ZURICH, April 8 (Reuters) – Austria’s government is monitoring the global banking turmoil although there are so far no signs of it spreading to the country’s financial sector, Finance Minister Magnus Brunner said in an interview published on Saturday.
Meanwhile, an aide to jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny today suggested Putin had massively miscalculated, predicting the ‘unpopular’ war and its economic consequences would lead to the ‘demise’ of his regime within five years.
An aide to jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (pictured) today suggested Putin had massively miscalculated, predicting the ‘unpopular’ war and its economic consequences would lead to the ‘demise’ of his regime within five years.
They are dated ranging from February 23 to March 1, and provide what appears to be details on the progress of weapons and equipment going into Ukraine with more precise timelines and amounts than the U.S.
Video posted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty shows military ambulances driving through the Belarusian city of Homel in early March, with employees at the region’s clinical hospital claiming more than 2,500 bodies have already been shipped back to Russia as of March 13.
* Russian forces have likely seized the center of the fiercely contested city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and are threatening a key supply route for Ukrainian forces to the west, British intelligence said.
Boris Johnson suggested the growingly desperate leader – who has yet to make any significant inroads in Ukraine – is being ‘irrational’, while Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte described him as ‘totally paranoid’.
The Austrian lender is now the most important Western bank in Russia, offering a lifeline to people and businesses there seeking to make international payments, but it is under growing pressure from Western officials and investors to quit.
Mykola Kuleba said at a news conference in Kyiv that the children were expected to arrive in the capital later in the day.
Kuleba is the executive director of the Save Ukraine organization and is the presidential commissioner for children’s rights.
* Russia threatened to bypass a U.N.-brokered grain deal unless obstacles to its agricultural exports were removed, while talks in Turkey agreed removing barriers was needed to extend the agreement beyond next month.
The Webb team will take the telescope through more alignment steps over the next six weeks. The observatory will then go through a two-month process of preparing its science instruments before it’s ready to tackle its mission in earnest. If all continues to go well, we could see Webb’s first full-resolution imagery this summer.
It comes after Russia used its latest hypersonic missile – known as the Kinzhal – for the first time during its attack on Ukraine, a military spokesman said today, reportedly wiping out an underground warehouse storing Ukrainian missiles and ammunition in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region.
* Ukraine’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova is due to visit India on Monday and will seek humanitarian aid and equipment to repair energy infrastructure damaged during Russia’s invasion, the Hindu newspaper reported on Saturday.
Putin is said to be furious at the slow pace of his campaign, which he had hoped to end within days given his country’s military superiority – on paper at least – and has fired at least eight generals since waging war on the former Soviet state, intelligence sources claim.
An FBI probe was launched Friday to determine the source of the leak, however a senior official told The New York Times that tracking down the perpetrator could prove difficult because a large number of officials have the security clearances needed to access the information.
Meanwhile, it also emerged Saturday that corpses of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine are being moved from Belarus back to Russia by train and planes in the dead of night to avoid attracting attention.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said this week it had been in contact with Lvova-Belova, the first confirmation of high-level international intervention to reunite families with children who were forcibly deported.
According to one US intelligence estimate, 7,000 Russian troops including four generals have already been killed – more than the number of American troops killed in either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars at 4,825 and 3,576 respectively – and between 14,000 and 21,000 troops have been injured in the fighting. The estimated Russian death toll is of a scale similar to that of the Battle of Iwo Jima, where 6,852 US troops were killed and 19,000 were wounded during five weeks of fighting Japanese forces in the most intense phase of the Pacific theatre of World War Two
ICRC spokesman Jason Straziuso said the organization was in contact with Lvova-Belova “in line with its mandate to restore contact between separated families and facilitate reunification where feasible.”
