Russia-Ukraine war: Russia bans entry to British PM and top officials; Kremlin claims warship sinking triggers World War III
Russia has banned entry to British PM Boris Johnson, as the Kremlin claims the sinking of its star warship has triggered World War III. WARNING: GRAPHIC
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Russia has banned entry to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and several other top UK officials, after London imposed sanctions on Russia over its military operation in Ukraine.
“This step was taken as a response to London’s unbridled information and political campaign aimed at isolating Russia internationally, creating conditions for restricting our country and strangling the domestic economy,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
The ministry said it had not ruled out further measures, and accused London of “unprecedented hostile actions”, in particular referring to sanctions on Russia’s senior officials.
“The British leadership is deliberately aggravating the situation surrounding Ukraine, pumping the Kyiv regime with lethal weapons and coordinating similar efforts on the behalf of NATO,” the ministry said.
Russia’s entry blacklist includes UK Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, former Prime Minister Theresa May and the First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon.
Britain has been part of an international effort to punish Russia with asset freezes, travel bans and economic sanctions, since President Vladimir Putin moved troops into Ukraine on February 24.
Meanwhile, a military hardware factory in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv was hit by strikes early on Saturday, a day after Russian forces bombed a missile unit outside the city.
Smoke rose from the area and there was a heavy police and military presence after Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko announced on social media there had been explosions in the capital’s Darnyrsky district.
Russia’s defence ministry said Moscow’s forces had used “high-precision long-range” weapons to hit facilities at an armaments plant in Kyiv.
The strike on the Ukrainian capital is among the first since invading Russian forces began withdrawing from regions around Kyiv last month, instead turning their focus on gaining control of the eastern Donbas region.
Russian strikes on Friday however hit the Vizar plant, near the capital’s international airport, seriously damaging the facility that produces missiles in the overnight strikes.
SUNKEN WARSHIP SPARKS WWIII CALLS FROM KREMLIN SUPPORTERS
Russia has confirmed its star warship Moskva has sunk in the Black Sea after it was struck by Ukrainian missiles with a satellite image reportedly showing the vessel burning.
The Moskva was sunk with its entire crew of 510 sailors on board after it exploded following a fire, Ukraine has claimed in a report by The Sun.
Russia launched a brutal attack on Ukraine in retaliation, striking a rocket factory, Ukraine towns and buses evacuating civilians.
The Pentagon on Friday backed Kyiv’s claim to have sunk the Moskva with cruise missiles.
A satellite image appears to pinpoint the warship’s location after it was struck and fears followed that the ship was carrying nuclear weapons.
***BREAKING***
— H I Sutton (@CovertShores) April 15, 2022
Updated article at https://t.co/tDVzYYzfpj
Tonight, Russian Navy warships have been sailing out of Sevastopol. Too soon to say destination but direction Ukraine. There were more landing ships near Crimean coast pic.twitter.com/9n6Z9n8BWV
Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Kyiv Interior Ministry, claimed that “the explosion was so strong that the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet sank in a matter of minutes”, The Sun reported.
He claimed to have heard this from sources in Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
“Apparently, as a result of the fire, the warheads of the large P-1000 cruise missile – Vulkan – detonated. And there were 16 of them on board the cruiser.”
As a result “all the crew of the cruiser Moskva died”.
Russia retaliated overnight by pounding the Ukrainian rocket factory that produced the Neptune missiles used against its warship.
The Vizar plant, near the capital’s international airport, was seriously damaged in the overnight strikes, an AFP journalist reported.
Russia said it had used sea-based long-range missiles to hit the factory, which Ukraine’s state weapons manufacturer says produced Neptune cruise missiles.
“There were five hits. My employee was in the office and got thrown off his feet by the blast,” Andrei Sizov, a 47-year-old owner of a nearby wood workshop, told AFP.
“They are making us pay for destroying the Moskva,” he said. It was the first major Russian strike around the Ukrainian capital in over two weeks.
A Pentagon official briefing reporters said Ukraine had hit the Moskva with two Neptunes — contradicting Russia’s claim that the ship lost balance in rough seas as it was towed to port after ammunition exploded.
The Moskva had been leading Russia’s naval effort in the seven-week conflict, and the fate of its crew of over 500 was uncertain.
The Pentagon official said survivors were observed being recovered by other Russian vessels, but Ukraine authorities said bad weather had made rescue operations impossible.
The Russian fleet in the Black Sea has been blockading the besieged port city of Mariupol, where Russian officials say they are in full control although Ukrainian fighters are still holed up in the city’s fortress-like steelworks.
In the capital, Kyiv regional governor Oleksandr Pavliuk said there were at least two other Russian strikes on the city Friday, adding civilians thinking about returning should “wait for quieter times.” Russian forces last month started withdrawing from around Kyiv as they were redeployed to focus on the east of the country, but the city remains vulnerable to missile strikes.
“The number and scale of missile strikes against targets in Kyiv will increase in response to any terrorist attacks or sabotage committed by the Kyiv nationalist regime on Russian territory,” Russia’s defence ministry vowed.
NUCLEAR THREAT GROWS
President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Friday that Russia could even use nuclear weapons out of desperation as its invasion falters, echoing recent comments by CIA director William Burns.
“They could do it, I mean they can,” Zelensky told CNN. “For them, life of the people is nothing.” Burns said that Russia’s battlefield setbacks raised the risk that President Vladimir Putin could deploy a tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon to try to regain the initiative.
In their latest move, Russia on Friday alleged Ukraine was preparing a missile strike to hit its own refugees at a railway station in the town of Lozova in the eastern region of Kharkiv.
The allegations echoed Russia’s widely-dismissed claim that Kyiv was responsible for a missile strike on April 18 that killed scored at another railway station.
In Kharkiv, Russian strikes killed at least seven, including a child, the region’s governor said Friday, as Moscow’s forces stepped up attacks in the region.
Outside the city, the village of Borova came under the control of Russian troops and the local administration had to flee, village mayor Alexander Tertychny said on Facebook.
Ukrainian authorities have been urging people in the south and the Donbas area in the east to quickly move west in advance of a large-scale Russian offensive.
Seizing the Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists control the Donetsk and Lugansk areas, would allow Moscow to create a southern corridor to the occupied Crimean peninsula.
‘INDISPUTABLE EVIDENCE OF PUTIN’S WAR CRIMES’: US
One of the first two US politicians to tour the devastation in Ukraine said the horror he witnessed this week was “indisputable evidence of Putin’s war crimes.”
According to the New York Post, US Sen. Steve Daines of Montana and Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz, who was born in Ukraine, travelled from Kyiv to Bucha, where hundreds of civilians were discovered in mass graves strewn across city streets.
Daines released a statement describing the grisly scene and called for more weapons to be sent to the country, according to the outlet.
“There is indisputable evidence of Putin’s war crimes everywhere — the images of shallow mass graves filled with civilians, women and children are heart wrenching.
“America and the world need to know about Putin’s atrocities against the innocent people of Ukraine now, not after time has passed and the aftermath of evil and bloodshed have been cleaned up. The sooner we can provide Ukraine with the lethal aid they need to win this war, the sooner we will end the war crimes,” he reportedly wrote.
Spartz said the visit was “important to show our support, to show we care,” according to The New York Times.
The American politicians were invited by the Ukrainian government and arrived in the capital city via train from western Ukraine on one day’s notice, the newspaper said.
The pair were reportedly escorted by local police through scenes of rubble and saw officials digging up a mass grave in Bucha, where untold citizens were bound and executed by Russian troops.
“We’ve been driving for miles and miles and miles, seeing death and destruction caused by Vladimir Putin in this evil invasion,” Daines said.
RUSSIAN MISSILES STRIKE CIVILIAN BUSES
Ukraine says seven people were killed and more than two dozen injured in a Russian attack on buses ferrying civilians from the war-torn east of the country.
“On April 14, Russian servicemen fired on evacuation buses carrying civilians in the village of Borova in the Izium district,” the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general said in a statement on social media.
“Preliminary data shows seven people died. Another 27 people were injured.”
Ukrainian authorities have been urging people in the south and the Donbas area in the east to quickly move west in advance of a large-scale Russian offensive to capture its composite regions, Lugansk and Donetsk.
In the eastern city of Kramatorsk, Russian forces were last week accused of targeting a train station used for evacuations, in an attack that left more than 50 people dead.
The increasingly tenuous situation in the east of the country led Kyiv to halt all evacuations on Wednesday saying the situation along humanitarian corridors was too unsafe.
AIR RAID ALERT SUGGESTS MAJOR ATTACK
The Moskva sinking comes as air raid alerts are being heard in all of Ukraine’s regions, in a possible sign of a major looming Russian attack.
The alert follows warnings that President Vladimir Putin could launch an “immediate escalation” of his war in Ukraine after his warship the Mosvka was struck in an apparent Ukrainian missile attack.
“If Ukraine has really sunk the Mosvka, expect immediate escalation from Moscow,” Russia analyst Clint Ehrlich wrote on Twitter.
“There will be a political imperative for the Kremlin to push this setback from the headlines with positive news. We may see large-scale strategic bombing, something Russia has held back on to date.”
RUSSIA ACCUSES UKRAINE OF BOMBINGS
As investigators began probing Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Kremlin officials accused Kyiv of sending helicopters to bomb a town close to the border, in the southern Bryansk region.
“Using two military helicopters carrying heavy weaponry, Ukrainian armed forces illegally entered Russian air space,” Russia’s Investigative Committee — which probes major crimes — said in a statement.
“Flying low, acting deliberately, they carried out at least six air strikes on residential buildings in the settlement of Klimovo,” investigators said.
As a result, they said, “at least six residential buildings were damaged … and seven people received injuries of varying severity including one small child born in 2020.”
The claims have not been independently verified. Satellite images from 2022 have shown mility equipment deployed at storage facilities in the Bryansk region north of the Ukraine-Russia border.
A Russian health ministry official, Alexei Kuznetsov, later told the Interfax news agency that eight people were injured, six of them admitted to hospital.
Two patients — the young child and a woman born in 1948 — were in serious condition, he added.
This appeared to be the first time that Moscow has officially accused Ukrainian armed forces of flying helicopters into Russia to carry out an attack.
Previously the governor of Belgorod region in southern Russia, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said two Ukrainian military helicopters had carried out a strike on a fuel depot on April 1, while this was not directly confirmed by Ukraine or Moscow.
The latest shelling was announced earlier by governor Alexander Bogomaz, who said on Telegram that “two residential buildings were damaged and some of the residents were injured”.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, Gladkov, later said on Telegram that the village of Spodaryushino close to the border “came under shelling from the Ukrainian side” and residents from this and a nearby village had been evacuated as a precaution.
Separately, Russian investigators said they were probing a Wednesday attack on a border checkpoint in Kursk region, also allegedly carried out by Ukraine.
There were no injured or damaged caused, investigators said. Also on Thursday, Russia’s security agency the FSB told TASS news agency that Ukraine fired at border checkpoint where over 30 Ukrainian refugees were crossing into Russia.
It added that there were no injuries.
RUSSIA’S WARNING TO FINLAND, SWEDEN
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has warned that Russia would deploy nuclear weapons close to the Baltic States and Scandinavia if Finland or Sweden decide to join NATO.
Mr Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s security council and president from 2008 to 2012, wrote on Telegram that if the countries joined, this would more than double Russia’s land border with NATO members.
“Naturally, we will have to reinforce these borders,” he said.
“In this case, it would not be possible to talk any more about the Baltic non-nuclear status. The balance has to be restored,” he said, indicating that Russia would be entitled to deploy nuclear weapons in the region.
The former president said Russia would “seriously reinforce its group of ground forces and air defences and deploy significant naval forces in the Gulf of Finland.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked about the comments by journalists, said that “this has been talked about many times” and President Vladimir Putin has issued an order on “reinforcing our western flank” due to NATO’s growing military potential.
Asked if this reinforcement would include nuclear weapons, Mr Peskov said: “I can’t say … There will be a whole list of measures, necessary steps. This will be covered at a separate meeting by the president.”
Moscow’s military actions in Ukraine have sparked a dramatic U-turn in public and political opinion in both Finland and Sweden over long-held policies of military non-alignment. Finland said this week it will decide whether to apply for NATO membership within weeks and Sweden is also discussing membership.
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