A kyiv court reduced the life sentence handed down to a Russian soldier last May to 15 years in prison. The 21-year-old sergeant had admitted to shooting a 62-year-old man in the northeast of the country at the end of February. Ukrainian prisoners captured in Mariupol were not entitled to the same leniency. The building where they were being held was bombed on Friday, killing more than 50 of them.
The Russian gas giant Gazprom announced on Saturday that it had stopped its gas deliveries to Latvia. “Today, Gazprom suspended gas deliveries to Latvia, due to violation of gas offtake conditions,” the Russian company said in a statement posted on Telegram, without further details.
The announcement comes as Gazprom drastically reduced deliveries of Russian gas to Europe via the Nord Stream pipeline this week, citing the need for turbine maintenance as European countries scramble to fill their reserves. for winter. Westerners accuse Moscow of using the energy weapon in retaliation for the sanctions adopted after the offensive against Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday called the bombing of Olevnika prison in eastern Ukraine a “deliberate Russian war crime”, after Moscow blamed Ukrainian forces for it. . More than 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war are said to have died, including defenders of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol. In a press release, the head of diplomacy of the European Union, Josep Borell, condemned this attack and referred to “serious cracks in the Geneva Convention”, before specifying that the European Union will actively support “all measures aimed at to hold those responsible for the violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed during the Russian aggression in Ukraine to account”.
Another Russian strike reported on Friday killed at least five people waiting for a bus in the southeastern Mykolaiv region. In the Donetsk region, eight people have died in the past 24 hours, according to Ukrainian authorities. For its part, the Ukrainian army destroyed the station of Bryvlika, a village located in the occupied region of Kherson, where the Ukrainians launched a counter-offensive in order to complicate supplies for the Russian forces, local MP Serguiï Khlan said. .
The Ukrainian president visited the port of Chornomosk, on the Black Sea, on Friday to supervise a first load of cereals on a Turkish ship. On July 22, Russians and Ukrainians reached an agreement to export grain blocked in Ukrainian ports occupied by the Russians. “We are fully prepared. We have sent all the signals to our partners, to the UN and to Turkey, and our military guarantees the security situation”, declared Volodymyr Zelensky, who is only waiting for a “signal” to begin. According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Infrastructure, 17 ships have already been loaded with grain in Chornomorsk and Odessa, and ten are ready to leave.
Still on the diplomatic front, the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, described as “frank and direct” the discussion he had with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. In particular, he told Moscow that the world would never recognize “the annexation of Ukrainian territories by Russia” and condemned the “rigged referendums” that Moscow wants to organize.
The two men also discussed the release of prisoners, with Washington indicating that it had made a proposal several weeks ago to secure the release of basketball player Brittney Griner and former Marine Paul Whelan, held in Russia, without disclosing the details. consideration for these releases. It could be an exchange for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms trafficker imprisoned in the United States and whose release the Kremlin is calling for. On this point, Sergei Lavrov declared, in a press release issued by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that Russia would like the communication around the exchange of prisoners to be done in a more discreet way.
