the suburbs of the Russian capital, for which Daesh would be “solely responsible”. Earlier this Thursday, Russia claimed to have “proof” that the perpetrators of the attack which killed 143 people last Friday had links with “Ukrainian nationalists”. As a reminder, the attack was claimed by the jihadist organization Islamic State (IS), while kyiv and its allies deny any involvement in this killing.
The Russian Investigative Committee therefore claims this Thursday to have new elements proving, according to it, a Ukrainian lead. “Work with detained terrorists, examination of technical devices seized from them and analysis of information on financial transactions made it possible to obtain evidence of their links with Ukrainian nationalists,” the Committee assured.
According to this organization, the four attackers also received “large sums of money and cryptocurrencies from Ukraine, which were used in the preparation of this crime”.
Investigators, who have not published any documents or elements to corroborate these statements, also announced the arrest of a new suspect, accused of having participated in the “financing” of the attack.
The trend
The repression targeting journalists trying to report freely does not appear to be stopping in Russia. A Russian court on Thursday sentenced a journalist to two years in prison for publishing messages denouncing the attack on the Kremlin in Ukraine, while a wave of arrests hit five journalists from independent media in Moscow.
Mikhail Feldman, a journalist and activist in the city of Kaliningrad, was found guilty of seeking to “discredit” the army and will have to serve his sentence in a penal colony with a “harsh regime,” said the specialized NGO OVD- Info. Mikhail Feldman had already been fined for “discrediting” the army in 2022 after participating in a demonstration against the Russian attack on Ukraine. He was then accused of repeat offenses and criminally prosecuted.
According to OVD-Info, he was accused of having shared content on the Internet denouncing the Kremlin offensive. “I did not kill, I did not pillage, I did not steal, I did not rape and above all I did not start a war of conquest against a neighboring country,” he said. he declared before the verdict, according to OVD-Info.
Our file on the war in Ukraine
In Moscow, Antonina Favorskaïa, a photographer from SOTAvision, one of the last media outlets covering political repression in Russia, has just been targeted by a case for “extremism”, punishable by a heavy prison sentence, her office announced on Thursday. media. Antonina Favorskaya has been covering the trials of Alexei Navalny for years. It was she who shot the last video showing the opponent, on February 15 during a hearing.
She was arrested on March 17 and subsequently sentenced to 10 days of administrative detention for disobedience to the police. Wednesday evening, after having served this sentence, she was arrested again as soon as she left prison. Her apartment was then searched, as was her parents’, and she was taken into custody, according to SOTAvision.