Western countries including the US heavily criticised the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, over the war in Ukraine on Thursday at an annual meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Malta. The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said in his speech: “My message to the Russian delegation is the following: We are not taken in by your lies. We know what you’re doing. You’re trying to rebuild the Russian empire and we will not let you. We will resist you every inch of the way.”
The Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, told the meeting that his country was continuing to fight for its right to exist. “And the Russian war criminal at this table must know: Ukraine will win this right and justice will prevail.” Sikorksi, Sybiha and others left the room for Lavrov’s speech, as often happens at international meetings, and Lavrov was absent when the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, delivered his speech where he called Lavrov “very adept at drowning listeners in a tsunami of misinformation”.
Lavrov accused Nato and the EU of politicising the OSCE and making it irrelevant. He said the west was behind a “reincarnation of the cold war, only now with a much greater risk of a transition to a hot one”, according to Russia’s state-controlled RIA Novosti agency. Separately in a Tucker Carlson interview, Lavrov said he hoped the west took “seriously” Moscow’s use of a ballistic missile in Ukraine, and that the US and its allies “must understand that we would be ready to use any means not to allow them to succeed in what they call strategic defeat of Russia”.
Vladimir Putin has had to scrap the requirement for foreign buyers of Russian gas to pay only through Gazprombank after it was put under US sanctions last month. Gazprombank had already been punished with sanctions by other countries including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The US Treasury said Gazprombank was being used as “a conduit for Russia to purchase military material for its war effort against Ukraine” as well as to pay soldiers. Under a decree signed by the Russian president on Thursday, foreign buyers will now be able to use other banks to pay for Russian gas.
Putin on Thursday appointed Alexander Khinshtein acting governor of southern Kursk region, saying “crisis management” was needed in the area, which has been partly occupied by Ukrainian forces since their lightning large-scale incursion in August. The Kremlin website said the region’s current governor, Alexei Smirmnov, had resigned.
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s office, discussed on Thursday improving Kyiv’s position in its war with Russia and ensuring it enters any future negotiations from a position of strength, a White House spokesperson said.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has said the UN and Red Cross are not doing enough to bring back Ukrainians held captive by Russia. “Do we currently receive much assistance from organisations such as the UN or the International Committee of the Red Cross in protecting and securing the return of Ukrainian prisoners held in Russia? In fact, we do not,” Zelenskyy said at a human rights conference in Kyiv. “We all see, in particular, how weak the world’s response is to what Russia is doing to Ukrainian prisoners.” The mayor of the southern Ukrainian town of Dniprorudne, Yevgen Matveyev, died in Russian captivity after he was taken prisoner in March 2022, officials confirmed this week. In October, Kyiv said Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna had also died in Russian detention. Thousands of children in Moscow-held areas of eastern Ukraine have been forcibly taken into Russia, in what Kyiv says is a war crime. The international criminal court has a warrant out against Putin and his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, over the children’s deportation from Ukraine.
A Russian man went on trial in Finland on Thursday charged with war crimes after being accused of fighting in a far-right paramilitary unit in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The Finnish prosecutor has demanded life imprisonment for Yan Petrovsky, also known as Voislav Torden, who denies all the charges. He was in Rusich, a group that fought with separatists against Ukraine in Luhansk, the prosecutor’s office alleged. Rusich fighters ambushed a group of Ukrainian soldiers by raising a Ukrainian flag, killing 22 and seriously wounding four, it is alleged. Prosecutors argue the deception, allegations of executions and mutilation of captives, and degrading treatment of a body amount to war crimes. One soldier had the Rusich symbol slashed on his cheek while he was still alive, according to the charges.
Canada on Thursday announced a ban on 324 models of assault weapons, granting an amnesty for their collection, with the aim of shipping them to Ukraine. An estimated 14,500 guns already in circulation may be turned in under an amnesty in place until October 2025 that would provide owners with compensation. The Canadian defence minister, Bill Blair, said: “Every bit of assistance that we can offer to the Ukrainians is one step towards their victory.”
