Did you miss the latest events on the war started by Vladimir Putin 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:
news of the day
During a meeting between European foreign ministers, the head of Danish diplomacy Jeppe Kofod proposed and obtained “an EU-wide closure” of airspace against Russian planes. Like several European countries, France had decided at the end of the morning to close its airspace “to Russian planes and airlines from this evening”. It was the Minister of Transport, Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, who announced it on Twitter, affirming that “the unity of Europe is total” in the face of the invasion of Ukraine. During the day, Canada, Germany and Spain also closed their airspace to Russia.
Another decision was taken at European level: the banning of broadcasting of the pro-Russian channels Russia Today and Sputnik. “We cut off the head of the snake,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, considering that these media were broadcasting Russian propaganda.
sentence of the day
“I order the Minister of Defense and the Chief of Staff to put the Russian army deterrent forces on special combat alert. »
Vladimir Putin’s latest announcement put all nuclear powers on red alert. If, as for the war, the term was not used, the many nuclear warheads held by Russia are indeed part of the arsenal of this deterrent force. The master of the Kremlin justified this decision by the “bellicose declarations of NATO” towards Russia. He also criticized the economic sanctions taken against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, according to him “illegitimate”.
This announcement from Moscow “means that President Putin is continuing to escalate this war, in a way that is totally unacceptable,” US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield told CBS. “We must continue to denounce his actions in the strongest possible way,” she added. Vladimir Putin “manufactures threats that do not exist”, for his part denounced Sunday the spokesperson for the White House Jen Psaki, questioned on the question on ABC.
The number of the day
368,000 Ukrainians have fled their country since the start of the Russian invasion on Thursday, according to the High Commission for Refugees. More than half of the refugees, or nearly 200,000 people, have entered Poland since Thursday, Polish border guards said on Sunday. They had identified 77,300 for the day of Saturday alone. Refugees are also beginning to arrive in Romania, Hungary and Germany. German and Austrian trains have also been made free for Ukrainians, in order to better distribute the effort to welcome refugees.
The trend of the day
In terms of military operations, the conflict seems to be bogged down. The Russian army has still not entered Kiev and has been driven out of the eastern city of Kharkiv. The Ukrainian forces indicated during the day to eliminate the last pockets of resistance there. On the other hand, two cities in the south are surrounded by Russia: Kherson and Berdiansk. After refusing to jump into the mouth of the wolf in Gomel, a Belarusian city which serves as a rear base for the Russian army, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to start talks “in the region of the Pripyat river”, near of Chernobyl, on the border.
The head of Ukrainian diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba has warned that his country will not “capitulate” to Moscow. “I don’t really believe in a result”, but “we have to try”, declared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a video statement. But the conflict is generalized on the diplomatic and economic level. Several Russian banks will be cut from the Swift system, sidelining a large part of the country’s economy. The European Union has closed its airspace to Russian planes and banned the media Russia Today and Sputnik, relays of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda. The latter reacted by asking his army to alert the “deterrent force”, which includes the country’s nuclear arsenal.
And the missiles will not necessarily be pointed only at Ukraine, since the master of the Kremlin has justified his decision by Western sanctions. At the same time, Germany and Sweden have broken two great taboos in their history: the budget of the Bundeswehr will be considerably increased and must tend towards 2% of German GDP and the Scandinavian nation will supply lethal weapons to another country, Ukraine, for the first time since 1939.