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.
The fact of the day
After skirting the Romanian and then Bulgarian coasts, the container ship Joseph Schulte, flying the Hong Kong flag, is expected to arrive in Istanbul tonight. It is the first time that a freighter has ventured into the Black Sea since the end of the grain agreement. Despite the imposing Russian blockade, the Joseph Schulte left the Ukrainian port of Odessa on Wednesday, appearing as a challenge to Russia, which has been threatening to sink such ships since it ended the agreement allowing Ukraine to export its cereals in July.
The ship will “probably arrive tonight” in Istanbul, a spokesman for the Hamburg-based Schulte Group said on Thursday. The freighter uses “a new humanitarian corridor” established by Kiev, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, while Russia fired warning shots at a freighter heading for Izmail last weekend , a port on the Danube in southern Ukraine.
sentence of the day
Our goal is victory, victory in the form of the liberation of our territories within the 1991 borders. And no matter how long that takes. »
These are the words of the head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kouleba, pronounced during an interview with Agence France Presse. The Minister hammered home the collective Ukrainian objective: the counter-offensive carried out since June has the “objective” of liberating all of Ukraine, “no matter how long it takes”. “As long as the Ukrainian people share this goal, the Ukrainian government will move forward hand in hand with its people”, he added, while admitting that “Ukraine is paying the highest price” for a conflict that ravaged many regions of this country bordering the European Union.
In Ukraine, “we are all tired. I am tired and you are tired. We are all humans. But the stakes are too high to allow fatigue to determine the nature of our decisions,” the minister said.
The number of the day
Five. Like the number of Ukrainian soldiers sentenced by pro-Russian courts to heavy prison terms for “murder” and “cruel treatment of civilians”, the Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement. Vladimir Pafitsevich and Yevgeny Vakhnenko were found guilty of “cruel treatment of the civilian population”, “use of prohibited methods during an armed conflict” and “premeditated group murder”. Captured during the Russian offensive in Ukraine, they were each sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Egor Kuranov, another soldier, was sentenced to twelve years in prison for “cruel treatment of civilians” and “use of prohibited methods in an armed conflict”, as were two other Ukrainian soldiers from the Azov regiment, Pavel Artiomenko and Anton Romaniouk, both sentenced to twenty-four years in prison.
The trend of the day
If the Ukrainian authorities pretend to control the situation, it seems that the Russians continue to advance and shell the north-east of Ukraine, near Kupyansk. It is also near this locality that a woman “born in 1962” died during Russian bombardments.
In the same place, another woman, “born in 1963”, was injured “by shrapnel” and an apartment building was damaged, Kharkiv region governor Oleg Synegoubov said on Telegram . Thursday, the Russians were now only a few kilometers from Kupiansk.