UN to hold emergency Security Council meeting on Ukraine Monday: diplomats
UNITED NATIONS, United States — The United Nations will hold an emergency Security Council meeting on the Ukraine crisis later Monday, diplomats told AFP, after Russia recognized two breakaway regions there and ordered its military to act as peacekeepers.
The meeting will be held at 9:00 pm (0200 GMT) in New York, the sources said. Russia, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council, had wanted it to be closed but the United States insisted it be public, the diplomats said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's recognition of the separatist republics effectively buries a fragile 2015 peace plan for the conflict, and opens the door for direct Russian military involvement.
In two official decrees, Putin instructed the defense ministry to assume "the function of peacekeeping" in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
Moscow provided no details or date for any deployment, with the order only saying that it "comes into force from the day it was signed."
The request by multiple countries for the Security Council meeting is based on a letter from Ukraine that demands that its representative be able to attend, along with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said she supports an emergency meeting.
"The Security Council must demand that Russia respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, a UN Member State," she said in a statement.
"Russia's announcement is nothing more than theater, apparently designed to create a pretext for a further invasion of Ukraine."
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday secured Turkey's crucial backing for Ukraine's NATO aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Washington's decision to deliver the controversial weapons — banned across a large part of the world but not in Russia or Ukraine — dramatically ups the stakes in the war, which entered its 500th day Saturday.
Zelensky has been travelling across Europe trying to secure bigger and better weapons for his outmatched army, which has launched a long-awaited counteroffensive that is progressing less swiftly than Ukraine's allies had hoped. — AFP
Washington's decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles is "a grave mistake", Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov says Wednesday.
"The White House's decision to send long-range missiles to Ukrainians is a grave mistake. The consequences of this step, which was deliberately hidden from the public, will be of the most serious nature," he says in a statement. — AFP
President Vladimir Putin says Sunday that Russian forces had made gains in their Ukraine offensive including in Avdiivka, a symbolic industrial hub.
"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this area, which is quite vast," he says in an interview on Russian television, an extract of which was posted on social media on Sunday. "This concerns the areas of Kupiansk, Zaporizhia and Avdiivka." — AFP
The regional governor says debris from a drone destroyed over the Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, fell on homes and killed three people, including a young child.
The air defense system "shot down an aircraft-type UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) approaching the city", says Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that the falling debris destroyed several homes.
"Most importantly, three people were killed, one of them a small child," he writes on the Telegram messaging app, accompanied by pictures of a house reduced to a pile of rubble behind red and white police tape. — AFP
Ukraine's air force says on Tuesday that it had destroyed 27 of 36 Russian attack drones overnight in the south of the country.
Ukrainian forces downed 27 "Shahed-136/131" drones in the southern Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, the air force said on the messaging platform Telegram.
In all, Moscow had launched 36 of the Iranian-made drones from the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, it says. — AFP
The Kremlin claims on Friday Russian forces never targeted civilian infrastructure after Ukraine blamed Moscow for a missile attack that killed over 50 people in the eastern village of Groza.
"We repeat that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says in his daily briefing. — AFP
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