europe
Ukraine president again presses West for advanced weapons
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pressed Western leaders again on Monday to provide more advanced weapons to help his country in its war with Russia, and he repeated his calls for Russian forces to withdraw from occupied areas of Ukraine, suggesting Christmas as a date to retreat.
During a video conference, Zelenskky told host Germany and other leaders of the Group of Seven industrial powers: “It would be right to begin the withdrawal of Russian troops from the internationally recognized territory of Ukraine this Christmas. If Russia withdraws its troops from Ukraine, then a reliable cessation of hostilities will be ensured.”
He added: “The answer from Moscow will show what they really want there: either a further confrontation with the world or finally an end to aggression.”
The G-7 leaders supported Zelenskyy's appeal, saying in a statement after their meeting that “Russia can end this war immediately by ceasing its attacks against Ukraine and completely and unconditionally withdrawing its forces from the territory of Ukraine.”
The Kremlin has rejected all previous appeals to reverse its land grabs in Ukraine. It didn’t immediately respond to this latest one.
The two countries haven't engaged in any recent peace talks and there is no end in sight for the war, which is in its 10th month and has killed and wounded tens of thousands of people and left dozens of Ukrainian cities and towns in ruins .
Read more: Russia grinds on in eastern Ukraine; Bakhmut ‘destroyed’
Russia has illegally annexed parts of eastern and southern Ukraine, including the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, though it doesn't fully control all of them. Zelenskyy has said his goal is to reclaim all occupied territory, while Russian President Vladimir Putin insists on solidifying his forces' control over the areas.
In his address to the G-7, Zelenskyy echoed his prime minister's Sunday appeal for long-range missiles, modern tanks, artillery and missile batteries and other high-tech air defense systems to counter Russian attacks that have knocked out electricity and water supplies for millions of Ukrainians. He acknowledged that, “Unfortunately, Russia still has an advantage in artillery and missiles.”
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told French broadcaster LCI that in addition to making Ukrainians suffer, Russia wants to swamp Europe with Ukrainian refugees by striking power stations and other infrastructure. Zelenskyy told the G-7 that protecting Ukraine's energy facilities from Russian missiles and Iranian drones “will be the protection of the whole of Europe, since with these strikes Russia is provoking a humanitarian and migration catastrophe not only for Ukraine, but also for the entire EU.”
Poland's president, Andrzej Duda, said his nation already has seen an increased demand to shelter refugees.
"The number of refugees in Poland has risen (recently) to some 3 million. That will probably also mean an increase in their numbers in Germany,” Duda said following talks with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin.
Read more: Ukraine: Russia put rocket launchers at nuclear power plant
On Monday, Russian shelling again mostly focused on eastern and southern regions that Putin illegally annexed.
To defend against further strikes, Shmyhal repeated Ukrainian calls for Patriot surface-to-air missiles — a highly sophisticated system. During the LCI interview, he also asked for more German and French air-defense systems, resupplies of artillery shells and modern battle tanks.
Providing Patriot missiles to Ukraine would advance the kinds of defense systems the West is sending to help the country repel Russian aerial attacks, and would likely mark an escalation.
A U.S. official told reporters the Pentagon has no current plans to send Patriot missiles to Ukraine, but that discussions continue. The key issue is that the complex, high-tech system requires significant maintenance and training, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations in Ukraine.
Air defenses were also a topic of a phone call Zelenskyy held Sunday with U.S. President Joe Biden. Biden "highlighted how the U.S. is prioritizing efforts to strengthen Ukraine’s air defense through our security assistance, including the Dec. 9 announcement of $275 million in additional ammunition and equipment that included systems to counter the Russian use of unmanned aerial vehicles," the White House said.
The G-7 leaders said in their statement that they've set an “immediate focus on providing Ukraine with air defense systems and capabilities.”
Even with their current systems, Ukrainian forces have already succeeded in intercepting missiles and drones, and a spokeswoman for the country's southern armed forces, Natalia Humeniuk, said Monday on Ukrainian TV that “the effectiveness of anti-aircraft defense is 85%-90%” against weaponized drones.
U.S. officials agree with Ukraine's reported success in shooting down drones and missiles, attributing the high kill rate in part to intelligence that the U.S. and other allies are providing.
Russian drones are still active. Their attacks near the Black Sea port of Odesa over the weekend destroyed several energy facilities and left all customers except hospitals, maternity homes, boiler plants and pumping stations without power.
Slovakia said that in cooperation with Germany, it has opened a center to repair Ukrainian howitzers and air defense systems of Western origin. The center is located inside a military base in the town of Michalovce, some 35 kilometers (22 miles) west of the border with Ukraine, the EU member nation's Defense Ministry said.
In Ukraine, the eastern Donbas region, made up of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, again has become a focus of intense fighting, particularly around the city of Bakhmut.
Ukrainian officials said Monday the country’s forces hit a hotel in the Luhansk region that served as a headquarters of the Wagner Group, a private Russian military contractor and mercenary group that has played a prominent role in eastern Ukraine.
The region's Ukrainian governor, Serhiy Haidai, said in an unverified claim that hundreds of Russians were killed in the strike on Kadiivka on Sunday. Moscow-backed local officials in Luhansk confirmed that a Ukrainian strike destroyed a hotel building in Kadiivka but claimed it was unused.
Ivan Fedorov, the Ukrainian mayor of the southeastern town of Melitopol, reported that Ukraine attacked a hotel that reportedly housed analysts from Russia’s top security agency, the FSB. Moscow did not comment on that claim, and none of the reports could be independently confirmed. Russian officials, meanwhile, accused Ukrainian forces of blowing up pillars of a bridge in a suburb of Melitopol on Monday night. Various reports said Russian forces had been using the bridge to transport supplies and that traffic across it has now stopped.
Elsewhere, the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office said two civilians were killed and 10 were wounded in Russia’s shelling of the town of Hirnyk in the Donetsk region.
Yaroslav Yanushevych, the governor of the Kherson region, said a Russian strike on the southern city of the same name, which Ukraine reclaimed a month ago, killed two civilians and left five wounded Monday. He said the Russian shelling hit residential buildings and damaged power lines.
And in Skadovsk, about 62 miles (100 kilometers) south of Kherson where the Russian-installed Kherson regional administration had been relocated, a senior government official was lightly injured Monday in an assassination attempt, the Russian Ria-Novosti news agency reported. The driver of a car carrying the official was killed in the attack, it said.
‘I’ll kill you all’: Man kills 3 in Rome condo board meeting
A man opened fire Sunday during a condominium board meeting in a coffee shop in northern Rome, killing three people and injuring others, authorities and witnesses said.
Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri called an emergency security meeting for Monday after what he called “the grave episode of violence that has struck our city.” In a tweet, he confirmed three people were killed in the shooting in the working class neighborhood of Fidene.
“The shooting occured in an enclosed outdoor seating area of the bar, called “Il Posto Giusto,” or “The Right Place.”
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La Repubblica daily quoted witness Luciana Ciorba, vice president of the condo board, as saying the man entered the bar shouting “I’ll kill you all,” and then opened fire. Participants managed to disarm him until Carabinieri police arrived.
Speaking in a video interview, Ciorba said the man was known to board members and had been previously reported to authorities for making threats against local residents.
Free for a month, Kherson still toils to clear Russian traps
A hand grenade jerry-rigged into the detergent tray of a Kherson home’s washing machine. A street sign maliciously directing passers-by toward a deadly minefield. A police station that allegedly housed a torture chamber but remains so booby-trapped that demining crews can’t even start to hunt for evidence.
Sunday marks exactly one month since Russia's troops withdrew from Kherson and its vicinity after an eight-month occupation, sparking jubilation across Ukraine. But life in the southern city is still very far from normal.
The departing Russians left behind all sorts of ugly surprises, and their artillery continues to batter the city from new, dug-in positions across the Dnieper River. The regional administration said Saturday that shelling over the past month has killed 41 people, including a child, in Kherson, and 96 were hospitalised.
Read more: Russia grinds on in eastern Ukraine; Bakhmut ‘destroyed’
Residents’ access to electricity still comes and goes, although water is largely connected, and indoor heating has only very recently been restored — and only to about 70-80% of the city — after the Russians last month blew up a giant central heating station that served much of the city.
For authorities and citizens, sifting through the countless headaches and hazards left behind by the Russians, and bracing for new ones, is a daily chore.
On Friday alone, according to the local affiliate of public broadcaster Suspilne, Russian forces shelled the region 68 times with mortars, artillery, tank and rocket fire. Meanwhile, in the last month, a total of 5,500 people have taken evacuation trains out, and work crews have cleared 190 kilometers (115 miles) of road, Suspilne reported.
When aid trucks arrived a month ago, war-weary and desperate residents flocked to the central Svoboda (Freedom) Square for food and supplies. But after a Russian strike on the square as a line of people queued to enter a bank in late November, such large gatherings have become less common and aid is doled out from smaller, more discreet distribution points.
Regional officials say some 80% of Kherson's pre-war population of about 320,000 fled after the Russians moved in, days after their invasion began on Feb. 24. With some 60,000-70,000 residents remaining, the city now has a feel of a ghost town. Those who remain mostly keep indoors because they're cautious about making forays into the streets.
“Life is getting back to normal, but there is a lot of shelling," said Valentyna Kytaiska, 56, who lives in the nearby village of Chornobaivka. She lamented the nightly “Bam! Bam!” and the unsettling uncertainty of where the Russian ordnance may land.
Normal is a relative term for a country at war. There’s no telling whether what Russia insists on calling a “special military operation” will end in days, weeks, months or even years.
In the meantime, painstaking efforts go on to establish a better sense of normalcy, like clearing the mess and mines left behind by the Russians, in tough wintertime weather.
"The difficulties are very simple, it’s the weather conditions," said one military demining squad member, who goes by the nom de guerre of Tekhnik. He said some of their equipment simply doesn't work in frost conditions “because the soil is frozen like concrete.”
Read more: Ukraine: Russia put rocket launchers at nuclear power plant
The deployment of additional teams could help ease the heavy workload, he said. “To give you an idea, during the month of our work, we found and removed several tons of mines," said Tekhnik, adding that they focused only on about 10 square kilometers (about 4 square miles).
In Kherson's Beryslavskyi district, a main road was blocked off with a sign reading “Mines Ahead” and rerouting passersby to a smaller road. In fact, it was that side road which was mined, and cost the lives of some military deminers. A few weeks later, four police officers were also killed there, including the police chief from the northern city of Chernihiv, who had come down to help Kherson regain its footing.
The general state of disrepair of weather-beaten roads helped the outgoing Russians disguise their deadly traps: Potholes, some covered with soil, provided a convenient place to lay mines. Sometimes, the Russians cut into the asphalt to make holes themselves.
Demining squads go slowly house-to-house to ensure it's safe for owners or previous residents to return. Experts say a single home can take up to three days to be cleared.
One crew turned up a hand grenade in one house, stuffed into a a washing machine — the pin placed in such a way that opening the detergent tray would set off an explosion.
The city's main police station, where detainees were reportedly tortured, is packed with explosives. When demining squads tried to work their way in, part of the building exploded — so they've shelved the project for now.
Longer term questions remain: Kherson sits in an agricultural region that produces crops as diverse as wheat, tomatoes, and watermelon — a regional symbol. The fields are so heavily mined that about 30% of arable land in the region is unlikely to be planted in the spring, Technik the deminer said. A cursory look reveals the tops of anti-tank mines poking up in the fields.
Even so, after a night of shelling from Friday evening into Saturday, Kherson resident Oleksandr Chebotariov said life had been even worse under the Russians for himself, his wife and 3-year-old daughter.
“It's easier to breathe now,” the 35-year-old radiologist said — only to add: “If the banging doesn’t stop before the New Year, I’m going on vacation.”
Germany: Suspect dead after killing mother, taking hostages
German police said Saturday that a man suspected of killing his mother and later taking two people hostage in the eastern city of Dresden has died.
Authorities had urged people to avoid an area in the city center and ordered Dresden’s Christmas market to remain closed while the police operation to free the hostages was underway.
Police initially said they were communicating with the suspect before announcing shortly after noon that the hostage situation was over.
“The suspect died during the operation,” Dresden police later wrote on Twitter. “The 40-year-old suffered fatal injuries while ... the hostages were freed.
”Dresden police didn’t immediately respond to requests for confirmation about whether the man had been killed by police or died from self-inflicted injuries.
Read: 'Planning armed coup': German police arrest 25 suspected far-right extremists
Police also said the hostages were “outwardly uninjured.”
The 40-year-old German was also suspected of killing his 62-year-old mother. Police had found the woman dead in another part of the city early Saturday.
Radio Dresden reported that the man had tried to enter a building where the broadcaster is based, near the city’s main train station. He reportedly fired several shots before fleeing, according to Radio Dresden.
Russia grinds on in eastern Ukraine; Bakhmut ‘destroyed’
Russian forces have turned the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut into ruins, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, while Ukraine’s military on Saturday reported missile, rocket and air strikes in multiple parts of the country that Moscow is trying to conquer after months of resistance.
The latest battles of Russia’s 9 1/2 month war in Ukraine have centered on four provinces that Russian President Vladimir Putin triumphantly — and illegally — claimed to have annexed in late September. The fighting indicates Russia’s struggle to establish control of those regions and Ukraine’s persistence to reclaim them.
Zelenskyy said the situation “remains very difficult” in several frontline cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Together, the provinces make up the Donbas, an expansive industrial region bordering Russia that Putin identified as a focus from the war’s outset and where Moscow-backed separatists have fought since 2014.
“Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna. For a long time, there is no living place left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, naming cities that have again found themselves in the crosshairs. “The occupiers actually destroyed Bakhmut, another Donbas city that the Russian army turned into burnt ruins.”
Some buildings remain standing in Bakhmut, and the remaining residents still mill about the streets. But like Mariupol and other contested cities, it endured a long siege and spent weeks without water and power even before Moscow launched massive strikes to take out public utilities across Ukraine.
The Donetsk region’s governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, estimated seven weeks ago that 90% of the city’s prewar population of over 70,000 had fled in the months since Moscow focused on seizing the entire Donbas.
Read: Russian man jailed 8 1/2 years for Ukraine action criticism
The Ukrainian military General Staff reported missile attacks, about 20 airstrikes and more than 60 rocket attacks across Ukraine between Friday and Saturday. Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun said the most active fighting was in the Bakhmut district, where more than 20 populated places came under fire. He said Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks in Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk.
Russia’s grinding eastern offensive succeeded in capturing almost all of Luhansk during the summer. Donetsk eluded the same fate, and the Russian military in recent weeks has poured manpower and resources around Bakhmut in an attempt to encircle the city, analysts and Ukrainian officials have said.
After Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson nearly a month ago, the battle heated up around Bakhmut, demonstrating Putin’s desire for visible gains following weeks of clear setbacks in Ukraine.
Taking Bakhmut would rupture Ukraine’s supply lines and open a route for Russian forces to press on toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, key Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk. Russia has battered Bakhmut with rockets for more than half of the year. A ground assault accelerated after its troops forced the Ukrainians to withdraw from Luhansk in July.
But some analysts have questioned Russia’s strategic logic in the relentless pursuit to take Bakhmut and surrounding areas that also came under intense shelling in the past weeks, and where Ukrainian officials reported that some residents were living in damp basements.
“The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around #Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the #Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut,” the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, posted on its Twitter feed on Thursday.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russian troops also pressed their Donbas offensive in the direction of the Donetsk city of Lyman, which is 65 kilometers (40 miles) north of Bakhmut. According to the ministry, they “managed to take more advantageous positions for further advancement.”
Russia’s forces first occupied the city in May but withdrew in early October. Ukrainian authorities said at the time they found mines on the bodies of dead Russian soldiers that were set to explode when someone tried to clear the corpses, as well as the bodies of civilian residents killed by shelling or who had died from a lack of food and medicine.
On Friday, Putin lashed out at recent comments by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said a 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine negotiated by France and Germany had bought time for Ukraine to prepare for war with Russia this year.
Read: Ukraine: Russia put rocket launchers at nuclear power plant
That deal was aimed to cool tensions after pro-Russia separatists seized territory in the Donbas a year earlier, sparking a war with Ukrainian forces that ballooned into a war with Russia itself after the Feb. 24 full-scale invasion.
Ukraine’s military on Saturday also reported strikes in other provinces: Kharkiv and Sumy in the northeast, central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia in the southeast and Kherson in the south. The latter two, along with Donetsk and Luhansk, are the four regions Putin claims are now Russian territory.
A month ago, Russian troops withdrew from the western side of the Dniper River where it cuts through Kherson province, allowing Ukrainians forces to declare the region’s capital city liberated. But the Russians still occupy a majority of the province and have continued to attack from their news positions across the river.
Writing on Telegram, the deputy head of Zelenskyy’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said two civilians died and another eight were wounded during dozens of mortar, rocket and artillery attacks over the previous day. Residential areas, a hospital, shops, warehouses and critical infrastructure in the Kherson region were damaged, he said.
To the west, drone attacks overnight left much of Odesa province, including its namesake Black Sea port city, without electricity, regional Gov. Maxim Marchenko said. Several energy facilities were destroyed at once, leaving all customers except hospitals, maternity homes, boiler plants and pumping stations were without power, electric company DTEK said Saturday.
Citing the sheer “scale of the destruction,”the company said on Facebook that emergency crews were deployed and would start work to restore power as soon as the military provided authorization. Earlier Saturday, Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command said Russian troops had attacked energy facilities in the Odesa region with explosive drones overnight.
France to make condoms free for anyone under 25, Macron says
France will make condoms free in pharmacies for anyone up to age 25 in the new year, President Emmanuel Macron announced Friday.
The move comes as the government says sexually transmitted diseases are on the rise among young people, and as this year’s exceptional inflation is cutting especially deeply into the budgets of France’s poorest.
Girls and women 25 and under already can get free birth control in France as part of government efforts to ensure that young people of all incomes can prevent unwanted pregnancy. Existing measures don’t apply to men, however, or specifically address access for transgender or nonbinary people.
Macron had said Thursday that condoms would be free in pharmacies for anyone 18-25 starting Jan. 1. But after a French TV presenter and others challenged him on social networks Friday over why the condom measure did not include minors, the president agreed to expand the program.
Read more: Biden, Macron vow unity against Russia, discuss trade row
“Let's do it,” Macron said in a selfie video that he shot from the sidelines of a summit in Spain. He later tweeted: “A lot of minors also have sex ... they need to protect themselves too.”
Macron, who was France's youngest-ever president when he was first elected in 2017 at age 39, also promised stepped-up efforts to prevent and test for HIV and other sexually transmitted viruses.
France’s state health care system covers some birth control costs but not all, and doctor appointments for low-income patients often require long waits. Abortions in France are available free for everyone.
Several other European countries offer free or subsidized contraception.
Ukraine: Russia put rocket launchers at nuclear power plant
Russian forces have installed multiple rocket launchers at Ukraine's shut-down Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Ukrainian officials claimed Thursday, raising fears Europe's largest atomic power station could be used as a base to fire on Ukrainian territory and heightening radiation dangers.
Ukraine's nuclear company Energoatom said in a statement that Russian forces occupying the plant have placed several Grad multiple rocket launchers near one of its six nuclear reactors. It said the offensive systems are located at new “protective structures” the Russians secretly built, "violating all conditions for nuclear and radiation safety.”
The claim could not be independently verified.
The Soviet-built multiple rocket launchers are capable of firing rockets at ranges of up to 40 kilometers (25 miles), and Energoatom said they could enable Russian forces to hit the opposite bank of the Dnieper River, where each side blames the other for almost daily shelling in the cities of Nikopol and Marhanets. The plant is in a southern Ukrainian region the Kremlin has illegally annexed.
The Zaporizhzhia station has been under Russian control since the war’s early days. Russia and Ukraine accuse each other of shelling the plant and risking a radiation release. Although the risk of a nuclear meltdown is greatly reduced because all six reactors have been shut down, experts have said a dangerous radiation release is still possible. The reactors were shut down because the fighting kept knocking out external power supplies needed to run the reactors' cooling systems and other safety systems.
Read more: Ukraine leader defiant as drone strikes hit Russia again
The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has stationed inspectors at the plant and has been trying to persuade both sides in the conflict to agree to a demilitarized zone around it. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the reported Grad installation. Ukraine has accused the Russians before of having heavy weapons at the plant. The Kremlin has said it needs to maintain control of the plant to defend it from alleged Ukrainian attacks.
With renewed focus on the dangers at Zaporizhzhia in the war, dragging on past nine months, the Kremlin is sending new signals about how to end it. It said Thursday it’s up to Ukraine’s president to end the military conflict, suggesting terms that Kyiv has repeatedly rejected, while Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to press on with the fighting despite Western criticism.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that "(Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy knows when it may end. It may end tomorrow if he wishes so.”
The Ukraine war has deteriorated relations between Russia and much of the rest of the world, but limited cooperation continues in some areas, such as exchanges of prisoners. On Thursday, in a dramatic swap that had been in the making for months, Russia freed American basketball star Brittney Griner while the United States released a jailed Russian arms dealer.
The Kremlin has long said that Ukraine must accept Russian conditions to end the fighting. It has demanded that Kyiv recognize Crimea — a Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow illegally annexed in 2014 — as part of Russia and also accept Moscow’s other land gains in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials have repeatedly rejected those conditions, saying the war will end when the occupied territories are retaken or Russian forces leave them.
In an acknowledgement that it’s taking longer than he expected to achieve his goals in the conflict, Putin said Wednesday that the fighting in Ukraine “could be a lengthy process” while describing Moscow's land gains as “a significant result for Russia."
During a conference call with reporters, Peskov said Moscow wasn’t aiming to grab new land but will try to regain control of areas in Ukraine from which it withdrew just weeks after incorporating them into Russia in hastily called referendums — which Ukraine and the West reject as illegal shams. After earlier retreats from the Kyiv and Kharkiv areas, Russian troops last month left the city of Kherson and parts of the Kherson region, one of the four illegally annexed Ukrainian regions.
Read more: Russian airfield hit, a day after drone strikes on bases
Putin vowed Thursday to achieve the declared goals in Ukraine regardless of the Western reaction.
“All we have to do is make a move and there is a lot of noise, chatter and outcry all across the universe. It will not stop us fulfilling combat tasks,” Putin said.
He described Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy facilities and other key infrastructure as a legitimate response to an Oct. 8 truck bombing of a key bridge linking Crimea with Russia’s mainland, and other attacks the Kremlin claimed Ukraine carried out. Putin also cited Ukraine’s move to halt water supplies to the areas in eastern Ukraine that Russia controlled.
“There is a lot of noise now about our strikes on the energy infrastructure,” Putin said at a meeting with soldiers whom he decorated with the country’s top medals. “Yes, we are doing it. But who started it? Who struck the Crimean bridge? Who blew up power lines from the Kursk nuclear power station? Who is not supplying water to Donetsk?”
While stopping short of publicly claiming credit for the attacks, Ukrainian officials welcome their results and hint at Ukrainian involvement.
Heavy fighting continues, mostly in regions Russia annexed. Zelenskyy's office said 11 civilians were killed in Ukraine Wednesday.
The Donetsk region has been the epicenter of the recent fighting. Russian artillery struck the town of Yampil during distribution of humanitarian aid to civilians, Ukrainian officials said. Buildings were damaged in Kurakhove, 35 kilometers (22 miles) west of the regional capital, Donetsk, officials said.
More than ten cities and villages in the region were shelled, including the town of Bakhmut, which has remained in Ukrainian hands despite Moscow’s goal of capturing the entire annexed Donbas region bordering Russia.
Officials predict more arrests over German far-right plot
German officials say they expect more people to be detained in connection with an alleged far-right plan to topple the government that saw 25 people rounded up Wednesday, including a self-styled prince, a retired paratrooper and a judge.
The plot was allegedly hatched by people linked to the so-called Reich Citizens movement, which rejects Germany’s postwar constitution and the legitimacy of the government.
Georg Meier, the top security official in Thuringia state, told public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk on Thursday that he expects a second wave of people being detained as authorities review evidence.
Meier accused the far-right Alternative for Germany party of fueling conspiracy theories like those that allegedly motivated the plotters detained across the country this week.
Those held include a former Alternative for Germany lawmaker, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, who is also a Berlin judge. The party condemned the alleged coup plans.
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Also detained was Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, whom prosecutors consider one of the two ringleaders of the plot. The 71-year-old member of the House of Reuss continues to use the title of ‘prince’ despite Germany abolishing any formal role for royalty more than a century ago.
Some in Germany have questioned whether the suspected extremists would actually have been able to pull off any serious attack.
But Germany’s top security official, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, said it would be wrong to underestimate such groups, especially if their members include people who are trained to use firearms, such as soldiers or police officers.
The head of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police, Holger Muench, said officers searched about 150 locations across the country. At about 50 locations they found weapons, he told public broadcaster ZDF late Wednesday, without elaborating.
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Muench said he expected the raids and detentions to continue in the coming days.
Thomas Haldenwang, who heads Germany’s domestic intelligence agency BfV, said authorities had been monitoring the group since the spring of this year.
The threat posed by the group had gradually become more concrete as members had obtained weapons, he said.
Germany is highly sensitive to far-right extremism because of its Nazi past and repeated acts of violence carried out by neo-Nazis in recent years, including the killing of a regional politician and the deadly attack on a synagogue in 2019.
Two years ago, far-right extremists taking part in a protest against the country’s pandemic restrictions tried and failed to storm the Bundestag building in Berlin.
'Planning armed coup': German police arrest 25 suspected far-right extremists
Thousands of police carried out a series of raids across much of Germany on Wednesday against suspected far-right extremists who allegedly sought to overthrow the state in an armed coup.
Federal prosecutors said some 3,000 officers conducted searches at 130 sites in 11 of Germany’s 16 states against adherents of the so-called Reich Citizens movement. Some members of the grouping reject Germany’s postwar constitution and have called for the overthrow of the government.
Justice Minister Marco Buschmann described the raids as an “anti-terrorism operation,” adding that the suspects may have planned an armed attack on institutions of the state.
Prosecutors said 22 German citizens were detained on suspicion of “membership in a terrorist organization.” Three other people, including a Russian citizen, are suspected of supporting the organization, they said.
Weekly Der Spiegel reported that locations searched include the barracks of Germany’s special forces unit KSK in the southwestern town of Calw. The unit has in the past been scrutinized over alleged far-right involvement by some soldiers.
Read: Germany commits EUR 15 million to pay poor rural people for their work to preserve ecosystems
Federal prosecutors declined to confirm or deny that the barracks was searched.
Along with detentions in Germany, prosecutors said that one person was detained in the Austrian town of Kitzbuehel and another in the Italian city of Perugia.
Prosecutors said those detained are alleged to last year have formed a “terrorist organization with the goal of overturning the existing state order in Germany and replace it with their own form of state, which was already in the course of being founded.”
The suspects were aware that their aim could only be achieved by military means and with force, prosecutors said.
They are alleged to have believed in a “conglomerate of conspiracy theories consisting of narratives from the so-called Reich Citizens as well as QAnon ideology,” according to a statement by prosecutors. They added that members of the group also believe Germany is ruled by a so-called ‘deep state;’ similar baseless claims about the United States were made by former President Donald Trump.
Prosecutors identified the suspected ringleaders as Heinrich XIII P. R. and Ruediger v. P., in line with German privacy rules. Der Spiegel reported that the former was a well-known 71-year-old member of a minor German noble family, while the latter was a 69-year-old former paratrooper.
Read: Germany postpones decision on mandatory speed limits
Federal prosecutors said Heinrich XIII P. R., whom the group planned to install as Germany’s new leader, had contacted Russian officials with the aim of negotiating a new order in the country once the German government was overthrown. He was allegedly assisted in this by a Russian woman, Vitalia B.
“According to current investigations there is no indication however that the persons contacted responded positively to his request,” prosecutors said.
A further person detained by police Wednesday was identified by prosecutors as Birgit M.-W. Der Spiegel reported that the woman is a judge and former lawmaker with the far-right Alternative for Germany party.
The party, known by its German acronym AfD, has increasingly come under scrutiny by German security services due to its ties with extremists.
Ukraine leader defiant as drone strikes hit Russia again
Drones struck inside Russia’s border with Ukraine Tuesday in the second day of attacks exposing the vulnerability of some of Moscow’s most important military sites, observers said.
Ukrainian officials did not formally confirm carrying out drone strikes inside Russia, and they have maintained ambiguity over previous high-profile attacks.
But Britain’s Defense Ministry said Russia was likely to consider the attacks on Russian bases more than 500 kilometers (300 miles) from the border with Ukraine as “some of the most strategically significant failures of force protection since its invasion of Ukraine.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russian authorities will “take the necessary measures” to enhance protection of key facilities. Russian bloggers who generally maintain contacts with officials in their country’s military criticized the lack of defensive measures.
A fire broke out at an airport in Russia’s southern Kursk region that borders Ukraine after a drone hit the facility, the region’s governor said Tuesday. In a second incident, an industrial plant 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the Ukrainian border was also targeted by drones, which missed a fuel depot at the site, Russian independent media reported.
“They will have less aviation equipment after being damaged due to these mysterious explosions,” said Yurii Ihnat, spokesman for the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “This is undoubtedly excellent news because if one or two aircraft fail, then in the future, some more aircraft may fail in some way. This reduces their capabilities.”
Moscow blamed Kyiv for unprecedented attacks on two air bases deep inside Russia on Monday. The attacks on the Engels base in the Saratov region on the Volga River and the Dyagilevo base in the Ryazan region in western Russia were some of the most brazen inside Russia during the war.
In the aftermath, Russian troops carried out another wave of missile strikes on Ukrainian territory struck homes and buildings and killed civilians, compounding damage done to power and other infrastructure over weeks of missile attacks.
Approximately half of households in the Kyiv region remain without electricity, the regional governor said Tuesday, while authorities in the southern Odesa say they have managed to restore power to hospitals and some vital services.
In a new display of defiance from Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to an eastern city near the front line. Marking Ukraine’s Armed Forces Day, Zelenskyy traveled to the eastern Donetsk region and vowed to push Russian forces out of all of Ukraine’s territory.
“Everyone sees your strength and your skill. ... I’m grateful to your parents. They raised real heroes,” Zelenskyy said Tuesday in a video address to Ukrainian forces from the city of Sloviansk, a key Ukrainian stronghold in the east.
Read more: Russia claims Kyiv hit its air bases, fires more missiles
The Tu-141 Strizh (Swift) drone entered service with the Soviet air force in the 1970s and was designed for reconnaissance duties. It can be fitted with a warhead that effectively turns into a cruise missile.
Unlike modern drones, it can only stay in the air for a limited amount of time and fly straight to its designated target.
Its outdated technology makes it easily detectable by modern air defense systems and easy to shoot down.
Another Soviet-built drone in the Ukrainian armed forces’ inventory, the Tu-143 Reis (Flight) has a much shorter range of about 180 kilometers (about 110 miles).
A Russian pro-war blogger posting on the Telegram channel “Milinfolive” on Monday hit out at Russian military leadership, alleging that incompetence and lack of proper fortifications at the airbases made Ukrainian drone strikes possible.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said three Russian servicemen were killed and four others wounded by debris, and that two aircraft were slightly damaged.
After Ukrainian forces took control in November of the major Russian-occupied city of Kherson, neither side has made significant advances. But Ukrainian officials have indicated that the country plans to pursue counteroffensives during the winter when frozen ground is conducive to moving heavy equipment. Kherson city is still being hit by Russian rocket attacks but if Ukrainian forces establish firm control there it could be a bridgehead for advancing toward Crimea.
Pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov said the latest strikes by Ukraine “have raised questions about security of Russian military air bases.”
The Engels base hosts Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers that have been involved in strikes on Ukraine. Dyagilevo houses tanker aircraft used for mid-air refueling.
In a daily intelligence update on the war in Ukraine, Britain’s Defense Ministry said the bombers would likely be dispersed to other airfields.
Speaking in a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Peskov said that “the Ukrainian regime’s course for continuation of such terror attacks poses a threat.”
Read more: Russia rains missiles on recaptured Ukrainian city
Peskov reaffirmed that Russia sees no prospects for peace talks now, adding that “the Russian Federation must achieve its stated goals.”
Russia, meanwhile, maintained intense attacks on Ukrainian territory, shelling towns overnight near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant that left more than 9,000 homes without running water, local Ukrainian officials said.
The towns lie across the Dnieper River from the nuclear plant, which was seized by Russian forces in the early stages of the war. Russia and Ukraine have for months accused each other of shelling at and around the plant.
The head of Ukraine’s northern Sumy region, which borders Russia, said that Moscow launched over 80 missile and heavy artillery attacks on its territory. Governor Dmytro Zhyvytsky said the strikes damaged a monastery near the border town of Shalyhyne.
Ihnat, the Ukrainian air force spokesman, said the country’s ability to shoot down incoming missiles is improving, noting there had been no recent reports of Iranian-made attack drones being used on Ukrainian territory.