Volodymyr Zelenskiy urges UN to adopt five-point plan for peace in Ukraine; more than 1,300 people arrested in anti-mobilisation rallies throughout Russia
Security forces detained more than 1,300 people in Russia overnight at protests denouncing mobilisation, a rights group said, hours after President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s first military draft since the second world war.
The independent OVD-Info protest monitoring group said that according to information it had collated from 38 Russian cities, more than 1,311 people had been held by late evening. It said those figures included at least 502 in Moscow and 524 in St Petersburg, Russia’s second most populous city. Unsanctioned rallies are illegal under Russia’s anti-protest laws.
Russian interior ministry official Irina Volk, in a statement quoted by Russian news agencies, said officers had cut short attempts to stage what it called small protests. “In a number of regions, there were attempts to stage unauthorised actions which brought together an extremely small number of participants,” Volk was quoted as saying. “These were all stopped.”
The Moscow Times is carrying a report that a Russian military recruitment office and an administration building were attacked overnight in two separate locations during the anti-mobilisation protests.
The UK’s ministry of defence has described the mobilisation as an admission that Russia has “exhausted its supply of willing volunteers to fight in Ukraine”. It said “Russia is likely to struggle with the logistical and administrative challenges of even mustering the 300,000 personnel. It will probably attempt to stand up new formations with many of these troops, which are unlikely to be combat effective for months.”
Traffic arriving at Finland’s eastern border with Russia has “intensified” during the night, the Finnish border guard said early on Thursday, while adding that the situation was under control. One-way flights out of Russia were rocketing in price and selling out fast on Wednesday after Putin ordered the immediate call-up of 300,000 reservists.
Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and prime minister, and currently deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, has threatened attacks on Europe and US, saying “Referendums will be held, and the Donbas republics and other territories will be admitted to Russia. Any Russian weapons, including strategic nuclear weapons and weapons based on new principles, could be used [to protect them]. Therefore, various retired idiots with generals’ stripes do not need to scare us with talk about a Nato strike on Crimea. Hypersonic is guaranteed to be able to reach targets in Europe and the United States much faster.”
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has described Joe Biden’s speech on Wednesday at the UN as “indecent”, and accused the US president of mis-quoting his Russian counterpart over nuclear threats.
Biden had denounced Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons as “reckless” and “irresponsible” and called Russia’s planned annexation of more regions of Ukraine as “an extremely significant violation” of the UN charter. The US president was speaking to the UN general assembly, where he sought to galvanise the outrage of UN member states at the threat that Putin’s actions and “imperial ambitions” posed to the UN’s founding values.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, shrugged off Russian moves to escalate the war, saying his country’s forces would continue their counteroffensive, not giving Russia breathing space to mobilise and dig in on Ukrainian soil. “We can return the Ukrainian flag to our entire territory. We can do it with the force of arms, but we need time,” Zelenskiy said in a recorded broadcast to the UN general assembly on Wednesday, which Russia had tried to stop but was overwhelmingly voted down by member states.
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