“They are sending tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine. This is really participation,” Vladimir Putin said Sunday, February 26 in an interview with the Rossiya-1 channel. “This means that they take part, albeit indirectly, in the crimes of the kyiv regime.” He also argued that Western countries had “one goal: to destroy the former Soviet Union and its main part, the Russian Federation.”
In this interview, the Russian president insisted on his desire to see a multipolar world emerge, to thwart the plans for unilateral domination of the United States: “What are we against? Against the fact that this new world that is emerging is being built solely in the interest of one country, the United States. Now that their attempts to reconfigure the world in their image after the fall of the Soviet Union have led to this situation, we are indeed obliged to react.”
New EU sanctions against Wagner officials in Africa
The member countries of the European Union announced on Saturday February 25 that they had adopted new sanctions against the Russian paramilitary group Wagner for its “human rights violations” in Africa, targeting in particular its leader in Mali and several of its senior officials in Central African Republic. In all, eleven people and seven entities have been added to the list, having their assets frozen and banned from staying on European territory.
These sanctions are in addition to those taken in 2021 and are justified, according to a press release from the European Council, by “the international dimension and the seriousness of the group’s activities”, as well as by “its destabilizing impact on the countries where it is active”. . Established in Africa for several years, the Wagner group constitutes, according to the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, “a threat to the populations of the countries where they operate and to the European Union”.
In addition, the boss of the Wagner group, Evgueni Prigojine, claimed this Saturday the capture of the village of Iaguidné, north of Bakhmout, target of the Russian army for several months. The noose is therefore tightening around this fortress-city of the Donbass which has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.
Russia accuses Westerners of destabilizing G20 summit
While the desire of Western countries to explicitly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came up against opposition from China, Moscow took advantage of this failure to denounce the attitude of Westerners, accused of having “destabilized” the summit held in India. “We regret that the activities of the G20 continue to be destabilized by the collective West and used in an anti-Russian and purely confrontational manner,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
According to Moscow, the United States, the EU and the G7 have “disrupted the adoption of collective decisions” by trying to impose a “diktat” via “clear blackmail” so that their interpretation of the conflict in Ukraine appears in the joint statement. This Friday and Saturday, the G20 Finances discussed in Bangalore, technological capital of India, in order to agree on the means of overcoming the current global economic challenges.
Russia blocks oil pipeline serving Poland
The Polish oil giant PKN Orlen announced on Saturday that its Russian partner had stopped delivering oil to it through the Druzhba pipeline, under the last contract in force, which covered around 10% of the group’s needs. “Deliveries to Poland have been stopped by the Russian side,” the Polish group said in a statement. This judgment comes the day after the European Union approved a new set of sanctions intended to hit the economy of Russia and Iranian companies accused of supporting the invasion of Ukraine.
German Chancellor says China’s proposed peace plan unsatisfactory
This Saturday, on the sidelines of the G20 Finance summit in Bangalore, India, Olaf Scholz said that the peace plan proposed by China in the context of the war in Ukraine was not explicit on a crucial point: the complete withdrawal of the Russian army. “The Russian president must know that there cannot be a peace plan dictated by Russia,” he added. Faced with Russian intransigence, the conflict could therefore last a long time, and the German chancellor said he shared Beijing’s concerns about the increased risk of the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict.
More than 1,800 Ukrainian towns and villages are occupied by Russia
According to the Ukrainian president, who spoke this Saturday from kyiv on the occasion of a solidarity event organized by Germany, the Russian army currently occupies 1,877 localities in Ukraine. He also gave sad news from the battered city of Mariupol, a large port city in the Donetsk region, now 90% destroyed.