Poland raises fears about ‘dangerous’ situation with Wagner troops near border
A group of 100 soldiers from the Russian Wagner group have moved closer to the Belarusian city of Grodno near the Polish border, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has said.
Poland, a former Warsaw Pact member which has been a full member of the US-led Nato military alliance since 1999, has been concerned about the possible spillover of war on to its territory ever since Russian invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Reuters reports.
The move of several thousand Wagner mercenaries to Belarus was part of a deal that ended the group’s mutiny attempt in June, when they took control of a Russian military headquarters, marched on Moscow and threatened to tip Russia into civil war, president Vladimir Putin has said.
Earlier this month, Poland began moving more than 1,000 troops to the east of the country amid rising concerns that the presence of Wagner fighters in Belarus could lead to increased tension on its border.
The situation is getting increasingly dangerous … Most likely [the Wagner personnel] will be disguised as the Belarusian border guard and help illegal migrants get to the Polish territory [and] destabilise Poland.
They will most likely try to enter Poland pretending to be illegal migrants and this poses additional threats.
In further comments reported by the BBC, he added:
This is certainly a step towards a further hybrid attack on Polish territory.
However he did not give the source of his information on the Wagner movements, and Anton Motolko, founder of the Belarusian opposition Hajun project, which monitors military activity in the country, told Reuters his group had not seen any evidence of the Wagner group moving closer to Grodno.
Key events
Ukrainian forces to enter Crimea ‘soon’, defence official claims
Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the main intelligence directorate of Ukraine’s defence ministry, has raised the prospect of Ukrainian forces “soon” entering Crimea in an effort to retake the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
Budanov, Sky News reports, citing TSN, did not specify a date by which the military operation would begin. However, Crimea has been subject to attacks in recent weeks – including the explosion which damaged the Kerch Bridge.
The former spokesperson to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Iuliia Mendel, has tweeted a photo a Guinean embassy staffer sporting an interesting choice of attire.
Lama Jacques Sevoba, the man in question, reportedly said:
I’ve had it for three years already because I love him very much, so I wear it any time, in any place. And today it’s to show my people that Russia and Africa will be even bigger friends than before.
Nothing to hide here. A staff member of the Guinean embassy arrived at the summit in St Petersburg yesterday wearing a shirt covered in Vladimir Putin’s face.
Lama Jacques Sevoba posed with a Russian man for a photo as the talks went on. pic.twitter.com/8BJBEVHBhr— Iuliia Mendel (@IuliiaMendel) July 29, 2023
Ukraine has moved its official Christmas Day state holiday from 7 January to the western-standard 25 December to “abandon the Russian heritage of imposing Christmas celebrations”.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed the bill into law yesterday, as efforts continue to distance Ukraine from Russia. They began in the several years prior to the invasion but have intensified since.
Jaroslav Lukiv at the BBC reports:
For centuries, first imperial Russia and then the Moscow-dominated Soviet Union had tried – but always failed – to totally control Ukraine. This included the imposed authority of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) over Ukraine’s churches. But in 2019, the recently formed Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was granted independence by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians worldwide.
The move provoked a furious response in the ROC, which is openly defending president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Until this year, the OCU – like several other Orthodox churches, including the ROC – celebrated Christmas Day on 7 January, in line with the Julian calendar. But the OCU has now officially switched to the more-precise Gregorian calendar used in most parts of the world.
A nine-year-old girl and her 10-year-old brother have been called as witnesses in a criminal case against their mother after she was accused of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian army.
Lidia Prudovskaya and her two children were summoned by investigators in the northern Russian region of Arkhangelsk on Friday to give testimony in the case, Russian news outlet Sota reported.
Prudovskaya previously faced administrative charges on similar allegations after sharing anti-war posts on Russian social media platform VKontakte in September 2022, AP reports.
Discrediting the Russian military is a criminal offence under a law adopted after Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. The law is regularly used against Kremlin critics.
The Guardian’s Shaun Walker reports on the programme of “de-Russification” that is going on all over Ukraine. It has a particular hue in Odesa, where it is not only the figure of Catherine that binds the historical and cultural landscape to Moscow.
Many of the great Russian-language writers were from Odesa or spent time there, its residents largely speak Russian and its Transfiguration Cathedral was consecrated by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in 2010. A barrage of missile attacks over the past two weeks, the first time the centre of the city has been significantly damaged since the start of the war, is likely to only accelerate this process.
Unesco representatives have arrived in Odessa to assess the damage to cultural and religious sites caused by Russian strikes on 19 to 23 July.
The mission will work in Odessa for four days, according to chair of the Odessa Regional State Administration Oleg Kiper. Experts will record the consequences of Russian attacks.
As a result of Russian shelling in Odessa, 28 architectural monuments were seriously damaged, including the Transfiguration Cathedral.
Poland raises fears about ‘dangerous’ situation with Wagner troops near border
A group of 100 soldiers from the Russian Wagner group have moved closer to the Belarusian city of Grodno near the Polish border, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has said.
Poland, a former Warsaw Pact member which has been a full member of the US-led Nato military alliance since 1999, has been concerned about the possible spillover of war on to its territory ever since Russian invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Reuters reports.
The move of several thousand Wagner mercenaries to Belarus was part of a deal that ended the group’s mutiny attempt in June, when they took control of a Russian military headquarters, marched on Moscow and threatened to tip Russia into civil war, president Vladimir Putin has said.
Earlier this month, Poland began moving more than 1,000 troops to the east of the country amid rising concerns that the presence of Wagner fighters in Belarus could lead to increased tension on its border.
The situation is getting increasingly dangerous … Most likely [the Wagner personnel] will be disguised as the Belarusian border guard and help illegal migrants get to the Polish territory [and] destabilise Poland.
They will most likely try to enter Poland pretending to be illegal migrants and this poses additional threats.
In further comments reported by the BBC, he added:
This is certainly a step towards a further hybrid attack on Polish territory.
However he did not give the source of his information on the Wagner movements, and Anton Motolko, founder of the Belarusian opposition Hajun project, which monitors military activity in the country, told Reuters his group had not seen any evidence of the Wagner group moving closer to Grodno.
Russia has claimed that its forces struck a command post in Ukraine’s Dnipro yesterday, after Kyiv said a missile hit an apartment block there, wounding nine people including two children.
“On the evening of 28 July, the Russian armed forces attacked a command post of the Ukrainian armed forces in the city of Dnepropetrovsk with high-precision weapons,” the Russian defence ministry said, referring to Dnipro by its earlier name. “The designated target has been hit.”
Kyiv officials said that several other buildings had been hit including an empty building belonging to the country’s security service.
Faisal Ali
Eritrea’s enthusiastic embrace of Russia’s narrative on the Ukraine war is explained by its isolation and deep suspicion of the US.
President Isaias Afwerki’s comments are part of a broader pattern of Eritrean diplomacy, which has seen Asmara lean strongly on Russia’s side in a series of conflicts where Moscow has gobbled up the territories of its much smaller neighbours.
When Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Eritrea joined an isolated club of countries – including Iran, North Korea and Syria – in voting against a UN general assembly motion which condemned the Kremlin’s move. A month later Eritrea’s foreign minister, Osman Salah, visited Russia, where he blamed western countries for attempting to “contain, weaken and isolate Russia”.
In 2014, Eritrea caused fury in Kyiv, when its foreign minister visited Crimea shortly after Russia invaded and then annexed it. An Eritrea delegation also visited the self-declared Republic of Abkhazia which declared independence from Georgia in 1999 with Russian support and South Ossetia which seceded from Georgia in 1992 but was recognised by Russia after a brief 2008 war between Moscow and Tbilisi.
Eritrea has frosty relations with Washington and other western countries. Eritrea came under UN security councils sanctions in 2009, which Afwerki believed were enforced on his isolated country at Ethiopia’s behest with whom Eritrea had a deadly border war in 1998 and a proxy conflict in the Horn of Africa throughout the early 2000s.
Another round of US sanctions followed when Eritrea entered a conflict in northern Ethiopia on the side of the federal government against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) which ruled Ethiopia from the 90s until 2018 when Abiy Ahmed came to power. Afwerki remains deeply suspicious of the west and frequently launches verbal tirades against the US.
Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Liverpool as the city hosted Pride on behalf of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, as a KyivPride organiser praised the “amazing friendship” between the cities.
Hundreds of LGBTQ+ Ukrainians and their allies were expected to take part in the event on Saturday.
The joint march continues a relationship built when Liverpool hosted the Eurovision song contest on behalf of the war-torn country earlier this year.
Edward Reese, a spokesperson for KyivPride, travelled from Ukraine’s capital to Liverpool to take part in the city’s Pride events, along with other members of the Ukrainian LGBTQ+ organisation.
He said: “We are marching together for Ukraine, for freedom, to remind the world and the UK that the war is not over.”
Reese added: “LGBTQ people right now suffer from a lack of rights all over the world …The conservative Christian agenda and anti-gender movement are very powerful here in the UK, in the US and Europe and everywhere, so it’s very important to stand together because this war for our rights is not over.”
More from Zelenskiy on his visit to troops near the eastern Bakhmut frontline. He added further thanks to Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces.
He posted:
Thank you for the fact that even after 520 days of the very difficult full-scale war for our freedom and the lives of all of us, our children – the present and the future of our state – you are still strong.
The Ukrainian SSO did not let our country be occupied, Ukraine and everything we have: our identity, our life be destroyed. Thank you for the fact that even after 520 days of the very difficult full-scale war for our freedom and the lives of all of us, our children – the present… pic.twitter.com/kGHSt7gJ6Z
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) July 29, 2023
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has visited Ukrainian troops in “advanced positions” near the eastern Bakhmut frontline today.
Photos published by Zelenskiy on Twitter showed him meeting troops and looking at maps in a dimly lit, windowless concrete-walled room. He praised Ukraine‘s Special Operations Forces. “The performance of tasks for the sake of Ukraine by you, guys, is truly heroic,” he wrote.
Ukraine last month began its highly anticipated fightback after stockpiling western weapons and building up its offensive forces. Kyiv has, however, admitted difficult battles and called on the US and other allies to provide long-range weapons and artillery.
Bakhmut direction, advanced positions of the Special Operations Forces. Today, I am here to congratulate our warriors on their professional day, to honor their strength. I heard a commander’s report, talked with the warriors. Very powerful, very effective. Thank you!
Although I… pic.twitter.com/4yJhfO8UBI
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) July 29, 2023