Anti-aircraft sirens sounded in kyiv shortly before the start of a Ukraine-EU summit in the Ukrainian capital on Friday (February 3rd). They then spread to the whole country, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is due to welcome the leaders of the European Union, in particular the President of the European Commission and the President of the European Council, Charles Michel.
“I think that Ukraine deserves to start negotiations on its EU membership this year,” President Zelensky said on Thursday. The country has been an official candidate for EU membership since June 2022. “Our future integration must energize and motivate our people to fight against obstacles and threats,” he continued. He also felt that international pressure on Russia needed to increase further.
For her part, Ursula von der Leyen assured Ukraine of the full support of the European Union, arriving in kyiv on Thursday accompanied by around fifteen European commissioners. The Commission described this visit as a “strong symbol” of European support for Ukraine, without responding to the Ukrainian president on this point. French President Emmanuel Macron nevertheless warned in May that the process of integrating the European Union could take “decades”.
In kyiv, Ursula von der Leyen assured that she was working on new sanctions against Russia for February 24, the first anniversary of the invasion. She did not give details of her intentions for this tenth package, but she felt that the punitive measures taken over the past year have already set back the Russian economy by “a generation”. She also noted that capping the price of exported Russian oil at $60 a barrel was costing Moscow 160 million euros a day.
Ukraine accuses Russia of sex trafficking
Ukraine’s human rights commissioner on Thursday accused Russians of abducting children from his country to fuel sex trafficking. According to Dmytro Lubinets, “Telegram accounts reveal that Russians are kidnapping Ukrainian children and making sex videos with them,” he said on the social network. He published an excerpt from an exchange on an unidentified internet messaging service between two people discussing the involvement of a young boy in the filming of a child pornography film, for several thousand euros, claiming that it was of a Ukrainian orphan.
“The Russian Federation insidiously kidnaps, kills, deports and rapes our children,” he added, without specifying how he obtained this exchange. Russia has already been accused by Ukraine since the beginning of the war of having kidnapped thousands of children and taken them to territories controlled by Moscow.
The West divided over the Olympics
Europe and the United States have not yet tuned their violins, a year and a half before the 2024 Olympic Games. very firm “of opposition” to the participation of Russians and Belarusians in the Olympic Games” in Paris, according to Sports Minister Kamil Bortniczuk. He then evoked the countries of the European Union, Great Britain and the United States. But the USA spoke out on Thursday in favor of the participation of these athletes under a neutral banner.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) also triggered Ukraine’s wrath last week by proposing a roadmap to organize the return of Russian and Belarusian athletes under a neutral flag, provided that they had “not actively supported the war in Ukraine”. For now, the Ukrainians are threatening to boycott the Paris Games if Russians take part. The sports ministers concerned are to hold a video conference on February 10 on the subject, said Kamil Bortniczuk.