live blog
A fire broke out near the airport and not far from an oil storage facility in Sochi, Russia. Ukrainian President Zelenskyj asks for cruise missiles. All developments in the live blog.
An explosion occurred on a cargo ship in the Black Sea off the Romanian port of Sulina. This is reported by the dpa news agency. The twelve crew members were brought to safety uninjured, the Romanian news agency Mediafax reported today, citing the shipping authority. Members of the crew told authorities that a sea mine may have been the cause of the explosion. There was initially no information from Romanian authorities about the cause of the accident.
Sulina is only five kilometers as the crow flies from the Ukrainian border. The accident occurred 16 nautical miles from Sulina. The Togo-flagged ship was carrying cement and was scheduled to enter Ukraine’s Bystre Canal on the Danube. Since the outbreak of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Romania’s military has been regularly searching for sea mines in the Black Sea – and has already defused several of them.
According to British information, the Ukrainian counteroffensive is making progress near the city of Bakhmut in the east of the country. The recapture of the villages of Klishchyivka and Andriivka south of the city will bring Ukrainian troops closer to one of the Russian occupiers’ main supply routes, the T 05-13 road, the British Ministry of Defense said today. In addition, the Russian defense of Bakhmut was weakened after Russian airborne troops were relocated to the front in Zaporizhia, southern Ukraine. “However, Russia continues to hold the railway line, which runs along an embankment between Klishchyivka and the T 05-13 and represents an easily defensible obstacle,” it said in London.
According to its military, Ukraine was attacked with drones by Russia on Wednesday night. This was reported by the Reuters news agency. The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said 17 of 24 of the unmanned aerial vehicles were shot down.
Conflict parties as a source
In the current situation, information on the course of the war, shelling and casualties provided by official bodies of the Russian and Ukrainian parties to the conflict cannot be directly verified by an independent body.
In the central Ukrainian region of Poltava, a fire broke out on the site of the Kremenchuk oil refinery after a Russian drone attack, according to Governor Dmytro Lunin. This was reported by the Reuters news agency. Operations have been temporarily suspended. Information about possible victims was not available.
The mayor of the Ukrainian power plant town of Enerhodar, which is occupied by Russian soldiers, warns of a growing risk of nuclear accidents at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant near the front. “The fears are growing every day because there are several dangerous factors,” Dmytro Orlov told the dpa news agency. The danger of a technical catastrophe is great, he said. Since the power plant is supplied from outside, there have been six incidents since September alone in which the power supply was interrupted. “There has not been a single such incident in the previous 40 years,” Orlov said.
Of the 10,000 employees who once worked at the power plants, only one in five are still there and there is a lack of qualified experts. The militarization of the nuclear facility in the midst of the fighting is also a danger in itself. “Russia has expanded the facility into a military camp with 1,000 men permanently on site,” Orlov said. The biggest problem for securing the power plant is the unpredictability of the occupiers.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, Russia has carried out firing maneuvers at training targets in the Baltic Sea. The crew of a warship conducted a series of planned exercises in which they fired at surface and air targets in a “difficult jamming environment” while using electronic countermeasures of a possible enemy, the ministry said. “The Baltic Fleet sea area where the exercise took place has been temporarily declared dangerous for civil shipping and aviation,” the ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging platform. It is not known when the exercises took place.
The Russian Navy’s Baltic Fleet is headquartered in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea between the NATO countries Poland and Lithuania.
At the United Nations, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) warned against “sham solutions” in the search for peace in Ukraine. “Peace without freedom means oppression,” said Scholz at the UN general debate in New York. “Peace without justice is called a diktat. Moscow must now finally understand that.”
Scholz said Ukrainians would “fight for their lives and freedom, for the independence and territorial integrity of their country, for the preservation of the very principles to which we all committed ourselves in the UN Charter.” The Russian war of aggression is not only causing great suffering to Ukraine, Scholz added. People around the world suffered from inflation, growing debt, fertilizer shortages, hunger and increasing poverty. “Because this war has unbearable consequences around the globe, it is good and right that the world also takes part in the search for peace,” Scholz continued. “And at the same time, we must beware of pseudo-solutions that only have ‘peace’ in their name.” Russia is responsible for this war. “And it is Russia’s President (Vladimir Putin) who can end it at any time with a single order.”
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi accused the US of adding “oil to the fire” in the war in Ukraine in a speech during the UN general debate in New York. The US is stoking tensions and violence “to weaken European countries,” Raisi said at the UN. This is a long-term plan, he added.
The West accuses Iran of supplying its ally Russia with drones for the war in Ukraine. Raisi, however, said on Tuesday that Iran supports “any initiative to end the fighting (…) as well as any political measure for this purpose.” He stressed that Iran “does not support war, anywhere, in Europe or anywhere else.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has once again requested long-range cruise missiles from the USA and other Western partners. His country is not planning to use it to attack Moscow or other targets on Russian soil, “we simply want to save our country,” Zelensky said in an interview with CNN on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
In the interview, the 45-year-old spoke partly Ukrainian and partly English. Ukraine has long wanted long-range cruise missiles of the ATACMS type from the USA to defend against Russia’s war of aggression. These are guided missiles with a range of up to 300 kilometers from the US manufacturer Lockheed Martin that are fired from the ground against targets on the ground. Ukraine is requesting a similar weapon system from Germany, Taurus-type cruise missiles. They are suitable for destroying bunkers and protected command posts at a distance of up to 500 kilometers.
According to the Russian news agency RIA, a fire broke out near the airport and not far from an oil storage facility in the Black Sea city of Sochi. The cause of the fire is unclear. The Russian news channel “Marsh” publishes a video on Telegram that shows a large column of smoke over the city. Explosions were heard before the fire broke out.
Ukraine urgently needs more help for air defense, demands NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg. The British government wants to supply more artillery shells to Ukraine. All developments from Tuesday to read.