“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.
CIA chief ‘convinced’ Beijing plans to send weapons to Russia
CIA director William Burns said he was “convinced” in an interview with CBS on Sunday that China was considering supplying weapons to Russia in its war in Ukraine. But, he added, “we have not seen that a final decision has been made” and “we have not seen evidence that they delivered” weapons to Russia.
The United States has been accusing China for a week of considering supplying arms to Russia to support its offensive in Ukraine, which Beijing denies. According to press information, including that of the Wall Street Journal, it would be drones and ammunition in particular. The head of the American diplomacy Antony Blinken expressed it directly to the most senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi during a tense meeting last Saturday in Munich, on the sidelines of a conference on security.
US President Joe Biden has said the prospect of China brokering peace between Ukraine and Russia is “simply not rational”. Speaking on ABC News about China’s peace plan, he said: “I haven’t seen anything [qui] would indicate that there is something that would benefit someone other than Russia. The idea that China is going to negotiate the outcome of a war that is a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational.”
Algeria to reopen its embassy in kyiv
Algeria, a traditional ally of Moscow, has decided to reopen its embassy in Kiev, closed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the Algerian Foreign Ministry announced on Sunday. “This decision comes within the framework of safeguarding the interests of the Algerian state in this country as well as those of the national community,” the ministry said in a statement. The reopening of the embassy, which will be headed by a charge d’affaires, will be done “as soon as possible”, added the same source.
According to Algerian diplomacy, the activities of its embassy in kyiv had been “frozen due to the deterioration of security conditions”. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune had already announced Friday evening the decision of Algiers to reopen its representation in kyiv, during a televised meeting with the local press. Abdelmadjid Tebboune specified that Algerian-Russian relations are “known to all” and described relations with Ukraine as “ordinary”. Algiers and Moscow have long-standing privileged relations. In 2021, trade between the two countries reached three billion dollars.