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news of the day
A building of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was the target of Russian bombardments in Mariupol, a strategic port in the south-east of Ukraine, a Ukrainian official said on Wednesday.
“Enemy planes and artillery shelled the building, marked with a red cross on a white background, which is equivalent to the presence of wounded, civilian or humanitarian material,” she continued, adding an aerial image of a building with a roof marked with a red cross. “At the moment we have no information about the victims,” she said.
A spokeswoman for the Red Cross in Geneva confirmed that the image shown showed an ICRC warehouse in Mariupol. “We don’t have a team on the ground so we don’t have any other information, including casualties or potential damage,” she said. According to her, all the humanitarian aid stored in the building had already been distributed.
sentence of the day
Vladimir Putin created this global food crisis”
The accusation comes from the number two of the American diplomacy Wendy Sherman during a meeting of the Security Council devoted to the humanitarian situation in Ukraine. She insisted on a risk of “starvation” after the invasion of “Europe’s breadbasket” and stressed that the Russian leader is the only one who can “stop” this food crisis.
The number of the day
4 million.
The bar was crossed on Wednesday. More than 4 million Ukrainians have fled their country since the invasion by the Russian army on February 24, according to figures from the High Commissioner for Refugees on Wednesday. Poland alone hosts more than 2.3 million of these people.
The trend of the day
Hope falls. While the markets had quivered positively at the idea of a breakthrough in the Russian-Ukrainian talks, their hopes were dashed on Wednesday. Cherniguiv, north of kyiv, continued to be shelled overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday by the Russian army, despite Moscow’s commitment to “radically” reduce its military activity there.
Russian forces have “likely abandoned their efforts to encircle kyiv by now, although they continue to fight to maintain their current positions on both banks of the Dnieper River”, according to the Institute for study of war (ISW).
Talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul on Tuesday yielded nothing “very promising” or “breakthrough”, the Kremlin said on Wednesday. “At this time, we cannot report anything very promising or any breakthrough. There is a lot of work to be done,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.