Ukraine yesterday denounced the dispatch of a Russian humanitarian aid convoy to its embattled east as an act of Kremlin cynicism and said the trucks would not be allowed in.
The comments reflected suspicions in Kiev and the West that passage of the convoy onto Ukrainian soil could turn into a covert military action to help pro-Russian separatists now losing ground to Ukrainian government forces.
“The level of Russian cynicism knows no bounds,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said at a government meeting. “First they send tanks, Grad missiles and bandits who fire on Ukrainians and then they send water and salt.”
Photo: EPA
Ukrainian Minister of the Interior Arsen Avakov said on Facebook: “No Putin ‘humanitarian convoy’ will be allowed across the territory of Kharkiv region. The provocation by a cynical aggressor will not be allowed on our territory.”
Yatseniuk reiterated that any kind of humanitarian aid from the outside had to be organized under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
It was not immediately clear if this was an outright rejection of the Russian aid, which was being taken by a convoy of 280 trucks down to the border yesterday, or a refusal to allow the trucks onto Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine said on Tuesday that the cargo would have to be unloaded from the trucks at the border and transferred under the International Red Cross’ aegis onto other vehicles. The EU said the contents would have to be scrutinized.
Kiev accuses Moscow of supporting and arming the rebels, who now appear to be on the verge of defeat by government forces, with tanks, missiles and other weapons. The Kremlin denies this.
Four months of fighting in has produced a humanitarian crisis in parts of eastern Ukraine. People in the main cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, on the border with Russia, are suffering acute shortages of water, food and electricity.
Yatseniuk said the Kiev government had received US$6 million from its Western partners that would be used to alleviate conditions in distressed areas.
“We as the government of Ukraine are sending vitally needed goods to all the liberated territories,” Yatseniuk said, meaning those places which had been recaptured from the rebels.
The convoy that Russia says is carrying about 2,000 tonnes of water, baby foods and other goods left Moscow region on Tuesday for the Ukrainian border. Journalists monitoring its movement said it appeared to be at the Russian town of Voronezh yesterday, about 340km from Shebekino on the Ukrainian border.
In Donetsk, at least three people were killed in the separatist-controlled city as the government intensified its shelling campaign.
Reporters saw two bodies lying in a street yesterday morning in the city’s Petrovsky District, 11 hours after rocket fire ended.
The city government reported three deaths.
Residents said the intermittent artillery barrage lasted about two hours. City authorities said 10 residential buildings and the wing of a hospital were struck.
The UN Human Rights Office yesterday said that the death toll from the conflict has nearly doubled from 1,129 on July 26 to 2,086 as of Sunday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema