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EUROPEAN COMMISSION PRESIDENT Ursula von der Leyen has said the EU would impose a gradual Russian oil ban in retaliation for the war in Ukraine.
“We will make sure that we phase out Russian oil in an orderly fashion,” von der Leyen said in speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg as she presented a sixth package of sanctions against Moscow to deny funding to the war effort against Ukraine.
Von der Leyen also said the EU would ask that the bloc’s 27 member states to deny Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, access to SWIFT, the global banking communications system.
EU officials yesterday handed a draft plan to member states on a new package of sanctions aimed at Moscow.
But several EU officials and European diplomats in Brussels told AFP there were divisions, with at least one member state jockeying to opt out of an oil embargo.
Ambassadors from the 27 European Union countries will meet today to give the plan a once-over, and it will need unanimous approval before going into effect.
It comes after Russian forces launched a major assault on the holdout Azovstal steel plant in the devastated port city of Mariupol while pounding sites across eastern Ukraine.
Three months into the war, Moscow has focused its fresh offensive on Ukraine’s east and south, while Western allies continue to provide Kyiv with cash and weapons in a bid to force Russian leader Vladimir Putin to pull back.
In one of a series of assaults yesterday, 21 civilians were killed and another 28 wounded in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, local authorities said.
Regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said 10 of the 21 dead were killed in the shelling of the Avdiivka coke plant, one of Europe’s largest, calling it the highest daily death toll since a Russian strike on a train station in Kramatorsk about a month ago.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenkskyy, meanwhile, said more than 150 people had been successfully extracted in Mariupol evacuation operations.
“Today, 156 people arrived in (the Ukrainian-held city) Zaporizhzhia. Women and children. They have been in shelters for more than two months,” Zelenskyy said in a daily address.
Further evacuations from the city are to take place today with the help of the United Nations and the Red Cross, a Mariupol mayoral adviser said.
But Osnat Lubrani, UN humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, has warned there “may be more civilians who remain trapped” in the immense underground galleries of the Azovstal steelworks.
Civilians reach safety
Azovstal evacuees who emerged from a caravan of white buses in Zaporizhzhia were met at a makeshift reception centre by crying loved ones and dozens of journalists.
“Under permanent fire, sleeping on improvised mats, being pounded by the blast waves, running with your son and being knocked to the ground by an explosion – everything was horrible,” evacuee Anna Zaitseva told reporters.
“We are so thankful for everyone who helped us. There was a moment we lost hope, we thought everyone forgot about us,” Zaitseva said, holding her six-month-old baby in her arms.
Elyna Tsybulchenko, 54, who worked at the site doing quality control before the war trapped her there, described days and nights of endless barrages.
“They bombed like every second… everything was shaking. Dogs barked and children screamed,” she told AFP. “But the hardest moment was when we were told our bunker would not survive a direct hit.”
The Russian army confirmed its forces and pro-Moscow separatists were targeting Azovstal with artillery and planes in the wake of the evacuation, accusing members of Ukraine’s Azov battalion and other troops of using the pause in fighting to take up combat positions.
Mariupol was now largely calm elsewhere, AFP journalists saw on a recent press tour organised by Russian forces, with the remaining locals emerging from hiding to a ruined city.
Battle for democracy
The war in Ukraine has killed thousands of people and displaced more than 13 million, creating the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
Western countries have responded by backing Ukraine with cash and increasingly heavy weaponry while imposing unprecedented sanctions against Russia.
US President Joe Biden yesterday framed the war as a historic battle for democracy in a speech to workers at a factory producing Javelin missiles, which have wreaked havoc on Russian tanks.
“These weapons touched by the hands, your hands, are in the hands of Ukrainian heroes, making a significant difference,” Biden said at the Lockheed Martin facility in Troy, Alabama.
Reprising one of his presidency’s core themes, Biden said the fight by democratic Ukraine against Putin’s Russia was a front in a wider contest between democracies and autocracies worldwide, including China.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping had told him that democracies can no longer “keep up,” Biden said.
Ukraine is the “first” battle to “to determine whether that’s going to happen,” he said.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pledged another 300 million pounds (€358 million) in military aid, as he became the first foreign leader to address Ukraine’s parliament since the conflict began.
Speaking via video link, he evoked Britain’s fight against the Nazis in World War II in hailing Kyiv’s resistance as its “finest hour”, and vowed to help ensure “no one will ever dare to attack you again”.
Deadly strikes
Since abandoning early attempts to capture Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, Russian forces have shifted to the east, including largely Russian-speaking areas, and the south.
In the town of Lyman, Ukrainian soldiers told AFP they had rigged with explosives a railway bridge over the Donets river and were awaiting orders to blow it up.
“It’s never easy to destroy one of your own pieces of infrastructure. But between saving a bridge or protecting a city, there’s no question at all,” said one, going by the nom de guerre of “The Engineer”.
Russia’s defence ministry, meanwhile, said its forces had struck a logistics centre at a military airfield in the region around the Black Sea port of Odessa, used for the delivery of foreign-made weapons.
Storage facilities containing Turkey’s Bayraktar drones as well as missiles and ammunition from the United States and Europe had been destroyed, it said.
A rocket strike also knocked out power in part of Lviv, the western city near Poland that has turned into a haven for the displaced due to its comparative calm, Mayor Andriy Sadovy said on Twitter.
Missiles also struck far to the country’s west in Transcarpathia, a region bordering Hungary that has largely been spared to date, Victor Mykyta, head of the local military administration, said.
Ukrainian prosecutors say they have pinpointed more than 8,000 war crimes carried out by Russian troops and are investigating 10 Russian soldiers for suspected atrocities in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv.
But in a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday, Putin accused Ukrainian forces of committing war crimes and claimed the EU was “ignoring” them, according to the Kremlin.
The United States warned Monday that Moscow was preparing imminently to annex the eastern regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, planning to “engineer referenda” to join Russia sometime in mid-May.
Pro-Russian separatists in the two regions declared independence in 2014, but Moscow has so far stopped short of formally incorporating them as it did that year with the Crimean peninsula.
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The winter vomiting bug (norovirus) had been around for some time now. What I cannot understand is Joe public visiting hospitals despite requests not to. Next of kin of course must visit. I’ve seen so much recently of aquatinted people and neighbors …. we can only stop infection by following requests of medical experts.
You get people going to A&E that really don’t need to be there.. the minor injuries clinic will sort you out for things like sprains, stitches, and minor fractures. A&E should be for medical emergencies like serious fractures, head injuries, spinal injuries, cardiac and respiratory problems. If you go to A&E with the sniffles or a minor injury, you are part of the problem in the Irish Health Service. If it’s serious enough, you’ll be referred from your GP or the minor injury clinic or the swift care clinics. They may even get you a spin in an ambulance.
@David: It’s not always practical. Minor injury clinics don’t operate 24/7. The one in Smithfield for example is 8-6 excluding weekends and bank holidays.
Go to the equivalent of SouthDoc then. Get your referral letter, if required, it’ll save you money as you won’t pay the A&E fee, provide reassurance and free up space in the A&E. Most doctors can put a few stitches in… it comes down to common sense. There are an awful lot of hypochondriacs in Ireland.
@David: The problem with crowding is the numbers who require admission and patient flow which is at a standstill. It’s all well and good telling people to first go to their GP, but high acuity patients need to go directly to an A&E. Minor injury units need to operate 24/7. GP’s should have direct access to diagnostics which again should be open 7/7. Triage should also be able to redirect inappropriate attendees back to GP’s.
Another thing that’s strange is people turning up to A&E with not medical issues. Do they not realise theres a out of hours doctor facility Care Doc or South Doc that are more than capable another thing I don’t get is people queuing at a doctor surgery coz they’ve a cough or cold.
Their GPs are still on holiday. If they attend Southdoc they must pay for the service. By going to the CUH they produce their medical card and get it for free and then ring their local radio station complaining about having to wait 8 hours in A&E.
Southdoc don’t charge if the patient has a medical card.
People who require a certificate for work because they have a heavy cold will have to get it from someone. I don’t see the issue with them queuing too get it from their doctor.
Anthony
Most doctors were open 28-30 December plus the car doc deals with any problems put of hours.
Charge everyone the a an e charge. If it is a real emergency you will get admitted and therefore no charge for a and e. Other than that see a GP and let them refer you to a and e if deemed necessary. Medical card holders can see out of hours doc for free but many go straight to a and e as that is free too.
Get well soon, all of ye.
To avoid €100 fee you need a gp letter or a medical card. Seems strange.Ambulance cases or gp referrals only.
Gosh! sick people over the Christmas / winter period, that’s something we’ve never seen before
no mention of the skeleton crews running the hospital last week…
yes yes I know someone will say that Hospital staff are entitled to holidays too, of course they are but not all at the same time
Have seen first hand the volume of patients presenting to an A&e in Cork over the Christmas period. It’s not a case of Skelton staff, in fact there were staff including doctors drafted in from other areas of the hospital to assist with the influx of patients. The doctors and nurses I have met were nothing short of excellent and have given the very best of care to all in the A&E.
No one should be allowed into hospital with the flu unless they’ve been vaccinated. Ditto other preventable diseases. Anyone pissed should be heavily fined.
Awful awful hospital. And shite doctors who will discharge patients without even interacting with them and telling them what’s wrong. Great nurses though.
have your say