Have you missed 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
Ukraine struck energy sites in western Russia this Wednesday using drones, a source in the Ukrainian defense sector announced, confirming Russian information. These new attacks took place against a backdrop of tensions with Washington which, according to media reports, criticized kyiv’s attacks against energy installations located on Russian soil and asked it to put an end to them.
Ukrainian drones hit “two oil depots” in the Smolensk region, some 400 kilometers from the border, during this operation organized by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU). “The SBU continues to effectively destroy military and logistical infrastructure that supplies fuel to the Russian army in Ukraine. These facilities are and will remain our absolutely legitimate targets,” said this Ukrainian source.
Another drone attack targeted the special economic zone in the city of Lipetsk on Wednesday, also located some 400 km from the Ukrainian border but further south, which is home in particular to metallurgical and pharmaceutical companies, according to the governor of this region.
Today’s statement
“ This is what it means to be a global superpower »
The sentence is signed by American President Joe Biden, not a little proud of the economic and military aid amounting to 61 billion dollars that the Senate finally adopted on Tuesday in favor of Ukraine. Joe Biden quickly promulgated the text this Wednesday. “It is an investment in our own security,” justified the American president, promising to send military equipment to Ukraine in the coming “hours”.
This important aid “will strengthen the security of America and the security of the world”, said the American president, recognizing that the legislative process had been “difficult”. “We bow down to no one. Person. And certainly not in front of Vladimir Putin,” declared the 81-year-old democrat.
“We are not abandoning our allies, we are supporting them. We don’t let tyrants win, we oppose them. We are not spectators of developments in the world, we shape them,” he declared, welcoming the political consensus found between Democratic parliamentarians and a certain number of Republican elected officials.
The number of the day
48. This is the number of children displaced by war that Ukraine and Russia agreed to exchange following an agreement reached in Qatar. Twenty-nine children will return to Ukraine and 19 to Russia.
The International Criminal Court believes, like Ukraine, that thousands of Ukrainian children were not displaced by the fighting but knowingly deported by Russia, allegations that Moscow firmly rejects.
In March, four Ukrainian children were repatriated from Russia, already with the mediation of Doha, after a similar operation the previous month involving eleven minors. In recent months, Qatar has, according to kyiv and Moscow, acted as mediator on the delicate subject of the repatriation of Ukrainian children present on Russian territory since February 2022.
Ukraine estimates that at least 20,000 Ukrainian minors have been deported to Russia from occupied areas in two years, although the total could be much higher. According to kyiv, just under 400 of them have so far been repatriated.
The trend
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) on Wednesday accused a senior Orthodox official, head of the main monastery in eastern Ukraine, of revealing Ukrainian army positions to Russia. The management of this monastery depends on the branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church historically linked to Moscow.
In May 2022, it proclaimed its independence in reaction to support for the war expressed by Russian Patriarch Kirill. But Ukraine has accused him of spreading separatist sentiments for years.
Security services said the Metropolitan of the Lavra of the important Orthodox site of Svyatogirsk was suspected of having “informed” the Russians about “the positions of checkpoints of the Ukrainian armed forces” in the Kramatorsk district of the Donetsk region. He is accused of having publicly mentioned these places in front of his faithful “during a liturgy”, added the SBU.
This Orthodox leader faces up to eight years in prison if convicted.