Did you miss the latest events on the war in Ukraine? Do not panic, 20 minutes takes stock for you every evening at 7:30 p.m. Who did what ? Who said what? Where are we ? The answer below.
The fact of the day
This Friday, two Ukrainian missiles were intercepted by Russian anti-aircraft defense in the southwest of its territory. The debris from the first caused at least 15 minor injuries in their fall on Taganrog, a town near the border with Ukraine. According to Vasily Goloubev, the governor of the Rostov-on-the-Don region where this city of 250,000 inhabitants is located, the injured received “shards of glass”.
Taganrog is located about fifty kilometers from the Ukrainian border, on the road leading to the port of Mariupol, occupied by Russian forces after a devastating siege in 2022.
sentence of the day
The Ukrainian people have long been subject to Russian ideology in almost all areas of life, including the Julian calendar and the celebration of Christmas on January 7”
Change of schedule. Ukrainians will now celebrate Christmas on December 25 instead of January 7, as was the case until then, following a law signed into law on Friday by President Volodymyr Zelensky.
As we can read in the explanatory note of the text voted by the deputies in mid-July, “the powerful rebirth of the Ukrainian nation continues. The continuous and fruitful struggle for their identity contributes to the awareness and desire of every Ukrainian to live their own life, with their own traditions, their own holidays”.
The number of the day
12. The European Union has imposed sanctions on 12 Russian individuals and entities accused of having participated in a vast disinformation campaign orchestrated by Moscow about the war in Ukraine, in particular via fake Internet pages of Western media. Among the targeted media, we find the Parisian, Le Figaro, The world but also 20 minutes, who had filed a complaint in June against these networks for identity theft.
According to the EU, this campaign aimed to “manipulate information and spread propaganda” in favor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, using “fake pages impersonating national media and sites ( Internet) governmental”, then rebroadcast by Russian state organizations. The EU said it had blacklisted the accused. Registration on this list entails a freezing of assets and a ban on entry into EU territory.
The trend of the day
Despite its illegal invasion of Ukraine, Russia can still count on the support of several African, South American and Asian countries, including the Chinese juggernaut.
At a Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg, Vladimir Putin proudly displayed himself on Friday surrounded by around fifteen African heads of state. The message of this family photo? Moscow, he assures us, intends to work “hand in hand” with the continent of more than a billion inhabitants. “Russia’s attention to Africa continues to grow”, boasted Vladimir Putin, saying he wanted to “build a strategic partnership” with this continent.
The day before, the Russian president had pulled out of his game the card of “grain diplomacy”, promising to deliver free cereals to six African countries, at a time when they are worried about the end of the agreement on grain exports from Ukraine.
Moscow can also count on historical partners such as Venezuela and Cuba, which refused to condemn the Russian offensive in Ukraine during the first summit between Latin America and the European Union in Brussels earlier in July.
At the UN, on February 24, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of a call to withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine. Moscow’s usual allies voted against – Belarus, North Korea, Syria… – and about thirty abstained. Among them, major powers: India, a privileged buyer of Russian oil, and China, an unwavering partner of Russia.