After Jeddah and Copenhagen this summer, it is in Malta that representatives from around fifty countries are meeting from this Saturday, October 28, to discuss ways to put an end to the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Five key areas will be on the agenda: food security, energy security, nuclear security, humanitarian issues and the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Among the participants, the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, supporters of kyiv, as well as Turkey, which offered itself as mediator between Ukraine and Russia. But we also find countries with more vague relations with Russia, such as Brazil, South Africa, and India. China has not confirmed its presence, although it participated in the last meeting.
For Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, this two-day meeting should help push for support for his ten-point peace plan. The latter demands in particular that Russia withdraw all its troops outside Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders. But Russia, which proclaimed the annexation of the four Ukrainian regions of Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia in September 2022 and that of Crimea in 2014, rejects any settlement which would involve ceding these territories.
For its part, the Kremlin obviously denounced the holding of these talks. “It is obvious that steps (like the meeting in Malta on October 28 and 29, Editor’s note) have absolutely no future, they are just counterproductive,” declared Thursday, October 26, the spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. , Maria Zakharova, calling this meeting “a deeply biased and anti-Russian event, which has nothing to do with a peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian crisis.”
Ukrainian cereals: 1.3 million tonnes exported since August
Kiev announced this Friday that it had been able to export 1.3 million tonnes of agricultural products since August and the establishment of a maritime corridor in the Black Sea, despite Russian threats of reprisals on ships circulating in the area. “Four ships are heading towards the Bosphorus, 11 ships have entered the ports of Odessa to be loaded,” Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said on X (ex-Twitter). The four cargo ships in question will “export nearly 130,000 tons of cereals and 10,000 tons of metal to countries in Africa, Asia and Europe,” the minister said.
The issue of exporting Ukrainian agricultural products had become critical since Russia’s withdrawal from the grain agreement between the two warring countries, which is nevertheless vital for world food security. This made it possible to export nearly 33 million tonnes of cereals and other Ukrainian food products through the Black Sea in one year.
Former pro-Russian Ukrainian MP injured by bullets
The FSB, the main intelligence body in Russia, opened criminal proceedings for “attempted assassination of a public figure”, after the former Ukrainian MP who had joined Russia in 2014, Oleg Tsariov, was seriously injured by bullets during the night from Thursday to Friday in Yalta, in annexed Ukrainian Crimea. According to an account of the events published on Oleg Tsariov’s Telegram channel, “around midnight”, the latter received “two bullets”. “When the ambulance arrived, he was unconscious and had lost a lot of blood,” it is written. The Russian Investigative Committee, in charge of the main investigations, called for “measures to establish all the circumstances of the incident”.
Born in Dnipropetrovsk in 1970, Oleg Tsariov was a deputy in the Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, from 2002 to 2014, notably under the label of the Party of Regions, one of the main promoters at the time of the pro-Russian movement in Ukraine. In particular, he strongly opposed the pro-European Maidan movement at the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014, describing the demonstrators as “neo-Nazis”. In spring 2014, he was deprived of his parliamentary immunity and sanctioned by the European Union for having notably become a member of the self-proclaimed “Parliament” of the pro-Russian separatist regions of Lugansk and Donetsk. On the day of the Russian assault on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the former MP wrote on his Telegram channel: “kyiv will be freed from the fascists.”