Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday claimed "rapid and powerful" advances by his army in the South, reporting "tens" of localities taken over "this week" from the Russians in this region. Reconquests that add to those of the East and North, where the Ukrainian army has had many victories since the beginning of September.
The Ukrainian army is making "rather rapid and powerful advances in the south of our country", Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his daily address posted on social media. "Dozens of localities have been liberated just this week" in the four regions annexed at the end of last week by Russia, welcomed the head of state. He notably cited eight localities taken over by the forces of kyiv in the region of Kherson, in the south, where the Russian army retreated according to maps presented Tuesday by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Volodymyr Zelensky also thanked his counterpart Joe Biden for the "continued military and financial support" of the United States in the face of the Russian invasion during a telephone conversation, after the announcement by Washington of a new shipment of weapons to kyiv. The new component of US military aid includes tens of thousands of light munitions and artillery munitions, mine systems, as well as 200 armored vehicles.
Christian Salazar Volkmann, who was presenting a report on the human rights situation in Ukraine to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, stressed that the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had the evidence of "a series of violations of the rights to life, liberty and security". The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian armed forces "has led to a disastrous human rights situation throughout Ukraine", noted the High Commission's operations manager in the field.
"The Ukrainian people have experienced untold suffering and destruction, as the armed conflict has resulted in a wide range of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law affecting both civilians and combatants," he said. He insists.
As D-Day approaches, the experts are divided between those who lean towards a prize in the form of criticism of the offensive launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin and those who anticipate a reminder shot on the urgency of stemming the push of the thermometer.
For Henrik Urdal, director of the Oslo Peace Research Institute (Prio) interviewed by AFP, the figurehead of the Belarusian opposition in exile, Svetlana Tikhanovskaïa, and the Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny, imprisoned after being the target of an attempted poisoning, deserve to be jointly crowned. “They are two champions of non-violent pro-democracy activities in their respective countries,” he argues. "And both Navalny and Tikhanovskaya have been very firm opponents of the war in Ukraine."
For other observers, the mobilization in the face of the climate emergency would also be worthy of a Nobel, after a year again marked by extreme weather events, from the record heat wave recorded this summer in Europe to the devastating floods in Pakistan.
The United States will transport a Russian cosmonaut to the International Space Station on Wednesday aboard a SpaceX rocket, a mission that is highly symbolic in the midst of the war in Ukraine. Anna Kikina, the only female Russian cosmonaut currently in active service, is part of the Crew-5 crew, also made up of two Americans and a Japanese. This is the fifth regular mission to the Space Station (ISS) carried out by SpaceX on behalf of NASA. Two weeks ago, an American took off aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket to the ISS.
This long-planned astronaut exchange program has been maintained despite the very high tensions between the two countries since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February. Ensuring the operation of the ISS has thus become one of the very few subjects of cooperation between the United States and Russia.