Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy does not believe that Ukraine is responsible for the rocket hit in Poland. Biden contradicts this statement. Lavrov’s spokeswoman makes fun of the incident. All current voices and developments on the Ukraine war can be found in our ticker.
More on the course of the war in Ukraine.
10:25 p.m .: The highest-ranking US general, Mark Milley, does not believe that the Ukrainians will soon win on the battlefield. Despite the setbacks, Russia still has significant combat power in Ukraine, he said at the Pentagon’s press briefing on Wednesday. “The probability of a Ukrainian military victory – defined as the Russians being kicked out of all of Ukraine, including the Crimea they claim – is not very high militarily.” But there is the possibility of a political victory. Russia is “on its back at the moment”.
9:29 p.m .: US Chief of Staff Mark Milley tried in vain to contact his Russian counterpart Valeri Gerasimov after the rocket hit Poland. All efforts by his staff to reach the chief of staff have been unsuccessful, Milley said in Washington on Wednesday. However, Milley emphasized that he was able to speak to the Ukrainian army chief Valery Saluschnyj and other European generals several times.
7:29 p.m .: The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj has doubted that the rocket hit on Polish territory should have been a Ukrainian projectile. “Can you get facts or any evidence from the partners?” the 44-year-old asked journalists in a televised interview on Wednesday. The head of state called for the use of a joint commission of inquiry and access to the existing data. Western countries are currently assuming that a missile from the Ukrainian air defense system was behind the explosion.
“I think it was a Russian missile – according to the trust I have in the military reports,” Zelenskyy said. According to the Ukrainian data, one of the 25 Russian missile strikes in western Ukraine coincided with the impact in Poland. He also asked, “Can a crater 20 meters in diameter and five meters deep have been made by debris or not?”
If, despite his doubts, it turns out that a Ukrainian missile was responsible for the deaths of two Poles, Zelenskyi offered an apology.
7:21 p.m .: The head of the US foreign intelligence service CIA, William Burns, was in Kyiv during the recent Russian rocket attacks on Ukraine. There he met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Washington Post newspaper reported on Wednesday. Burns was inside the US embassy during Tuesday’s rocket fire and was not injured.
Zelenskyi later confirmed Burns’ visit to Kyiv. “Yesterday he was in the bomb shelter and then we sat together and talked,” said the 44-year-old in a television interview with journalists.
There should be no connection between Burns’ stay in the Ukrainian capital and the Russian attacks.
6.30 p.m .: Ex-boxing world champion Wladimir Klitschko sees the war after the Russian withdrawal from Cherson in a “final phase”. In an interview with “RTL/n-tv” he said: “We know we are in a final phase of the breakthrough at the end of the war. The end of the war is already on the horizon.”
Nevertheless, the brother of Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko cannot and does not want to rule out a further escalation. “You have to take everything into account. You saw that yesterday. Exactly 24 hours ago there was a continuous air alert and over a hundred shells and rockets landed all over Ukraine, including here in the city of Kyiv. We already know how far Russia can go – there are no borders and there are many lies.”
4:55 p.m .: According to the Deputy Chief of the Ukrainian Military Intelligence Service, Wadym Skibitsky, Russia is under increasing pressure in the war against Ukraine. “I think Russia is slowly reaching its military limits,” he said in an interview with t-online. “At least when it comes to the production of new weapon systems, Russian industry is severely restricted.”
This is also due to the punitive measures taken by the West, Skibitsky continued: “It is the success of the international sanctions that has slowed down Russian military production enormously.” The longer the measures last, the more difficult it becomes for the Russian Federation to find spare parts and new weapons to manufacture.
Looking towards Moscow, Skibitsky believes that a change of regime is possible in the near future. “In Russia, people are starting to understand what’s going on,” he said. “A fall of the Putin regime is suddenly conceivable.”
The goal must now be for Russia to no longer possess any nuclear weapons, he demanded. “The only solution is to denuclearize the Putin regime to remove its ability to blackmail the world with nuclear weapons,” Skibitsky said.
3:25 p.m .: Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova made fun of the deadly rocket hit in Poland. Ukraine had always wanted to join NATO, but now it has entered by force – with an S-300, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s spokeswoman picked up a joke on her Telegram channel on Wednesday that had previously been circulating on social media. She then asked Poland for an apology.
“The President of Poland called the crash of the rocket an ‘accident’.” Before that, however, Polish politicians had spread “hysteria”, allowed themselves to be carried away with “Russophobic outbursts” and summoned the Russian ambassador around midnight. Warsaw should apologize for this, Zakharova wrote.
1:56 p.m .: Russia is increasingly using oil exports to Turkey to circumvent the embargo of the EU countries. “Turkish refiners provide a focal point for Russian oil exports by refining products for markets that do not want to import Russian crude directly or cannot process it themselves,” according to a report by the independent Center for Research on, presented on the sidelines of the climate conference on Wednesday Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
Turkey has been importing more oil from Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine war. At the same time, exports of refined oil products to European countries or the USA increased by 85 percent in September and October compared to the two previous months. “A new route for Russian oil to the EU via Turkey is emerging,” emphasized the Finland-based institute. This gap in the embargo could become even more significant if the sanctions are tightened again in early December.
According to the report, Russia earned €21 billion from fossil fuel exports in October, down 7 percent from the previous month and a low since the war of aggression against Ukraine began.
The economic advisor to the Ukrainian government, Oleg Ustenko, who was connected via video, called for the import ban on refined products made from Russian oil planned for February to be implemented immediately.
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