US president says Russian leader has clearly committed war crimes and move makes ‘a very strong point’
Joe Biden has welcomed the international criminal court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Russian president for war crimes in Ukraine.
The US president said Vladimir Putin had clearly committed war crimes and that the arrest warrant for the Russian leader made a “very strong point”.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Apparent reversal of position adopted after invasion of Ukraine sends men fleeing Putin’s draft back to Russia
The Biden administration has quietly resumed deportations to Russia, an apparent reversal of the position adopted after Russia invaded Ukraine just over a year ago, when such removals were suspended, the Guardian has learned.
Immigration advocates were taken by surprise when a young Russian man, who came to the US fleeing Vladimir Putin’s efforts to mobilize citizens to fight in Ukraine, was abruptly deported at the weekend from the US back to Russia.
Continue reading...Joe Biden says international criminal court’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin is justified, while Volodymyr Zelenskiy hails the ‘historic’ move
Continue reading...Supporters of the invasion of Ukraine are portraying the court’s decision as a sign of western antagonism to Russia
The international criminal court’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin will probably be portrayed as a point of no return in Russia, where the Kremlin will spin the court’s decision as proof that the west is seeking nothing short of regime change.
While Putin has already been preparing his public for a long war, the arrest warrant will for the first time raise the concrete possibility that Russia’s leaders and other prominent supporters of the war could face justice at The Hague if they ever find themselves under arrest.
Continue reading...Russian president accused of ‘unlawful deportation’ of children ‘from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation’
The state-owned Russian news agency RIA is reporting that Russia’s defence secretary, Sergei Shoigu, has presented state awards to the pilots of the Su-27 planes involved in the drone incident over the Black Sea for “preventing the violation of the borders of the special operation area by the American MQ-9 Reaper drone”.
More details soon …
Continue reading...What we know about the children behind the indictment of Vladimir Putin and his children’s commissioner for abduction
• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates
The international criminal court in The Hague has indicted the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the mass abduction of Ukrainian children.
This means there is now an international arrest warrant out for Putin, a reflection of the speed with which the international legal community has pursued allegations of war crimes during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Continue reading...China says president will meet Russian leader next week with aim of deepening partnership
China’s president is to visit Russia next week in an apparent show of support for Vladimir Putin, the Chinese foreign ministry has said.
The Kremlin also announced the visit, scheduled for 20-22 March, saying it would take place “at the invitation of Vladimir Putin”.
Continue reading...The Hague issues arrest warrant for Putin for overseeing abduction of Ukrainian children; Russia sustaining up to 1,500 casualties a day
Continue reading...Footage shows thick black smoke billowing from security service building near eastern Ukraine
At least one person has been killed and two people injured in a blast and fire at a building belonging to Russia’s FSB security service in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, according to officials quoted by Russian news agencies.
Footage captured on Thursday by Reuters showed thick black smoke billowing into the air near residential buildings and a shopping centre in Rostov, the capital of a region that adjoins parts of eastern Ukraine where battles with Russia are raging.
Continue reading...War crimes in Ukraine include wilful killings, systematic torture and deportation of children, says UN report; Polish president says handover to come within days
Suspilne correspondents are reporting that explosions have been heard in Kherson this morning.
Oleh Synyehubov, governor of Kharkiv, reports that the Russian military destroyed and damaged private houses and infrastructure facilities in two settlements in the Kharkiv region overnight. The claim has not been independently verified.
Continue reading...Pentagon says video has been edited for length but shows events in sequential order
A remarkable video released by the Pentagon shows the moments before a Russian fighter crashed into a $32m US Reaper drone after spraying it with jet fuel on Tuesday morning over the Black Sea.
The declassified footage shows an Su-27 Flanker jet making two exceptionally close passes of the uncrewed drone, spraying fuel in front of it, a harassment tactic that US experts say has not been seen before.
Continue reading...Daniil Frolkin handed 5.5-year sentence in move widely seen as attempt to silence other servicemen
A Russian soldier who confessed to killing a civilian in Ukraine last year has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison by a military court in Russia’s far east on charges of spreading “fake news” about the army.
In an interview with the independent news outlet Istories last August, Daniil Frolkin, 21, said he shot and killed a male civilian in Andriivka, a village near Kyiv that was occupied by Russian forces shortly after the start of the invasion.
Continue reading...US secretary of state Antony Blinken says collision of Russian fighter jet with US drone was ‘reckless and unsafe action’
Thanks for following along – that’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. My colleague Martin Belam will take you through the rest of the day’s news.
AFP has this flash of news, saying Russia has called on the US to halt what it calls its “hostile” flights, after the collision of a Russian fighter jet with a US MQ-9 Reaper drone that the Pentagon said was conducting a routine flight.
Continue reading...Civilians are being killed by Russian weapons just like in Ukraine, says special rapporteur Tom Andrews in call for global action
Myanmar is a “failing state” and the crisis is getting exponentially worse, a UN special rapporteur for the country has warned, urging countries to adopt the same unified resolve that followed the invasion of Ukraine.
“The same types of weapons that are killing Ukrainians are killing people in Myanmar,” Tom Andrews, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, told the Guardian in an interview, citing the supply of Russian weapons to the junta since the coup two years ago. The junta relies heavily on aircraft from China and Russia, and has increasingly resorted to airstrikes to attempt to quell determined resistance forces.
Continue reading...‘I certainly hope for success,’ says senior Kremlin official of hopes of raising debris from seabed west of Crimea
Moscow has said it intends to recover the wreckage of a US drone brought down on Tuesday following an interception by Russian fighter jets, but the White House said the debris could be in such deep water that recovery is impossible.
“I don’t know if we can recover [it] or not, but we will certainly have to do that, and we will deal with it,” Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s security council, said on Wednesday. “I certainly hope for success.”
Continue reading...Swedish prime minister also said he hopes Sweden’s accession will be ratified by Ankara after May elections
Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö, has said he expects his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to tell him whether Turkey is endorsing the Nordic country’s Nato membership application when the two meet in Ankara later this week.
“It was known that once President Erdoğan has made his decision concerning ratification of Finland’s membership of Nato, he would wish to meet and fulfil his promise directly from president to president,” Niinistö told Reuters on Wednesday.
Continue reading...US accuses Russia of ‘unsafe and unprofessional’ intercept of MQ-9 Reaper drone over waters west of Crimea
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A Russian fighter has collided with a US Reaper drone, forcing it down into the Black Sea, in what US forces called an “unsafe and unprofessional” intercept.
A US European Command statement said the collision happened just after 7am on Tuesday morning, when two Russian Su-27 fighter jets flew up to the MQ-9 Reaper drone over international waters west of Crimea. The statement said the Russian pilots sought to disrupt the US aircraft before the collision.
Continue reading...Russia’s and China’s ‘signalling’ to US aircraft in international airspace is nothing new, but downing a craft is a worrying development
On any given day around Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Russian and Nato aircraft and naval vessels, manned and unmanned, buzz around in close proximity, a constant recipe for a superpower crisis along the edges of a war.
The stakes are raised by the fact that both sides have thousands of nuclear warheads as a weapon of last resort, and the risks are raised considerably by reckless behaviour.
Continue reading...International criminal court prosecutor is said to be preparing to formally open two war crimes cases
Moscow has said it does not recognise the jurisdiction of the international criminal court in The Hague, after reports that the court is expected to seek its first arrest warrants against Russian individuals over the war in Ukraine.
“We do not recognise this court; we do not recognise its jurisdiction,” Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists in Moscow on Tuesday morning.
Continue reading...Russian fighter jet collides with US drone over Black Sea; one person killed and three injured in Kramatorsk shelling
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