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
At least eight civilians were killed and nearly eighty injured in nighttime Russian airstrikes. “The death toll in Kharkiv stands at seven,” said regional governor Oleg Synegoubov, who earlier said 51 people had been injured.
In Pavlograd, in the Dnipropetrovsk region (center), “one person was killed and another injured,” according to regional leader Serguiï Lyssak. In kyiv, 22 people were injured, said the mayor of the capital, Vitali Klitschko, specifying that “13 were hospitalized, including three children”. According to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, one person is in a “state of clinical death”, but authorities in the capital have not confirmed this death so far. According to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Army, Valery Zaluzhny, Russia targeted Ukraine with 41 missiles, of which 21 were shot down.
Sentence of the day
As of February 2022, the Russian Federation has not been involved in the deportation of Ukrainian citizens on its territory. »
Alexei Vovchenko, Russian Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Protection, denied this Tuesday before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child any “deportation” on his soil of thousands of Ukrainian children. “About 3 million residents of Ukraine, including a number of children, have been accepted into the Russian Federation. Most of the children came with their families or guardians, they were placed in temporary shelters or with relatives,” he said.
Ukraine estimates the number of Ukrainian children forcibly sent to Russia at 20,000. Only around 400 have been repatriated by authorities at this stage. The International Criminal Court, for its part, issued arrest warrants last year against Vladimir Putin and the Russian Commissioner for Children, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the “deportation” of thousands of Ukrainian children.
The number of the day
220,000. This is the number of 155 mm caliber artillery shells ordered by NATO for Ukraine, the Atlantic Alliance announced on Tuesday. All for a value of 1.2 billion dollars (1.1 billion euros). “Russia’s war in Ukraine has become a battle for munitions,” said Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, calling on NATO countries to “sign” contracts to increase their production.
“The shortage of ammunition is a very real and pressing problem that our armed forces are currently facing,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Roustem Umerov lamented Thursday on X (formerly Twitter), on the occasion of the launch of a “ artillery coalition” led by France and the United States.
Today’s trend
Climatology is the new collateral victim of the conflict in Ukraine. The evolution of the glaciers, forests and soils of the Arctic Circle strongly controls the climatic future of the globe, but the freezing of scientific cooperation with Russia aggravates a lack of data which was already worrying for the work of climatologists.
The Arctic is warming two to four times faster than the rest of the planet, affecting its glaciers, forests and frozen carbon-rich soils which are at risk of irreversible changes, causing potential cascading impacts on the the whole planet.
Russia’s territory covers almost half of the Arctic landmass. And the lack of cooperation since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has caused researchers to lose a considerable amount of data, explains Efren Lopez-Blanco of Aarhus University, who led a study on the subject. published Monday in Nature Climate Change. “One of the immediate problems that arises if we neglect the Russian boreal forest is that we underestimate the biomass and carbon of the soil,” Efren Lopez-Blanco told AFP. “This can have global consequences for important processes such as thawing permafrost, changes in biodiversity or even greenhouse gas emissions. » Not good news for the planet.