On the night of the 144th day of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed that his country would take back territory occupied by Russia. At the same time, the 44-year-old lamented a targeted “information terror” from the Russian side, against which his compatriots had to arm themselves emotionally.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian air force reported enemy missiles fired at long range from the Caspian Sea region. Shortly before, the Ministry of Defense in Moscow had announced that it wanted to expand the attacks against the neighboring country almost five months after the invasion. The FDP politician and Chairwoman of the Defense Committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, calls for a “National Ukraine Conference”.
“We have already managed to liberate part of the territory occupied after February 24,” said Zelenskyj in his daily video speech on Sunday night. “We will gradually liberate other regions of our country that are currently occupied.” Almost five months after the start of the war, Ukraine launched counter-offensives in the south. Western weapons are also to be used to recapture occupied territories.
Zelenskyj also accused Russia of deliberately using fake news as a weapon in the war against his country. The Ukrainians need “a kind of emotional sovereignty” in order not to play this “information game”, he said. Untruths, for example about allegedly prepared rocket attacks, only had one purpose: “to supplement the rocket and artillery terror against our state with information terror”.
Russia fired rockets at Ukraine from the Caspian Sea region, according to sources in Kyiv. Four out of a total of six missiles were intercepted on Saturday over the Dnipro areas in the east and Zaporizhia in the south, the Ukrainian air force said. Two more struck an agricultural area in the central Ukrainian region of Cherkasy. The damage is still being investigated.
In addition to Russia, the South Caucasus Republic of Azerbaijan and Central Asian Kazakhstan also border the Caspian Sea. According to the Ukrainian account, long-range bombers of the Tupolev Tu-95 type were used in the shelling. There was initially no confirmation from Moscow.
According to the pro-Russian administration of a region in south-eastern Ukraine, large quantities of grain are exported. “More than 100 wagons have already been dispatched, and another contract for 150,000 tons has been signed with a grain dealer,” said the head of the Russian military administration in Zaporizhia, Yevgeny Balitsky. Ukraine has been accusing Russia of stealing grain for months.
Balizki did not specify where the grain will be taken. However, it can only be transported by rail to Russia or to the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Russia has annexed since 2014. After the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia quickly conquered the southern part of the Zaporizhia region with the port of Berdyansk on the Azov Sea located there.
The Chairwoman of the Defense Committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, has called on Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) to convene a “National Ukraine Conference” as soon as possible. In a letter from the FDP politician to Chancellor. It was available to the German Press Agency in Berlin.
The FDP politician is calling for a meeting at which representatives from politics and the Federal Chancellery, the armaments industry, the trade unions and the Bundeswehr sit around a table and coordinate further steps. “The aim should be to get an orderly overview in order to initiate the next steps in a targeted, mutually agreed manner,” the letter says.
The meeting of G20 finance ministers in Indonesia on Saturday ended without a joint final declaration. At their two-day meeting on the island of Bali, the representatives of the 20 leading industrialized and emerging countries could not agree whether a statement on the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine should be included, said Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati. However, all participants agreed that the global food crisis must be addressed.
Despite the loss of Russia as a sales market, the US aircraft manufacturer Boeing expects greater demand for new jets in the next ten years than recently. In the period from 2022 to 2031, around 19,575 new passenger and cargo planes should find their way to their customers, Boeing announced on Sunday morning. This is a little more than 2021 predicted for ten years – although Boeing had calculated 710 aircraft for Russian airlines.
Because of the Western sanctions against Russia as a result of the Ukraine war, Western aircraft manufacturers and suppliers are no longer allowed to deliver machines and parts to Russia. In addition, Russia has not returned hundreds of aircraft leased abroad to their owners for months, so that the market for Airbus and Boeing has practically disappeared from today’s perspective.
