live blog
Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has promised solutions for the country’s catastrophic electricity supply. NATO is concerned about the relationship between Russia and North Korea. All developments in the live blog.
According to a report in “Spiegel”, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is planning another major order to upgrade the Bundeswehr. According to the report, the Defense Ministry wants to order 105 Leopard 2A8 battle tanks from the defense company KNDS for 2.93 billion euros, which are to be delivered to the army by 2030.
The news magazine reports this, citing a confidential document for the Bundestag’s budget committee, from which it quotes. The order is intended to equip both the German combat brigade in Lithuania and the army’s armored troops in Germany.
According to the documents, the Ministry of Finance emphasizes that the costs for the tanks are not covered by the 100 billion special fund nor by the Defense Ministry’s previously targeted annual budgets for the years from 2025 onwards. Instead, a so-called commitment authorization should be issued. This way, the federal government guarantees that the bills will be paid in the end and the order can be placed.
A “Leopard 2” battle tank of the German Army during a maneuver in Klietz.
The city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine is under constant bombardment – this also has an impact on the animals: The beluga whales Plombir and Miranda were brought abroad to safety from the local dolphinarium, as the AFP news agency reports. The animals were first taken to Chisinau, the capital of the Republic of Moldova, before being flown from there to Valencia in Spain.
After arriving in Valencia, the whales Plombir and Miranda were cared for by zookeepers.
Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) thanked South Korea for its common stance in the Ukraine war. During a visit to the capital Seoul, he praised the country as a partner of values that has “clearly taken the side of freedom and liberal democracies, which essentially always accepts sanctions and will continue to do so in the future.”
South Korea has not yet supplied military goods to Ukraine from its own stocks, but has provided ammunition for US weapons systems, which the US is replacing for the country. After the meeting, sources in the South Korean presidential office said they wanted to “reconsider” their position of only supplying non-lethal goods to Ukraine.
The EU states have agreed on a new package of sanctions against Russia. This was announced by the current Belgian EU Council Presidency in Brussels. The planned punitive measures are said to be aimed, among other things, at preventing the circumvention of existing sanctions, such as the shipping of Russian liquefied natural gas. Specifically, ports such as the one in Zeebrugge, Belgium, are to be banned from being used to ship Russian LNG to third countries. This will then lead to Russia being able to sell less liquefied natural gas and invest less money in its war of aggression due to a lack of transport capacity. The new package will close loopholes and thus maximize the effect of existing sanctions, Brussels said.
The new sanctions package was proposed by the EU Commission at the beginning of May. The fact that an agreement was not reached sooner was mainly due to German concerns and requests for changes. According to diplomats, the German government prevented a drastic tightening of the measures during the negotiations. The reason for this was probably warnings from German businesses, which feared excessive administrative costs and loss of sales.
Critics fear that Russia’s arms industry will therefore continue to have access to Western goods and technologies for the time being in order to produce weapons for the war against Ukraine. Recently, it felt as if Germany was the new Hungary, said an EU official, alluding to the fact that the Budapest government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban had repeatedly delayed decisions on Russia sanctions in the past.
According to Ukrainian sources, a thermal power plant was hit during the nighttime Russian attacks. The plant suffered “serious damage” and three employees were injured, said the operator DTEK and the Ministry of Energy. According to the information, this was the seventh “massive” attack on Ukrainian energy plants in the past three months. The military said that air defense shot down five of nine Russian missiles and all 27 attack drones over ten Ukrainian regions.
According to Kiev, a heavy Russian air strike has hit several energy supply facilities in Ukraine. The state energy supplier reported damage in the Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Kiev regions this morning. The exact extent has yet to be determined.
The damage in the Vinnytsia region was caused by debris from a downed Russian combat drone, regional governor Serhiy Borsov said on Telegram. In the Kyiv region, according to regional sources, a power line and an unspecified industrial facility were hit. Explosions were reported overnight in the city of Dnipro and in the Zaporizhzhia region. The information cannot currently be independently verified.
Conflicting 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 source.
According to local authorities, a fire broke out in a fuel depot during a Ukrainian drone attack in Russia’s North Caucasus region of Adygea. However, the fire was quickly extinguished, the authorities said.
A fire also broke out in the Platonovskaya fuel depot in the central Russian region of Tambov after an explosion, which was probably caused by a drone attack, regional governor Maxim Yegorov said on the Telegram short message service. No one was injured in the incident and the fire brigade is on duty. The Russian news agency Tass reports, citing the Ministry of Defense, that air defense shot down a total of 15 Ukrainian drones during the night, including six over the Adygea region.
Map of Ukraine, hatched: areas occupied by Russia
Refugees in Europe are sometimes treated unequally depending on their ethnic origin. This is evident from the annual report of the Council of Europe’s Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI). According to the report, reception centers for war refugees from Ukraine were, on average, better equipped than those for asylum seekers from other countries.
But differences are also being made between Ukrainians, it was said. For example, Ukrainian Roma refugees were offered worse accommodation in some countries than in others. In addition, there were reports from last year of a number of anti-Ukrainian incidents, especially in places where the local population was experiencing growing social and economic problems.
According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the new defense alliance between Russia and North Korea shows the increasing rapprochement between authoritarian powers and underlines the importance of a united front of democracies. “We must be aware that the authoritarian powers are moving ever closer together. They are supporting each other in ways we have never seen before,” he said at a panel discussion.
North Korea has supplied Russia with “an enormous amount of ammunition,” Stoltenberg said. The growing proximity between Russia and other Asian states makes it all the more important for NATO to work with its allies in the Asia-Pacific region. For this reason, the heads of government of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea have been invited to a NATO summit in Washington next month.
By winter, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants to improve the country’s electricity supply, which is currently catastrophic due to systematic Russian attacks. “We are preparing solutions to get through the heating season more safely and to offer people more opportunities to survive this extremely difficult time in terms of energy supply, bottlenecks and outages,” Zelensky said in a video address. Kyiv will also mobilize other partners to do this. The Ukrainian head of state did not provide any details.
Currently, Ukrainians are living with severe energy rationing. The electricity is repeatedly cut off for longer periods of time during the day. According to previous statements by Zelensky, Russia has now destroyed nine gigawatts of energy capacity. That is half of what Ukraine had at its disposal last winter. This is also why Zelensky keeps calling for the strengthening of air defense. This is intended to prevent – or at least make it more difficult – the systematic destruction of energy facilities in Ukraine by Russia.
China denies supporting Russia in the war against Ukraine. According to Ukraine, energy facilities on the border with Poland and in the center of the country were damaged following Russian attacks.