LONDON — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has told Ukraine’s parliament that their country has achieved the “greatest feat of arms of the 21st century” by repelling Russia’s attempt to capture Kyiv.
Johnson addressed lawmakers in Ukraine’s legislature, the Verkhovna Rada, by video link on Tuesday. He is the first world leader to do so since Ukraine was invaded on Feb. 24.
Johnson, one of Ukraine’s most prominent international supporters, announced a new 300 million pound ($375 million) package of military aid to Ukraine, including radar, drones and armored vehicles.
Johnson said Ukraine had “exploded the myth of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s invincibility,” and expressed confidence Ukraine would win the war.
The British leader said Western allies had not done enough to stop Russia after it annexed Crimea and triggered a conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and said Ukraine’s allies should not press it to give up territory to make peace.
He said “you are the masters of your fate, and no-one can or should impose anything on Ukrainians. We in the U.K. will be guided by you and we are proud to be your friends.”
___
The Russian military says they have resumed strikes on the Azovstal steel plant in the port city of Mariupol.
Vadim Astafyev, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said Tuesday Ukrainian fighters holed in at the plant “came out of the basements, took up firing positions on the territory and in the buildings of the plant.” Astafyev said Russian forces along with rebel forces from Donetsk were using “artillery and aircraft ... to destroy these firing positions.”
The steel plant is the last holdout of Ukrainian resistance in a city that is otherwise controlled by Moscow’s forces. More than 100 civilians, including small children, were making their way out of the steelworks in an evacuation effort overseen by the United Nations and the Red Cross.
___
TIRANA, Albania - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has reiterated his call on the world to shut Russia out of all international financial and trade systems.
In an online Zoom speech to the Albanian Parliament Tuesday, Zelenskyy called on Europe and the world to stop buying oil from Russia, shut Russian banks out, stop trading with Russia, close ports to Russian ships and limit the arrival of Russian tourists “because you don’t know who is coming, a killer in the prisons or Mariupol’s hangmen.”
“It is simply unfair,” Zelenskyy said of the United Nations buying some $2.5 billion of materials from Russia for its humanitarian operations.
He thanked the tiny Western Balkan country for its full support, especially at the United Nations Security Council, where it is a temporary member.
“Our history when half a million Albanians were forcefully deported in an ethnic cleansing from their land in Kosovo, and found shelter in Albania, helps us feel from far away Ukraine’s heavy pain,” Prime Minister Edi Rama said.
A bloody 1998-1999 conflict between Serbia and ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, then a Serbian province, left more than 12,000 dead and forced almost a million Kosovars to flee their homeland.
___
BERLIN — The leaders of Finland and Sweden have indicated that their governments haven’t yet decided whether to join NATO, but stressed close security cooperation with other European countries in the face of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Speaking Tuesday after a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz near Berlin, Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin said “Russia’s attack on Ukraine has changed our security environment completely” and there was “no going back.”
“We have to decide on whether to apply for NATO membership or continue on our current path,” she said. “That is the discussion we are having now in our national parliament.”
Her Swedish counterpart, Magdalena Andersson, said the Nordic nation’s parliament is conducting a security review that will be presented on May 13.
“The analysis includes future international defense partnerships for Sweden, including a discussion on NATO, and all options are on the table,” she said.
“While our respective security arrangements are of course decided nationally, we coordinate very closely with Finland,” Andersson added.
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has said both countries would be welcomed if they decide to join the 30-nation military organization and could become members quite quickly.
The foreign ministers of NATO’s member countries are scheduled to meet in Berlin on May 14-15.
___
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — A group of 20 children from an orphanage in Luhansk, eastern Ukraine has arrived in Slovenia where they will stay until the end of the war.
Officials said Wednesday that the children are mostly toddlers who travelled together with orphanage staff, doctors, nurses and their families.
The group will be staying near the western town of Postojna and will be granted temporary protection status in the small European Union country.
Local civil protection commander Sandi Curk says “the arrival was quite emotional.” Curk says there have been no problems along the route and that the trip lasted for 24 hours.
___
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Slovakia’s energy minister says the country is not ready to join a European Union embargo on imports of Russian oil as part of a new package of sanctions to be imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
Slovakia is almost fully dependent of Russian oil it receives through the Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline. Economy Minister Rchard Sulik told reporters Tuesday that the sole Slovak refiner, Slovnaft, cannot immediately switch from Russian crude to any different oil. To change the technology would take several years, he said.
“We will insist on the exemption, for sure,” Sulik said.
European Union leaders are debating Tuesday new proposals for sanctions, which could include a phased-in embargo on oil. The 27 member countries are likely to start debating the plans on Wednesday, but it could be several days before the measures enter force.
___
STRASBOURG, France — Italian Premier Mario Draghi is calling for Europe to move more rapidly toward greater defense integration following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Draghi told EU lawmakers in Strasbourg on Tuesday that European defense spending “is a deeply inefficient distribution of resources, that blocks the construction of a true European defense.” He called for a conference to improve coordinated of defense spending.
Draghi praised the European Council’s ambitious plan of action to strengthen the EU’s security and defense policy by 2030, but said “it is necessary to go quickly beyond these first steps and construct an efficient coordination among defense systems.”
___
GENEVA — The World Health Organization’s incident manager for Ukraine says evacuees from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol “are on the way” toward government-controlled areas away from the most intense combat zones where Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting.
Dr. Dorit Nitzan, speaking by video to reporters in Geneva from government-controlled Zaporizhzhia, said WHO teams have been among workers from the U.N. and other aid groups who have deployed to help dozens of evacuees — up to 100 — from the plant.
“Things are moving,” she said Tuesday. “We know that they are on the way.”
Nitzan said the U.N. health agency was not clear what kind of health needs that the evacuees would present but that hospitals nearby and trauma teams were on standby to help the arriving evacuees.
The United Nations humanitarian aid coordinator and the International Committee of the Red Cross were leading the evacuation, after securing agreement from Ukrainian and Russian authorities in recent days.
Nitzan said about 100 people have been trickling out in their own vehicles from Mariupol in recent days.
___
LVIV, Ukraine — The British military says it believes the Russian military is now “significantly weaker” after suffering losses in its war on Ukraine.
The British Defense Ministry made the comment Tuesday in its daily statement on Twitter regarding the war.
It said: “Russia’s military is now significantly weaker, both materially and conceptually, as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. Recovery from this will be exacerbated by sanctions. This will have a lasting impact on Russia’s ability to deploy conventional military force.”
The ministry added while Russia’s defense budget has doubled from 2005 to 2018, the modernization program it undertook “has not enabled Russia to dominate Ukraine.”
“Failures both in strategic planning and operational execution have left it unable to translate numerical strength into decisive advantage,” the ministry said.
___
LVIV, Ukraine — Satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press show nearly 50 Russian military helicopters at a base close to the Ukrainian border.
The image captured Monday by Planet Labs PBC shows the helicopters in Stary Oskol, Russia, some 175 kilometers (110 miles) northeast of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
The helicopters are stationed on the tarmac, runway and grass of the otherwise civilian airport. Military equipment is stationed nearby to support the aircraft.
Russia has been using its military attack helicopters in its war on Ukraine, flying low to the ground to try to avoid anti-aircraft missiles.
Meanwhile, another satellite image showed a bridge repeatedly targeted by Moscow near the Black Sea port city of Odesa still standing as of around noon Monday. That strategic bridge connects Odesa to the wider countryside and would be key to defending the area.
A breakaway region of neighboring Moldova home to Russian troops nearby has seen a series of mysterious explosions in recent days, raising concerns about the conflict widening.
___
ROME — Pope Francis has told an Italian newspaper that he offered to travel to Moscow to meet the Russian president about three weeks into the invasion, but that he has not received a response.
Francis was quoted Tuesday by Corriere della Sera as saying his offer to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow was made through the Vatican’s No. 2, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, 20 days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He said, “Of course, it would be necessary for the leader of the Kremlin to make available some window of opportunity. But we still have not had a response and we are still pushing, even if I fear that Putin cannot and does not want to have this meeting at this moment.”
Francis said he spoke with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, for 40 minutes by videoconference and for the first half “with paper in hand, he read all of the justifications for the war. I listened and told him: I don’t understand any of this. Brother, we are not clerics of the state, we cannot use language of politics, but that of Jesus. … For this we need to find the paths of peace, to stop the firing of arms.”
___
KYIV, Ukraine — Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod says his visit to Ukraine's capital showed “the full support from the Danish side” on transfer of weapons, sanctions on Russia, but also humanitarian assistance.
Kofod reopened the Danish embassy in Kyiv and met with his counterpart Dymtro Kuleba and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday. His meetings come as Denmark's neighbors, Sweden and Finland, are debating joining NATO. Denmark is a founding member.
Moscow has warned that such a move would have consequences, without giving specifics. Yet on Friday, a Russian military plane violated Swedish and Danish airspace.
“I have to say to Russia that it’s a sovereign right of each country to arrange themselves when it comes to security. Denmark is not threatening anybody. Sweden, Finland is not threatening anybody,” Kofod told The Associated Press. “It’s totally unjustified if Russia or anybody else is trying to, in a way, violate our airspace (…) or doing some kind of other hybrid attacks on us, this is totally unjustified. And we will, of course, protect ourselves against that.”
Earlier in the day, Kofod visited Irpin in the suburbs of Kyiv to witness firsthand the destruction and devastation.
___
OTTAWA — Ukraine’s ambassador-designate to Canada says Russia must be held accountable for its troops committing sex crimes, including against children.
Yulia Kovaliv told a Canadian House of Commons committee Monday that Russia is using sexual violence as a weapon of war and said rape and sexual assault must be investigated as war crimes.
She said Russia also has kidnapped Ukrainian children and taken them to Russian-occupied territories and now Russia itself. Ukraine is working with partners to find the children and bring them back.
“Russians, a few days ago, killed a young mother and taped her living child to her body and attached a mine between them,″ the ambassador said. She said the mine detonated.
All of Russian society, and not just President Vladimir Putin “and his proxies,” should bear responsibility for the war on Ukraine because more than 70% of Russians support the invasion, Kovaliv said.
MOSCOW — More than 1 million people, including nearly 200,000 children, have been taken from Ukraine to Russia since the Russian invasion began, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Monday, according to the state-owned news agency TASS.
Defense Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev said those included 11,550 people, including 1,847 children, in the previous 24 hours, “without the participation of the Ukrainian authorities.”
He said those civilians “were evacuated to the territory of the Russian Federation from the dangerous regions" of Donetsk, Lugansk and other parts of Ukraine, according to the report. No details were provided on the location or circumstances of the moves.
Throughout the war, Ukraine has accused Moscow’s troops of taking civilians against their will to Russia or Russian-controlled areas, something the Kremlin has denied.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking Monday to Greek state TV ERT, said half a million Ukrainians have been “illegally taken to Russia, or other places, against their will.”
___
OTTAWA — Ukraine’s ambassador-designate to Canada says Russia must be held accountable for its troops committing sex crimes, including against children.
Yulia Kovaliv told a Canadian House of Commons committee Monday that Russia is using sexual violence as a weapon of war and said rape and sexual assault must be investigated as war crimes.
She said Russia also has kidnapped Ukrainian children and taken them to Russian-occupied territories and now Russia itself. Ukraine is working with partners to find the children and bring them back.
“Russians, a few days ago, killed a young mother and taped her living child to her body and attached a mine between them,″ the ambassador said. She said the mine detonated.
All of Russian society, and not just President Vladimir Putin “and his proxies,” should bear responsibility for the war on Ukraine because more than 70% of Russians support the invasion, Kovaliv said.
___
WASHINGTON — U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived Monday at the Capitol after leading a surprise delegation trip to Ukraine, vowing the U.S. Congress has “more to do” to help the country fight the Russian invasion.
Pelosi is the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to touch down in Kyiv since the start of the war and she called the congressional delegation’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “informative and it was inspiring.”
The trip with Democratic lawmakers comes as Congress is preparing a $33 billion package of military and humanitarian aid, but now some lawmakers also are discussing a “Marshall Plan”-type effort to eventually help rebuild Ukraine as the U.S. aided Europe after World War II.
Pelosi returned to the Capitol in Washington to sign and send President Joe Biden legislation passed last week by Congress that would update a World War II-era military lend-lease law and streamline the process for sending aid to Ukraine. Biden is expected to sign it into law.
___
GENEVA -- The Union of European Football Associations has kicked Russian soccer teams out of the Women’s European Championship, the next men’s Champions League and qualifying for the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
The latest round of sporting sanctions Monday during Russia’s war on Ukraine followed UEFA and FIFA suspending Russian national and club teams in February from playing in international competitions, including the men’s World Cup playoffs.
The latest expulsions are likely to be appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, just as the Russian Football Union has challenged the previous decisions.
UEFA said Portugal will take Russia’s place in the Women’s Euro 2022 being hosted by England in July. Russian Premier League winner Zenit St. Petersburg’s place in the next Champions League group stage will go instead to the champion of Scotland, according to UEFA’s updated list of allocated entries.
Meanwhile, Finland and Sweden will ban from their national ice hockey teams any players who appear in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League next season. Both ice hockey federations announced their decisions on Monday, two days after the Russian league’s season ended.
___
WASHINGTON -- The highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S. has condemned as “sickening” Russian Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov’s antisemitic comments about the Ukraine invasion.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday that Russia is fooling no one by trying to justify its brutal invasion of Ukraine with a “deranged conspiracy theory” against the Jewish people. Schumer, a New York Democrat, is the U.S. Senate’s first Jewish majority leader.
“I have only one word for this: Sickening,” Schumer said in the Senate.
Lavrov was asked during an interview over the weekend with an Italian news channel about Russian claims that it invaded Ukraine to “denazify” the country -- a seemingly confusing position since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.
Lavrov suggested falsely that Jewish people themselves are “the biggest antisemites.” Schumer said he condemned Lavrov’s comments in the strongest possible way.
“You’re fooling no one,” Schumer said. “The crimes of Russia are as plain as day for the world to see.”
___
LONDON — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is scheduled to address Ukraine’s parliament, delivering a message that the fight against Russian invasion is Ukraine’s “finest hour.”
Johnson’s office says the U.K. leader will announce a new 300 million pound ($375 million) package of military aid to Ukraine when he speaks to the legislature by video link on Tuesday. Britain has already sent Ukraine equipment including missiles and missile launchers. The new package includes electronic warfare equipment, a counter battery radar system, GPS jamming equipment and thousands of night vision devices.
In advance extracts of the address released by the prime minister’s office, Johnson evokes a 1940 speech by World War II leader Winston Churchill as the U.K. fought attack from Nazi Germany. Johnson will say that “the British people showed such unity and resolve that we remember our time of greatest peril as our finest hour. This is Ukraine’s finest hour, an epic chapter in your national story that will be remembered and recounted for generations to come.”
Ukrainian President Volydymyr Zelenskyy addressed Britain’s Parliament on March 8, and also likened his country’s struggle to Britain’s fight against the Nazis. Johnson visited Kyiv on April 9.
___
WASHINGTON — A senior U.S. official says the United States believed Russia is planning this month to annex large portions of eastern Ukraine and recognize the southern city of Kherson as an independent republic.
Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Monday that the suspected actions are “straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook” and will not be recognized by the United States or its partners and allies.
Carpenter said the U.S. and others have information that Russia is planning “sham referenda” in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” that would attach the entities to Russia. He also said there were signs that Russia would engineer an independence vote in the city of Kherson.
“We believe that the Kremlin may try to hold sham referenda to try to add a veneer of democratic or electoral legitimacy and this is straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook,” he said, adding that the information suggested the votes could come as early as mid-May. “Such sham referenda, fabricated votes will not be considered legitimate, nor will any attempts to annex additional Ukrainian territory,” he said.
Carpenter did not detail the information that led to the assessment, although there have been public reports that Russia is moving to exert greater control over areas that it already controls and occupies in eastern and southern Ukraine. He pointed to evidence that local mayors and legislators there have been abducted, that internet and cell phone service had been severed and that Russian school curricula is soon to be imposed.
___
ROME — Italian Premier Mario Draghi said that statements made by Russia’s foreign minister on Italian television regarding Nazism and antisemitism were “aberrant” and “obscene.”
Draghi told a press conference Monday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statements that Adolf Hitler was Jewish “is truly obscene.”
He also noted that Lavrov comes from a country “where there is no freedom of expression. This country permits the free expression of opinions, even when they are clearly false and aberrant. My judgment is that what Minister Lavrov said is aberrant.”
Draghi also criticized the TV format, noting that Lavrov was permitted to speak freely without being contradicted. “You spoke of an interview,’’ Draghi said. “It was really a rally.”
“The question is if it should be accepted to invite a person to ask to be interviewed without any contradictions for a period of time, not for one minute or two, without any contradiction. That is not great professionally. It brings up strange questions,″ Draghi said.
Lavrov was interviewed Sunday evening for a program on the private Mediaset network, owned by former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, a long-time friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Berlusconi criticized Putin for the invasion at a rally some six weeks after the invasion was launched.
___
WASHINGTON — The CIA says Russians disaffected by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may be trying to get in touch with U.S. intelligence — and it wants them to go to the darknet.
The agency on Monday began a new push to promote its presence on a part of the internet accessible only through specialized tools that provide more anonymity. The CIA has a darknet site that has the same features as its regular homepage but accessible only through the Tor internet browser, which has encryption features not available on most regular browsers.
Instructions in English and Russian on how to access the darknet site appeared Monday on the CIA’s social media channels. The agency hopes Russians living abroad can share the instructions with contacts inside the country.
While many Russians appear to support what the Kremlin officially calls a “special military operation,” longtime Russia watchers think Putin’s management of the war may push away some powerful people who disagree with him. Even with immense capabilities to capture communications and satellite imagery, it remains critical for Western intelligence agencies to recruit human sources who can offer insight into the Kremlin and conditions inside Russia.
“Our global mission demands that individuals can contact us securely from anywhere,” the agency said in a statement.
___
LVIV, Ukraine — Authorities say a Russian missile attack struck the Black Sea port of Odesa on Monday evening.
Maksym Marchenko, the governor of the Odesa region in southwestern Ukraine, wrote on the messaging app Telegram that the strike killed and wounded people but didn’t specify how many. He added that an infrastructure site was hit, without identifying what it was.
The secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, Oleksiy Danilov, also said the attack on Odesa took the roof off a church belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox faction loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate.
___
BOSTON — Twenty-four hours after internet service was disconnected to Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Kherson, which Russian troops seized in early March, it has resumed but is now under Kremlin control, network analysts say.
“Someone must have activated a line from Crimea to Kherson,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc. He called the development “eerily similar” to what occurred after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
The London-based internet monitor Netblocks, like Madory, reported that the Kherson region’s traffic had been rerouted as of Sunday evening through Russia’s state-controlled Rostelecom after a day-long outage.
On Sunday, Ukrainian officials said internet and cellular communications were cut in a large area of the Kherson region and part of the Zaporizhzhia region and blamed Russia. They attributed the outages to breakages in fiber optic backbone cables and a power outage.
The Ukrainian State Service of Special Communication said the Kremlin had falsely claimed Ukraine’s government had ordered a shutdown.
In a statement, it called the outage “another enemy attempt to leave Ukrainians without access to the true information” and suggested Moscow was preparing to try to cement political control by introducing the Russian ruble as currency and staging a “possible fake referendum.”
___
BRUSSELS — Poland urged its European Union partners on Monday to unite and impose sweeping sanctions on Russia’s oil and natural gas sectors over the war in Ukraine, and not to cave in to pressure to pay for their gas in Russian rubles.
EU ministers are meeting in Brussels to discuss their response to Russia’s decision last week to cut gas supplies to Bulgaria and Poland. Energy giant Gazprom says the two countries failed to pay their bills in April.
“We will call for immediate sanctions on Russian oil and gas. This is the next, and urgent, and absolute step,” Polish Climate and Environment Minister Anna Moskwa said. “We already have coal. Now it’s time for oil, and (the) second step is for gas. The best option is take them all together.”
Russian energy giant Gazprom cut supplies to Bulgaria and Poland last week after President Vladimir Putin said that “unfriendly” countries must start paying for gas in rubles, Russia’s currency. Bulgaria and Poland have refused to do so, like most EU countries. More Gazprom bills are due May 20, and the bloc is wary that Russia might turn off more taps then.
The 27 nation EU imports around 40% of the gas it consumes from Russia. But some member countries, notably Hungary and Slovakia, are more heavily dependent on Russian supplies than others, and support for a gradual phasing in of an oil embargo is emerging.
___
Teams of workers strove Monday to repair a bridge in southwestern Russia near the border with Ukraine that was damaged in what a local governor described as an act of sabotage.
The regional administration said it expects the repair work will be completed Wednesday.
Kursk regional Gov. Roman Starovoit said Sunday that the bridge was blown up by unidentified attackers and the Investigative Committee, Russia’s top state investigative agency, has launched a criminal probe into what it described as a “terrorist act.”
Officials didn’t specify the significance of the bridge for the war, but it sits on a key railway link used to ferry supplies to Russian troops fighting in eastern Ukraine.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack on the bridge, that follows a series of explosions and fires in western Russia amid the war in Ukraine that has entered a third month.
___
LVIV, Ukraine — U.S. diplomats have made a day trip back into Ukraine amid that country’s grinding war with Russia.
Kristina Kvien, U.S. Embassy charge d’affaires, attended a news conference Monday in Lviv to highlight the diplomatic return.
The U.S. pulled out of its Kyiv embassy to Lviv before the war, then pulled out entirely after Russia began its war on Ukraine in February.
In recent days, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited, promising diplomats would return.
Kvien spoke at the Lviv’s city council building in front of a Chestnut Briotti tree planted in April 2021 by America. She said America was there to support Ukraine and hoped to return to Kyiv soon.
Andriy Sadovyi, Lviv’s mayor, also attended the event. He pledged that Ukraine would “kick out the enemy from our land.”
___
KYIV, Ukraine — Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod walked the streets of Kyiv suburbs on Monday to view the devastation caused by Russian forces before they withdrew.
He tweeted to say that it was “horrible” to witness the destruction, which he viewed with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba.
Kofod also said that Denmark firmly supports the work to investigate and prosecute those responsible for killing civilians in those areas, referring to the International Criminal Court’s work in investigating possible war crimes.
Denmark’s Embassy in Kyiv reopened Monday after closing earlier in the war. Kofod said he hoisted the Danish flag on the building.
___
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian authorities say the Russian military again has struck a strategic bridge in the country’s southwest.
Odesa region Gov. Maksym Marchenko said that the Russians on Monday hit a bridge across the Dniester Estuary west of Odesa where the Dniester River flows into the Black Sea. The bridge already had been heavily damaged in two previous Russian missile strikes.
The bridge provides the only railway connection and the key highway link to areas west of Odesa. Its destruction cuts access to shipments of weapons and other cargo from neighboring Romania.
The attacks on the bridge followed a claim by a senior Russian military officer that Russia aims to take control of the entire south of Ukraine and build a land corridor to the separatist Transnistria region of Moldova, where tensions have recently escalated.
The region broke away after a short civil war in the early 1990s, and is unrecognized by most countries. An estimated 1,500 Russian soldiers are stationed there. Ukrainian and Western officials have voiced concern that Russia could use the region to open a new front in the war against Ukraine.
___
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba says his Russian counterpart’s recent remarks about Adolf Hitler and Jews demonstrate “the deeply-rooted antisemitism of the Russian elites.”
In an interview with an Italian news channel, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed that Ukraine could still have Nazi elements even if some figures, including President Volodymry Zelenskyy, were Jewish. “Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean anything,” he said, according to an Italian translation.
“Lavrov could not help hiding the deeply rooted antisemitism of the Russian elites,” Kuleba said in a tweet Monday. “His heinous remarks are offensive to President Zelenskyy, Ukraine, Israel, and the Jewish people. More broadly, they demonstrate that today’s Russia is full of hatred towards other nations.”