The Ukraine update: The Russian army is wearing down the Ukrainian defense lines in the east with massive shelling. Is there a boiler battle looming there? The EU has now frozen 10 billion euros from oligarchs. What happened on Wednesday night.
With massive artillery and air strikes, Russian troops have driven the Ukrainian defenders out of several towns in the east of the country in the past few days, and the Ukrainian front is beginning to falter. For Moscow, the complete conquest of the Ukrainian administrative regions of Donetsk and Luhansk is an important war goal. In Luhansk, this goal has almost been achieved.
“The Russian army is throwing all its forces into this attack,” Zelensky said in his video speech on Tuesday evening. He listed the cities of Lyman, Popasna, Sievjerodonetsk and Sloviansk. “The occupiers want to destroy everything there.” It’s getting bigger Efforts of the Ukrainian people are needed to overcome the Russian superiority in armaments and technology.According to the administration, 15 civilians were killed within 24 hours in the Donetsk region alone.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense also spoke of a difficult situation in the Donbass coal and steel region. Apparently, the Russian army wants to encircle Ukrainian units in the cities of Sievjerodonetsk and Lysychansk, said spokesman Olexander Motusyanyk. Both cities had about 100,000 inhabitants before the war.
The Ukrainian defenders there are supplied via a single road. This has now come under fire from Russian artillery and mortars, wrote the expert Nikolay Mitrokhin in the magazine “Osteuropa”.
According to military information, Russia wants to set up a safe sea passage from the conquered Ukrainian port of Mariupol through the Sea of Azov from Wednesday. The mine-cleared route towards the Black Sea is 115 nautical miles (213 kilometers) long and 2 nautical miles wide and navigable from 8:00 a.m. local time (7:00 a.m. CEST). At the same time, the damaged port infrastructure of Mariupol will be repaired.
The last Ukrainian defenders of the city laid down their weapons at the end of last week, and Mariupol itself has been largely destroyed. According to Russian information, around 70 foreign ships from 16 countries are still stuck in the ports controlled by Ukraine on the Black Sea coast.
Gazprom nominated Schröder for a post on the supervisory board in early February – shortly before the attack on Ukraine. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the former SPD leader left open whether he would accept the nomination. Now he explained that he had rejected the post a long time ago.
Schröder has been heavily criticized in recent months for his connections to Russia. The former chancellor maintains a friendship with Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin and has held various positions in the Russian energy industry over the years: a seat on the supervisory board of the oil company Rosneft and activities for the Gazprom subsidiaries Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2. Last Friday, Rosneft announced that Schröder resigns from the supervisory board.
In the course of the Ukraine war, Russian oligarchs lost access to luxury yachts, real estate and other assets worth almost 10 billion euros. According to information from the German Press Agency, this is based on figures from the EU Commission. On April 8, the value was still 6.7 billion euros.
The EU Commission wants to present a legislative proposal this Wednesday that should make it possible to confiscate frozen Russian money. This money could then be used to rebuild Ukraine. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emphasized on Tuesday: “We should turn every stone for this – if possible also Russian assets that we have frozen.”
Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, the EU has put a number of Russian oligarchs on the sanctions list because they are accused of supporting the war. At the beginning of March, an EU special unit was set up to ensure better cooperation between EU countries and to track down the assets of the oligarchs.
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