Summary
The UN gave an urgent warning regarding Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant being disconnected. Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, told his board of governors that urgent action was needed to protect the site’s safety and security.
Russian missile strikes across Ukraine while people slept on Thursday killed at least six civilians, knocking out electricity and forcing a nuclear power plant off the grid.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 81 missiles in total, alongside eight Shahed drones. It claimed to have shot down 34 cruise missiles and four of the drones.
Russia’s state-owned news agency Tass is reporting that security services in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria claim to have foiled an assassination attempt on the internationally unrecognised leader, Vadim Krasnoselsky. Transnistria’s security forces claim Ukrainian security services were the source of the plans.
AFP reports Lithuania’s military intelligence service on Thursday said it
estimated that Russia had enough resources to wage two more years of
war in Ukraine.The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has reportedly been snubbed by the Oscars for the second year in a row.
Reuters reports that Ukraine will take part in the European Union scheme to jointly buy gas in global markets, to procure 2 billion cubic metres of the fuel ahead of next winter, the EU energy policy chief said on Thursday.
A close ally of Alexei Navalny has resigned his post at the opposition leader’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) after it was revealed that he had signed letters calling for the EU to drop sanctions against several UK-based Russian billionaire oligarchs.
Leonid Volkov confirmed he had signed and sent a 2022 letter to Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief, in which he called for Brussels to relax sanctions on Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, and business partners German Khan and Alexei Kuzmichev, in a scandal marked by infighting among Russia’s contentious liberal and opposition circles.
“This letter was a big political mistake,” wrote Volkov in a post on Thursday where he uploaded the October 2022 letter to Borrell. “Worse, by doing this, I exceeded my authority – I signed it not in my personal capacity, but on behalf of the organisation. I did not inform my colleagues, and, therefore, I also put them [on the letter].”
Volkov said he would resign from ACF International’s board and “take a break from my public socio-political activity”. The organisation had earlier published a list of 6,000 “bribetakers and warmongers” it said should be issued with sanctions by western countries.
