Putin dismisses claims over mystery Baltic pipeline damage
Vladimir Putin has dismissed the idea that Russiadamaged a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia as “rubbish” and suggested such claims were made up to divert attention from what he said was a Western attack on Nord Stream.
Helsinki said this week that a subsea gas pipeline and a telecommunications cable connecting Nato members Finland and Estonia under the Baltic Sea had been damaged in what may have been a deliberate act.
Asked by reporters in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, about claims that Russia could have been involved, Putin said: “That is complete rubbish.” Until recently, Putin said, he had not even known such a pipeline existed as it was so small. He also suggested that it might have somehow been snagged by an anchor, some sort of hook or an earthquake, and suggested that Finland investigate, reports Reuters.
Putin said it was clear that suggestions that Russia was involved were “done only to distract attention from the terrorist attack carried out by the West against Nord Stream”.
Russia says blasts on the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea in September 2022 were carried out by the US and Britain, without providing evidence. Washington and London have denied any involvement in what they - along with Sweden, Denmark and Germany - have called an act of sabotage.
Leading US newspapers have reported that the US Central Intelligence Agency knew of a Ukrainian plot to attack the pipelines. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has denied Ukraine attacked them.
In a February blog post, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh cited an unidentified source as saying that US navy divers had destroyed the pipelines with explosives on the orders of president Joe Biden.
The US has claimed that North Korea delivered more than 1,000 containers of military equipment and munitionsto Russia for the war in Ukraine.
Fighting on the eastern frontline, in Avdiivka, entered a fourth day as Russia seeks to regain the initiative in its biggest offensive in months. Ukraine’s top military command said that it had repelled more than 20 attacks over the past day around the town, while there were claims Ukrainian reservists were being sent in to shore up defences after initial Russian breakthroughs.
Vladimir Putin dismissed the idea that Russia damaged a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia and suggested such claims were made up to divert attention from what he said was a western attack on Nord Stream.
EU leaders meeting later in October will demand “decisive progress” on using Russian assets frozen by sanctions to help Ukraine, according to their draft statement.
Former Olympic champions Yelena Isinbayeva and Shamil Tarpischev – Russia‘s two International Olympic Committee members – have no contractual links to the country’s military and have not supported the invasion of Ukraine, the IOC president, Thomas Bach, said.
No final communique is expected to be released at the end of the International Monetary Fund’s meetings in Marrakech because of a disagreement on how to refer to Russia’s war in Ukraine, a European official said on Friday.
The White House has said that between 7 September and 1 October, a Russian-flagged ship transported cargo from a North Korean ammunition depot to a Russian port. From there, the cargo was allegedly carried to a Russian military warehouse, the BBC reports.
“We condemn [North Korea’s] supply of this military equipment to Russia,” the US national security adviser, Paul Kirby, told reporters. “We will continue to monitor any new arms supplies to Russia.”
US claims North Korea supplied military equipment to Russia
The US has claimed that North Korea has delivered more than 1,000 containers of military equipment and munitions to Russia for its war in Ukraine.
Speculation about a possible North Korean plan to refill Russia’s munition stores drained in its protracted war with Ukraine flared last month, when the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un traveled to Russia to meet Vladimir Putin and visit key military sites, AP reports.
The White House national security council spokesperson John Kirby said the US believed Kim was seeking sophisticated Russian weapon technologies in return for the munitions to boost North Korea’s nuclear programme.
BREAKING: US says #NorthKorea sent 300 shipping containers full of munitions to #Russiavia rail
It comes after North Korea denounced a US aircraft carrier’s visit to South Korea on Friday, calling it a provocation that could bring “irrevocable, catastrophic circumstances.”
The nuclear-powered Ronald Reagan and its strike group arrived in the South Korean port of Busan on Thursday for a five-day visit, after joint exercises in nearby waters.
AFP has this dispatch from the town of Chasiv Yar, close to the eastern Ukraine frontline near Bakhmut.
Ukrainian artillery as well as incoming fire from Russians constantly sounded in and around this strategic town. “The hardest thing about our work is risking your life,” said chief inspector Dmytro Kuzmenko, who has the rank of major. “Last year I was wounded near the police station in Bakhmut. I have three shrapnel wounds from shelling.”
There are only 600 people, all adults, still living among the ruins of Chasiv Yar, out of a pre-war population of 12,000. He was glad that “people have shown some common sense and got their children out”, he said. In other places devastated by the war, some families had insisted on staying.
Evacuating children from areas under fire was “painstaking and difficult work”, he said. It involved “complex measures, which luckily proved effective here”, he said. “But that is not the case everywhere.”
Those still living in Chasiv Yar are mainly older people who “have nowhere to go”, said Kemran Azermanov, deputy chief of the Bakhmut district police department. They “know it will be difficult to start everything over in a different city or region at their age”, he added. Yet those who stay face enormous hardships.
“There is no electricity, no phone network, no water,” said Azermanov. “During winter it will be a bit difficult.”
A Ukrainian police officer walks next to 84-year-old Mykola pushing his bicycle in Chasiv Yar. Photograph: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images
The burned out Palace of Culture in Chasiv Yar. Photograph: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images
A residential building damaged by shelling in Chasiv Yar. Photograph: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images
The fate of anyone who returns to Russia from abroad depends on how they have behaved, Vladimir Putin said when asked about the future of Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman.
Fridman was reported to have returned to Russia this week for the first time since the start of the Ukraine conflict. The Russian senator Dmitry Rogozin has asked investigators to check reportsthat Fridman may have provided funding for Ukraine’s armed forces, reports Reuters. If someone has behaved immorally and returns, “they will feel it”, Putin told reporters.
One of Russia’s most prominent businessmen, Fridman and his partners made $14bn from the sale of the oil company TNK-BP to the state-controlled Rosneft in 2013. He subsequently moved to the UK. His lawyers claim his business has been destroyed by EU sanctions and he regards the war as a tragedy.
The EU says its evidence shows Fridman is a co-founder of Alfa Group, which controls Russia’s largest retailer and private bank, and has close ties to the Russian political regime, we reported earlier this year. It was these connections that allowed him “to acquire state property as a reward from Alfa Group for his loyalty to the political regime”, according to the EU.
Russia has hit six civilian ships, 150 port and grain facilities and destroyed more than 300,000 tonnes of grain since Moscow quit a deal allowing safe Black Sea exports of Ukrainian grain, the government in Kyiv said on Friday.
It said 21 vessels had already been loaded with grain for export and had used the “humanitarian” grain corridor in the Black Sea announced by Kyiv in August. It said 25 ships had entered Ukrainian ports for loading.
Earlier, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, vowed to increase the security of the corridor for grain exports during a visit to the port of Odesa.
Vladimir Putin also said Russia would continue to export large quantities of grain next year despite western sanctions, after a record harvest of 158m tons of arable crops last year.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, have vowed to improve Ukraine’s air defences and increase the security of a “humanitarian corridor” for grain exports during a visit to the Black Sea port of Odesa.
Zelenskiy said Kyiv was working to strengthen its position in the Black Sea so that it continue grain exports, which are vital to ensuring budget revenues after a surge in defence spending as a result of Russia’s invasion last year.
“Today we had a busy day in our beautiful city of Odesa, which was dedicated to global and security issues,” Zelenskiy told a joint press conference with Rutte. “We are working with partners to protect properly these corridors, and strengthen our positions in the Black Sea, and it also applies to the protection of Odesa’s skies and in the region as a whole.”
The Odesa region has came under frequent Russian missile and drone attacks, and Zelenskiy and Rutte visited a damaged port. In August, Ukraine announced a new humanitarian corridor in the Black Sea after Moscow’s withdrawal from a deal allowing the safe export of grain from Ukraine‘s Black Sea ports, reports Reuters.
It has sought safe shipping routes as airstrikes inflicted damage on its port and grain export infrastructure near the Black Sea and on the Danube River.
Zelenskiy described the airstrikes as “vile tactics” and thanked Rutte for a new air defence package which would include missiles for Patriot air defence systems.
Putin dismisses claims over mystery Baltic pipeline damage
Vladimir Putin has dismissed the idea that Russiadamaged a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia as “rubbish” and suggested such claims were made up to divert attention from what he said was a Western attack on Nord Stream.
Helsinki said this week that a subsea gas pipeline and a telecommunications cable connecting Nato members Finland and Estonia under the Baltic Sea had been damaged in what may have been a deliberate act.
Asked by reporters in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, about claims that Russia could have been involved, Putin said: “That is complete rubbish.” Until recently, Putin said, he had not even known such a pipeline existed as it was so small. He also suggested that it might have somehow been snagged by an anchor, some sort of hook or an earthquake, and suggested that Finland investigate, reports Reuters.
Putin said it was clear that suggestions that Russia was involved were “done only to distract attention from the terrorist attack carried out by the West against Nord Stream”.
Russia says blasts on the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea in September 2022 were carried out by the US and Britain, without providing evidence. Washington and London have denied any involvement in what they - along with Sweden, Denmark and Germany - have called an act of sabotage.
Leading US newspapers have reported that the US Central Intelligence Agency knew of a Ukrainian plot to attack the pipelines. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has denied Ukraine attacked them.
In a February blog post, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh cited an unidentified source as saying that US navy divers had destroyed the pipelines with explosives on the orders of president Joe Biden.
Huge fiscal spending on the military is fuelling short-term economic growth in Russia, but looking at the longer term picture the outlook is “dim”, the International Monetary Fund’s European director Alfred Kammer has said.
The IMF said this week that significant spending and resilient consumption in a tight labour market would support gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 2.2% this year in Russia, but it lowered its forecast for 2024 growth to just 1.1%.
“We are seeing a considerable fiscal impulse in Russia from ramping up spending related to the war,” Kammer told a press conference at the IMF meeting in Marrakesh. “That is really a short-term impact you are going to see of fuelling growth in the economy.”
“When we look at the longer-term picture on Russia, the outlook is dim because [of)]sanctions, because the reduction of [the] technology transfer will hurt the productive capacity and productivity growth in the medium term.”
Russia is throwing resources at its military, with draft budget plans showing defence spending will account for almost one third of all expenditure next year, as Moscow diverts funds from schools and hospitals to finance its “special military operation” in Ukraine, reports Reuters.
Journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, who fell ill in France where she lives in exile after protesting the offensive in Ukraine on Russian state TV, said tests had not revealed poisoning, AFP reports.
Several Kremlin critics have reported being poisoned, and on Thursday French prosecutors opened an investigation into suspected poisoning after Ovsyannikova felt unwell.
She posted on Telegram:
I’m feeling much better now.
Most of the test results are back. There are no toxic substances in the blood. We’re not talking about poisoning.
No white powder had been found, she added, contrary to what was first reported.
Posting from what appeared to be her hospital bed, she said:
The deterioration of my condition was so sudden that the French police decided to investigate.
Former Russian state TV journalist Marina Ovsyannikova now lives in Paris. Photograph: Christophe Ena/AP
She said prosecutors opening an investigation was “not surprising, since Putin’s Russia has long been associated with war and the poisoning of politicians and journalists”.
Ovsyannikova, who fled Russia last autumn, had held up a protest placard during the main evening news programme on Russia’s Channel One in March 2022.
In her absence, a Russian court sentenced her to more than eight years in prison this month for a separate protest she made outside the Kremlin four months later.
Several high-profile opposition politicians have said they were poisoned for political reasons, including Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Here are some of the latest images coming from Ukraine.
People look at images of Kyiv residents who have died since Russia invaded Ukraine last year. Photograph: Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA
A stray dog sits while residents and Ukrainian soldiers walk on a street in the frontline town of Chasiv Yar, in the Donetsk region. Explosions are near-constant in the small town, whose buildings are scored with holes from shelling. Photograph: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images
Rescuers work at the site of an administrative building damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Pokrovsk. Photograph: State Emergency Service Of Ukraine/Reuters
Relatives and friends attend the funeral for victims of a Russian missile attack on a cafe in the village of Hroza, near Kharkiv, Ukraine. Photograph: Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Local resident Anatolii, 84, walks in front of a heated "invincibility point" where people can get food and recharge their devices in the frontline town of Chasiv Yar. Photograph: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images
EU leaders meeting later in October will demand “decisive progress” on using Russian assets frozen by sanctions to help Ukraine, according to their draft statement.
The US and Britain last month signalled support for an EU plan to tax windfall profits generated by frozen Russian sovereign assets to finance Ukraine as Kyiv battles a full-scale Russian invasion that started in February 2022.
Earlier, we reported the UK government has requested the Bank of England look how Russian sovereign assets could be used to fund Ukraine’s war effort.
Finance ministers of the G7 have estimated $280 billion worth of such assets had been frozen, and expected more work in the coming months to find legally sound ways of using them to aid Ukraine, reports Reuters.
The EU’s own work among its 27 member states on harnessing frozen Russian state assets for Ukraine has been repeatedly delayed due to legal concerns, among others, after the bloc’s sanctions on private Russian wealth were challenged in courts.
Belgium, an EU country but not a G7 member, said earlier this week it would spend 2.3 billion euros on supporting Ukraine that it expects to collect in 2023-24 taxes on Russian central bank assets immobilised on its soil.
