US President Joe Biden says will downgrade Russian trade status, ban imports of Russian alcohol, seafood, diamonds. (Reuters Photo)Russia Ukraine War Highlights: The United States on Friday informed that the country will revoke Russia’s ‘permanent normal trade relations’ status to punish Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine, news agency Reuters reported. President Joe Biden said that the US will downgrade Russian trade status, ban imports of Russian alcohol, seafood, diamonds. The broad trade shift, which revokes the “most favoured nation” status for Russia, is being taken in coordination with the European Union and Group of Seven countries.
Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light on Friday for up to 16,000 volunteers from the Middle East to be deployed alongside Russian-backed rebels to fight in Ukraine, doubling down an invasion that the West says has been losing momentum, news agency Reuters reported. Russian forces kept up their bombardment of the port city of Mariupol, as Ukrainian minister expressed hopes that a “humanitarian corridor” will be opened successfully for civilians to leave the city. Meanwhile, two Air India flights carryings evacuees from Ukraine landed in New Delhi on Friday. One more evacuation flight, operated by IndiGo, is expected on March 11.
Satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that 64-km convoy of vehicles, tanks and artillery has broken up and been redeployed, with armoured units seen in towns near the Antonov Airport north of the city. Some of the vehicles have moved into forests, Maxar reported, with towed howitzers nearby in position to open fire.
People cook outdoors for the Ukrainian servicemen and civil defense members serving in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 7, 2022. (AP)
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Russia's communications and media regulator says it's restricting national access to Instagram because the platform is spreading “calls to commit violent acts against Russian citizens, including military personnel.” The regulator, called Roskomnadzor, took the step Friday as Russia presses ahead with its invasion of Ukraine.
Earlier on Friday, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said in a statement tweeted by its spokesman Andy Stone that it had “made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules on violent speech, such as death to the Russian invaders'.” The statement stressed that the company “still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians.” (Reuters)
US envoy to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said a U.N. Security Council meeting called by Russia on Friday to discuss Moscow's claims, presented without evidence, of U.S. "biological activities" in Ukraine was a potential "false flag" effort in action.
Repeating Washington's position that Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program or such laboratories supported by the United States, Thomas-Greenfield said it was Russia that could use chemical or biological agents in Ukraine.
Although she did not immediately provide evidence of an imminent threat during the meeting of the 15-member council, she said: "Russia has a track record of falsely accusing other countries of the very violations that Russia itself is perpetrating." (Reuters)
Forty-three more students from Assam landed in New Delhi on Friday, completing the evacuation exercise of all the 157 Assamese who were stranded in war-ravaged Ukraine, a state government official said. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma tweeted that 19 students of Sumy State University returned to the country on Friday morning.
During the day, 27 other students arrived in the national capital in batches, the official said.
The students will be accommodated in Assam Bhawan and Assam House, where they will stay till the time arrangements are made to take them to Guwahati. Of the 157 students, 151 arrived in New Delhi and six in Mumbai. The returnees include 88 students from Kamrup Metropolitan, 17 from Morigaon and 10 from Kamrup, officials said. (PTI)
Turkey on Friday evacuated its embassy in Kyiv, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said. Tanju Bilgic said staff at the mission would move to Chernivtsi near the Romanian border for security reasons, state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
The order to leave Kyiv came as Russian forces fanned out around the city and appeared likely to step up artillery and rocket attacks. Many countries ordered diplomatic staff to leave Kyiv before Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24.
Turkey has close ties to both Ukraine and Russia and has been seeking to mediate between its warring Black Sea neighbours. (AP)
The United States on Friday informed that the country will revoke Russia’s ‘permanent normal trade relations’ status to punish Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine, news agency Reuters reported. President Joe Biden said that the US will downgrade Russian trade status, ban imports of Russian alcohol, seafood, diamonds.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suggested that the war in Ukraine could have been avoided had the world spoken out against Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
“Would we have faced such a picture if the West, the whole world, had raised their voices?” Erdogan asked. “Those who remained silent in the face of Crimea's invasion are now saying some things.” Erdogan spoke Friday at a diplomacy forum near the Turkish Mediterranean city of Antalya, where the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba met a day earlier for talks facilitated by Turkey's foreign minister. Erdogan said Turkey would continue its efforts for peace. (AP)
A broader war in Ukraine could displace 15 million people, Switzerland's justice minister said on Friday, citing estimates from the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR.
"If you assume the hostilities continue, that the Russian army advances more strongly in the West (of Ukraine), that perhaps there are escape corridors, then it could be that practically 1 million people leave the country each week," Karin Keller-Sutter told a news conference in Bern on the Swiss approach to taking in refugees.
"There are now estimates from UNHCR that you have to reckon with around 15 million displaced persons -- that is the highest number...It is said around half the population minus men who are of course in the armed forces and defending the country."
A UNHCR spokesperson said the agency had not for now revised its initial projection for 4 million refugees leaving the country but it was closely following the situation. (Reuters)
Efforts to disrupt the operations of company websites in Russia have jumped in March, a cybersecurity firm said on Friday, with the number of distributed denials of service (DDoS) attacks already exceeding those for the whole of February.
Russian government entities and state-owned companies have been targeted over events in Ukraine, with the websites of the Kremlin, flagship carrier Aeroflot and major lender Sberbank among those to have seen outages or temporary access issues.
Rostelecom-Solar, the cybersecurity arm of telecoms company Rostelecom, on Friday said it had noted increased activity on hacker forums on Feb. 22-23, with mass attacks on state authorities' internet resources beginning on Feb. 25.
"The main target of attackers continues to be government resources," Rostelecom-Solar said in a statement, noting around 1,700 DDoS attacks against one government portal in the past three days alone. (Reuters)
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said that the group must not allow Russia's invasion of Ukraine to spill over into a war between the alliance and Moscow.
Ukraine's ambassador urged Israel on Friday to step up its support for Ukraine by sanctioning Moscow, accepting more Ukrainian refugees and sending defence equipment.
Israel has condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine and sent humanitarian aid, but has maintained contacts with Moscow, with which it coordinates strikes in Syria and which has influence in international nuclear talks with Iran.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on March 5 and has also spoken several times with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an effort to mediate between the sides. In a briefing, Ambassador Yevgen Korniychuk told reporters in Tel Aviv that Israel did not have "exclusivity" in the mediation process, adding: "Saying that 'we are mediators, that's why we have to be neutral to both parties' - that's not the name of the game."
"What we expect from Israel at the moment, the government, (is) to join the sanctions of their allies, including but not only the U.S. and European Union," he said, speaking in English. (Reuters)
Kyiv mayor and former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko told Reuters on Friday that he believed there were nearly 2 million people still left in the city, which is being squeezed by advancing Russian forces on several fronts.
He said that the Ukrainian capital, normally home to some 3.5 million people, had enough vital supplies to last a couple of weeks, and that supply lines in and out remained open for now.
His brother Wladimir, also a heavyweight boxing star, added in the joint interview that some of the men and women who had accompanied their families to the relative safety of the west of the country were returning to take part in the city's defence. (Reuters)
A Soviet-era scouting drone flying across Hungary from Ukraine crashed near the Croatian capital of Zagreb, leaving a big hole in the ground, the Croatian government said on Friday. No deaths or injuries were reported.
An explosion was heard near Lake Jarun in Zagreb at around 11 p.m. on Thursday, Croatian media reported. Two parachutes were found and several vehicles had been damaged, police said.
The drone, flying at 1,300 metres, came from Hungary and crashed seven minutes after entering Croatia's air space, the government said. Both Hungary and Croatia are NATO members.
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic said that according to preliminary information the drone originally came from Ukraine and crashed once it had run out of fuel. "We estimate that this was an incident and it was not (military action) directed against Croatia," Milanovic said. (Reuters)
Russian authorities have put Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh on a wanted list and are now seeking jail time for her, interior ministry and court databases showed on Friday.
'All that's left is to work even better!' Yarmysh said in a Twitter post, reacting to news that authorities were taking steps to track her down and imprison her. Yarmysh left Russia last year after a court imposed 18 months of restrictions on her freedom of movement for breaching COVID-19 safety rules. Russian authorities have cracked down hard on the opposition, and many of Navalny's most prominent allies have left Russia rather than face restrictions or jail at home.
Navalny - President Vladimir Putin's most prominent opponent - was jailed last year when he returned to Russia after receiving medical treatment in Germany following a poison attack with a nerve agent during a visit to Siberia in 2020. (Reuters)
Russia said on Friday it would shut down the activities of Meta Platforms if the operator of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp allowed users to call for violence against Russians and death to President Vladimir Putin. Internal Meta emails seen by Reuters showed the U.S. company had temporarily allowed posts that call for the death of Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed it had temporarily eased its rules for political speech, allowing posts such as "death to the Russian invaders", although it would not allow calls for violence against Russian civilians. "We don't want to believe the Reuters report - it is just too difficult to believe," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.
"We hope it is not true because if it is true then it will mean that there will have to be the most decisive measures to end the activities of this company," Peskov added. The United Nations human rights office said the potential change in Facebook policy was "concerning".
Meta said the temporary change aimed to allow for forms of political expression that would normally violate its rules. Its oversight board said on Friday that it was closely following the war in Ukraine, and how Meta is responding. (Reuters)
Embassy of India in Russia on Friday issued fresh guidelines for Indian students studying in the country. The guidelines 'reassured all students that at present the embassy saw no security reasons for them to leave Russia'.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday there had been some progress in Moscow's talks with Ukraine, but provided no details.
"There are certain positive shifts, negotiators on our side tell me," Putin said in a meeting with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko, adding that talks continued "practically on a daily basis". Putin did not elaborate, but said in the televised remarks that he would go into more detail with Lukashenko. (Reuters)
Eastern Europe's volunteer-driven aid effort to help Ukrainians was showing signs of strains of Friday, with some cities running out of accommodation as the number of refugees passed 2.5 million and fierce fighting continued unabated. Relief work in frontline states - Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary and Moldova - has mainly been shouldered by ordinary citizens volunteering to drive, cook or house refugees, with the help of non-governmental organisations and local authorities.
But with the war now in its third week and the number of refugees continuing to swell, it is becoming increasingly difficult to provide sufficient help. In Krakow, Poland's second-largest city, one NGO described the situation at the city's train station as "tragic".
"There is nowhere to direct the refugees. They are stressed and confused, all kinds of help is needed, and above all, premises," tweeted Fundacja Brata Alberta, an NGO that in normal times helps individuals with mental disabilities. "We call many places, but the only answer is: there are no more beds. Government intervention necessary!"
In Hrubieszow, a Polish town on the Ukrainian border, Mayor Marta Majewska said she had spent all the town's crisis reserve of 100,000 zlotys ($22,889), as well as 170,000 zlotys from the local province, to run a refugee reception centre. (Reuters)
At least 78 children have been killed in Ukraine since Russian invaded, Ukrainian human rights ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova said on Friday. She said fighting around the southern city of Mariupol, the eastern town of Volnovakha and the town of Irpin in the Kyiv region meant the authorities had not been able to establish how many people had been killed or wounded in those places. (Reuters)
Russians who say they are ashamed of the country's "special military operation" in Ukraine are not real Russians, the Kremlin said on Friday.
"A real Russian is never ashamed to be Russian," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about a slogan "ashamed to be Russian" that some had repeated both inside and outside Russia.
"If someone says such things then they are just not Russian," Peskov said. Peskov said anti-Russian feelings were running dangerously high in the West and said he hoped Western leaders would stop stoking such Russophobia. (Reuters)