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A Russian warship that sank in the Black Sea this week was hit by two Ukrainian anti-ship missiles, a senior US defense official confirmed on Friday as relentless Russian attacks continue to the east. The southern port city of Mariupol, which has endured weeks of bombing, looks close to falling by Russian ground forces.
Ukraine’s satisfaction with the successful sinking of the Moscow cruiser on Thursday was mitigated by the situation in Mariupol and a Russian warning that it would step up strikes on the Ukrainian capital. Explosions outside Kyiv were reported on Friday, with Russian forces saying in a statement that they had fired rockets at a suburban factory producing Ukrainian defense weapons in retaliation for what were allegedly attempted Ukrainian attacks on Russian border towns.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has continued to pressure Western leaders to step up efforts to isolate Russia. In a recent telephone conversation with President Biden, Zelensky called directly on the United States to identify Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, one of the most powerful and far-reaching sanctions in US arsenal, The Washington Post reported.
While Biden told his Ukrainian counterpart that he was ready to explore a number of proposals to put more pressure on Moscow, he did not commit to concrete action, according to people familiar with the conversation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive dialogue between the two leaders.
Even during the Cold War, Washington refrained from defining the Soviet Union in this way, despite Moscow’s support for groups considered terrorist actors in the 1970s and 1980s.
Such a measure could have a number of effects, including imposing economic sanctions on dozens of other nations that continue to do business with Russia; the freezing of Moscow’s assets in the United States, including real estate; and the ban on various types of dual-use exports.
The label, which requires a statement from the Secretary of State, can be applied to any country that has “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism,” according to a State Department report. The list includes four countries: North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Syria.
When Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was asked directly about US support for the appointment of a press conference last month, he said: “We are and will look into everything.
“Our focus is primarily to do everything we can to help end this war quickly, to stop the suffering of the Ukrainian people,” Blinken told reporters at the State Department.
The destruction of the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet by local Ukrainian weapons represents a deeply symbolic victory for Ukraine and a serious blow to Russia’s naval capacity.
The sinking has removed a ship that Moscow will not be able to replace in Ukraine’s theater, according to a U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity under basic rules set by the Pentagon. Russia has two other similar ships in its fleet, but none of them are based in the Black Sea. Turkey, which controls the entrance to the sea through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, has said it will only allow ships that already have a port there.
Russia has previously acknowledged the sinking of the cruiser, but said only that it was damaged by “severe storms” and fire.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said on Friday morning that it would continue its offensive in Mariupol, saying its forces already controlled full control of the city’s Ilyich iron and steel factory. Separately, Ukraine’s Azov battalion is said to support the Azovstal steel plant, one of the last bastions in the city outside Russian control, where photos from Friday’s scene appear to show smoke billowing from the heavily industrial zone.
Both steel plants are owned by Metinvest, a company controlled by billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man.
“The city of Mariupol is no more,” Pavlo Kirilenko, governor of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, told CNN. “The city of Mariupol has been wiped off the face of the earth by the Russian Federation.
Earlier this week, UN Deputy Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths described Mariupol as an “epicenter of horror” and renewed calls for the safe evacuation of other civilians from the city. Its mayor, Vadim Boychenko, said 50,000 to 70,000 people with a pre-war population of more than 400,000 remained in Mariupol after mass evacuations and deaths.
In a video address Thursday (50th), Zelensky said defending the country on February 24, the day the Russian invasion began, was an “achievement for millions of Ukrainians”.
“You have all become heroes. “All Ukrainian men and women who survived and did not surrender,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky also used the occasion to reiterate his gratitude to those unnamed world leaders who said they had shown “great generosity” to Ukraine and to continue to criticize those who “behave as if they have no power.”
This week, Biden announced an additional $ 800 million in arms supplies from the United States to Ukraine as Russia gathers troops, military vehicles and equipment on both sides of its border with eastern Ukraine in preparation for an attack on the eastern Donbass region.
The Washington Post said Thursday that Russia’s foreign ministry has sent a diplomatic note to the State Department warning of “unpredictable consequences” if supplies do not stop. On Friday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed the note and said similar démarches on arms supplies to Ukraine had been sent “to all countries”, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.
In Kherson, a city about 400 miles south of Kyiv that was quickly captured by Russian forces in the first week after the invasion, at least 824 new graves were dug in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city between February 28th and April 15th, according to recent satellite imagery. , analyzed by the London-based non-profit organization Center for Information Sustainability (CIR).
The CIR is monitoring a number of cemeteries and cemeteries in Russian-occupied areas or areas where Russian forces are nearby, said Benjamin Strick, director of investigations. “It’s scary to think about how [civilians] died and what else is happening in these areas, “Strick told The Post.
Similarly, the group recently spotted mass graves in a forest near Chernihiv, the regional capital. New graves continued to be dug even after the city was returned to Ukrainian control after weeks of Russian siege, according to images from the Planet Lab.
Other allegations of atrocities are more difficult to confirm. Kyiv Regional Police Chief Andriy Nebitov said on Friday that authorities had found more than 900 dead civilians in the area of about 3 million people since the withdrawal of its ground forces from Russia to the area earlier this month.
Although it withdrew from the northern regions, Russia’s accumulation continued in and around the Donbass region. Russian forces occupy territory just outside the city of Kharkiv, northwest of the region, where regional governor Oleg Sinegubov said on Friday that Russians shelled a residential area, killing at least 10 people, including a 7-month-old baby, the Kyiv Independent reported.
In the same area, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had information that the Ukrainian military planned to launch a missile strike on refugees gathering at the Lozova railway station and then blame the Russian army. Russia is said to have launched a rocket attack on the Kramatorsk railway station in Donbas a week ago, killing dozens of civilians. Russia has denied responsibility for the attack.
Ukrainian authorities are preparing a provocation in Lozova, “similar to Kramatorsk, to accuse Russian servicemen of so-called war crimes,” said Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the Russian Center for National Defense Control, according to Interfax.
New videos and images from the Luhansk region, which is part of Donbass, show burnt bodies amid the ruins of a nursing home destroyed last month. District Governor Sergei Haidai said on Friday that Russian troops had shelled homes and infrastructure in the area, killing two civilians.
In Moscow, meanwhile, the foreign ministry warned of “negative consequences” for European security if Sweden and Finland meet indications that they may want to join NATO.
“Why our Finnish and Swedish neighbors in the Baltic region need to become a new frontier of confrontation between the NATO bloc and Russia is not clear,” said Zakharova, a ministry spokeswoman. “The negative consequences for peace and stability in northern Europe are obvious.
Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, who shares an 830-mile land border with Russia, said her country would make a decision in the coming weeks. She commented after a visit to Sweden on Wednesday, which is considering abandoning decades of military neutrality and applying for NATO membership.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Ukraine’s stated desire to join NATO is a threat to Russia’s security and one of the reasons for the invasion. Since then, Ukraine has said it will abandon hopes of joining the alliance, but wants “security guarantees” from other countries against Russian aggression in the future.
Zakharova acknowledged that “the choice depends on the authorities of Sweden and Finland.”
“But they also need to understand the implications of such a step for our bilateral relations and for the European security architecture in general, which is currently in a state of crisis,” Zakharova added.
Dmitry Medvedev, an ally of Putin who is deputy chairman of …
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