Horrific video shows Ukrainians hit by Russian missile
Graphic video has surfaced that shows the moment a Russian military strike hit in Irpin, Ukraine, a town on the western outskirts of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. CNN's Pamela Brown has more.
Archive link is broken, and that's the second time archive.md absolutely refused to archive this properly, so here's an archive by WaybackMachine:
U.S. gasoline prices soar to highest since 2008 on Russia conflict -AAA
U.S. gasoline prices at the pump jumped 11% over the past week to the highest since late July 2008 as global sanctions cripple Russia's ability to export crude oil after its invasion of Ukraine, automobile club AAA said on Sunday.
AAA said average U.S. regular grade gasoline prices hit $4.009 per gallon on Sunday, up 11% from $3.604 a week ago and up 45% from $2.760 a year ago.
The automobile club, which has data going back to 2000, said U.S. retail gasoline prices hit a record $4.114 a gallon on July 17, 2008, which was around the same time U.S. crude futures soared to a record $147.27 a barrel.
The most expensive gas in the country is in California at $5.288 a gallon, followed by Hawaii ($4.695), Nevada ($4.526) and Oregon ($4.466), according to AAA.
U.S. gasoline futures , meanwhile, soared to a record $3.890 per gallon on Sunday.
Gasoline price provider GasBuddy said the average price of U.S. gasoline spiked nearly 41 cents per gallon, topping $4 for the first time in almost 14 years, and stands just 10 cents below the all-time record of $4.103 per gallon.
GasBuddy said that weekly increase was the second largest ever, following a jump of 49 cents per gallon during the week of Sept. 3, 2005, after Hurricane Katrina tore through the U.S. Gulf Coast.
"Increasing oil prices continue to play a leading role in pushing prices higher," AAA said in a release, noting "pump prices will likely continue to rise as crude prices continue to climb."
U.S. crude futures soared more than 12% to $130.50 per barrel late Sunday, their highest since July 2008, as the United States and its European allies consider banning imports of Russian oil.
China Says Russia Friendship "Rock Solid", Ready For Ukraine Mediation
"The friendship between the two peoples is rock-solid, and both sides' future cooperation prospects are very vast," said China's Foreign Minister.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi Monday stressed that
the friendship between Beijing and Moscow was still very strong, despite international condemnation of Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, as he said China was open to helping mediate peace.
Beijing has walked a tight diplomatic tightrope throughout the crisis, refusing to condemn its close ally Moscow after only last month touting a "no limits" strategic partnership between the two countries.
"The friendship between the two peoples is rock-solid, and both sides' future cooperation prospects are very vast," said Wang at an annual press briefing.
But he said China was "willing to work with the international community to carry out necessary mediation, when necessary".
The European Union's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said last week that China should mediate future peace talks between Russia and Ukraine as Western powers cannot fulfil the role, in an interview with Spanish daily El Mundo.
Beijing has repeatedly said it would play a "constructive role in calling for negotiations" to resolve the crisis, but has not previously committed to joining or hosting any peace talks.
Wang also said China would send humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
He also described the China-Russia relationship as "the world's most crucial bilateral relationship", which "is conducive to world peace, stability and development".
The foreign minister referred to last month's partnership commitment as "clearly and unmistakably showing the world" that both countries "jointly oppose the revival of the Cold War mentality and stoking ideological confrontations".
Wang also said the informal alliance would "not brook interference by third parties", in a warning to the United States and its Western allies who in recent days have lobbied China to play a more active role in mediating the conflict.
Because Russia is recruiting Syrians, I feel like update on them fits this thread:
Syria says two civilians killed in Israeli airstrikes near Damascus
State media claims its air defenses shot down most missiles, but damage also caused to sites; reported attack marks first since Russia's invasion of Ukraine
Israel struck several sites near Damascus early Monday, killing two civilians and causing material damage, Syrian state TV reported.
The 5 a.m. strike marked the first since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett flew to Moscow for a surprise meeting he said was intended to help broker a ceasefire.
Russia is allied with Syria’s regime and allows Israel to carry out operations against targets in the country. Israel’s attempts at neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have been described as necessary to safeguard its relatively unfettered access to Syria’s skies.
Monday’s report from Syria’s SANA news agency, citing a military official, said the Israeli jets launched their missiles from over neighboring Lebanon, near Beirut.
The official said most of the incoming missiles were intercepted by Syrian air defenses, an often-heard claim that can rarely be independently verified.
It added that two civilians were killed and that the strikes caused material damage to the sites near the capital. It did not say how the civilians were killed and gave no further details.
As a rule, Israel’s military does not comment on specific strikes in Syria, but has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country.
Israel last struck in Syria on February 24, mere hours before Moscow launched its assault on Ukraine.
Three Syrian soldiers were killed in that strike, Damascus said.
Bennett has
refrained from antagonizing Russia by refusing to condemn Moscow by name and resisting Ukrainian pleas for arms or defensive equipment. Bennett has described the strategy as necessary to keep Israel as a neutral broker, while expressing sympathy for Ukraine and sending humanitarian aid. Other officials have noted that Israel’s national security depends on being able to continue hitting Iran-backed forces in Syria.
Israel has acknowledged that it targets the bases of Iranian forces and Iran-allied terror groups, particularly along the Golan border, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has fighters deployed in southern Syria. It says it also attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for those groups.
Last month Israel also allegedly fired surface-to-surface missiles at an
observation post and “finance building” near the border town of Quneitra on the Syrian Golan Heights.
Russia obstructs Iran nuclear deal as the Kremlin frets over its oil income
Moscow makes last-minute demands as Tehran promises to boost oil production and market shuns Russian crude
Moscow is throwing up last-minute demands that could scupper an international nuclear deal with Iran — and the timing is unlikely to be coincidental as the Kremlin frets about the growing threat to its critical oil revenue after its invasion of Ukraine.
Hopes had been high that international negotiators from the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council, Germany and the EU would be able to secure a deal with Tehran on Saturday to put strict limits on Iran’s atomic work in exchange for sanctions relief for the Islamic Republic.
Such a deal would bring significant volumes of Iranian crude oil back to global energy markets in the months ahead, and that could spell trouble for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The return of Iranian supplies would help offset market turmoil and price spikes if the West were to ramp up its sanctions against Moscow over the war in Ukraine and ban Russian crude sales.
Oil sales are critical to Russia’s budget. Although Western countries have not yet directly targeted oil and gas, they have said they are prepared to do so and many oil traders have already started imposing an effective embargo.
At the Iran talks, Russia is demanding guarantees from the U.S. that the sanctions targeting the Kremlin over its invasion of Ukraine would not hinder its trade with Iran.
This fresh demand, which one Western senior official called a potential “trap,” could up-end negotiations aimed at securing a return to a 2015 accord on Iran’s atomic work. It has created yet another twist in a long-running saga that has seen the nuclear talks nearly fall apart over and over.
Russia would play an important role in implementing a renewed Iran agreement, which negotiators say they are close to achieving after 11 months of talks. The plan would be for Moscow to ship excess enriched uranium out of Iran to Russia and support the conversion of Iran’s Fordow nuclear plant into a research facility, among other things.
But with the international community moving to economically sever ties with Russia following its assault on Ukraine, Moscow says it wants assurances that it will still be able to benefit from a revived Iran accord. “We have asked for a written guarantee … that the current process triggered by the United States does not in any way damage our right to free and full trade, economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation with the Islamic Republic,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Saturday.
Key role
The question is whether Moscow is actually demanding protection from sanctions in order to fulfill its key role in implementing a restored nuclear deal, or if it’s a ploy to demand broader sanctions relief, officials said. Western officials appeared to still be scrambling to understand which one of the two scenarios was at play.
“If they stretch the domain of sanctions exceptions, we will get a political and not a technical problem, and that could be lethal for the agreement,” the senior official said.
Another senior Western official said that if Russia’s demands went beyond sanctions waivers to fulfill the role in implementing a restored nuclear deal, they could potentially “take hostage the entire agreement and put at risk their relationship with China.” Beijing is already importing significant amounts of Iranian oil and will do even more so under a restored nuclear accord.
The U.S. State Department said sanctions over Ukraine are “unrelated” to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran deal is formally known. “The new Russia-related sanctions are unrelated to the JCPOA and should not have any impact on its potential implementation,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson said. “We continue to engage with Russia on a return to full implementation of the JCPOA. Russia shares a common interest in ensuring Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon. ”
The threat of additional Ukraine-related sanctions already is having an impact on Russian’s oil revenue. Almost three-quarters of Russian
crude trade is frozen in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, Bloomberg reported, citing consultant Energy Aspects. Russia has been exporting about 5 million barrels a day, equal to about 5 percent of global consumption, it said. Iran, meanwhile, has ambitions of supplying well over 2 million barrels per day.
“It’s hard to say whether this is a technical hiccup or a political pivot,” said Ali Vaez, Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group. “The JCPOA’s collapse is not in Russia’s medium to long-term interest, even if in the short-run it might help keep the global energy prices up as a means of imposing pressure on the West,” Vaez said.
“As soon as nuclear negotiations in Vienna are concluded, we can reach our maximum oil production capacity in less than one or two months,” Iran’s oil minister, Javad Owji, said on Thursday, according to a Reuters report citing SHANA, the official oil ministry news agency. Iran produced 2.4 million barrels per day on average in 2021, and plans to increase that to 3.8 million barrels if restrictions are lifted.
Europe and the U.S. were beginning to worry about soaring oil prices as a result of Russia’s incursion against Ukraine. Iran analyst Henry Rome at the Eurasia Group argues that “the war puts intense pressure on Western policymakers to secure a deal that brings more Iranian oil onto the market to temper high oil prices and potential further sanctions and disruptions.” The calculation is that a revived Iran deal could help to stabilize the energy market, analysts say.
In recent days, Western officials have said negotiators were within reach of an agreement, insisting only a few outstanding issues needed to be resolved. Among the outstanding issues are the scope of sanctions relief, including Iran’s demand that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps be taken off Washington’s terror sanctions list.
“We are very close to an agreement,” said British chief negotiator Stephanie Al-Qaq on Twitter before departing to London for what appeared to be final consultations. “Now we have to take a few final steps.”
Meeting postponed
Negotiations had advanced to such a stage that preparations to close the deal were even visible outside Palais Coburg, the main venue of the talks in Vienna. Police have begun to erect additional barricades around the luxury hotel in preparation for a meeting of ministers from Russia, China, Iran, Britain, Germany and France. Invitations were even sent out more than a week ago in anticipation of a formal adoption of a restored deal at ministerial level; that meeting is now postponed.
Western negotiators have warned over the past few months that Iran was only weeks away from having enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon. They argued that time was running out for a successful conclusion of the talks as Iran’s nuclear advances were eroding the very basis of the JCPOA.
Underscoring this point, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in its latest confidential quarterly report circulated on March 3 to member states and seen by POLITICO, that Iran had doubled its amount of 60 percent enriched material. That’s “a hair’s breadth away” from weapons grade, Eurasia Group’s Rome wrote in a note.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine also loomed large over the final days of the negotiations with officials emphasizing the need to quickly seal the deal as they were beginning to scramble with the fallout of this aggression on European territory.
While diplomats were able to shield the sensitive talks from global developments during the past eleven months, the recent scale of the Russian aggression in Ukraine made close interaction between Russia’s chief negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov and U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley more difficult by the hour.
Meanwhile, Iran agreed to provide the IAEA with documents that will answer questions into its past nuclear weapons program, potentially removing a major hurdle for the restoration of the nuclear deal. That agreement was reached on Saturday during a visit by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi to Tehran.
In a
joint statement, Grossi and Iran’s nuclear chief Mohammad Eslami said they agreed to “accelerate and strengthen their cooperation and dialogue aimed at the resolution of the issues” with the aim of concluding the probe by June, when Grossi will report to the IAEA Board of Governors.
Iran had demanded that the probe into the past nuclear weapons program be closed once and for all as a precondition for Tehran returning to the 2015 nuclear deal. The investigation by the UN nuclear watchdog looks into the origin of decades-old uranium traces found by IAEA inspectors inside Iran at several undeclared sites in 2019 and 2020.
Upon his return from Tehran on Saturday evening, Grossi told reporters at Vienna airport that “there is no artificial deadline, there is no pre-defined outcome,” highlighting that the IAEA would continue to press Iran on those questions also beyond the June deadline should Tehran’s answers be inconclusive.
The IAEA has thought for some time that the undeclared sites could have been active in the early 2000s and insisted that it needed credible answers from Iran on the origin of the traces. The traces were found by inspectors on the ground after the IAEA reviewed intelligence material stolen by Israeli Mossad agents in a high-risk operation inside Iran in 2018.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was originally agreed upon in Vienna in 2015 by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China – plus Germany. The European Union acted as mediator and coordinator of the talks.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018 and re-imposed nuclear-related sanctions along with new ones related to terrorism and human-rights abuses. In response, Iran began to incrementally ramp up its nuclear program beyond the limits of the JCPOA. Iran insists that its nuclear program is entirely for peaceful purposes.
Iran criticises Russian 'interference' in nuclear talks -Tasnim agency
Iranian officials criticised Russian "interference" in the final stages of talks aimed at reviving Tehran's nuclear deal with major powers, Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.
Talks to revive the 2015 pact have been mired in uncertainty following Russia's demands for a U.S. guarantee that the sanctions it faces over the Ukraine conflict would not hurt its trade with Iran.
Moscow raised the potential stumbling block on Saturday, just as months of indirect talks between Tehran and Washington in Vienna appeared to be headed for agreement.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia wanted a written U.S. guarantee that Russia's trade, investment and military-technical cooperation with Iran would not be hindered in any way by the sanctions.
Tasnim cited Iranian officials on Monday saying the Russian demands were aimed at securing its interests in other areas and were "not constructive".
By postponing the revival of the agreement and delaying Iran's return to the oil market, Russia was seeking to raise crude prices and increase its own energy revenue, the news agency said, without citing a source for that assessment.
Iran's top security official Ali Shamkhani said on Monday negotiators were evaluating new components that had affected the talks in Vienna. Shamkhani said on Twitter Iran was adapting initiatives to accelerate an agreement.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to dispel talk of obstacles to the nuclear deal, saying on Sunday that the sanctions imposed on Russia over Ukraine had nothing to do with it.
The 2015 deal between Iran and the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China, eased sanctions on Tehran in return for limiting Iran's enrichment of uranium, making it harder for Tehran to develop material for nuclear weapons.
The accord fell apart after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States in 2018.
Russia's concerns about the impact of Western sanctions on its dealings with Iran follow a push by senior Iranian officials for deeper ties with Russia since the election of Iran's hardline president Ebrahim Raisi last year.
Iran's top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, has been calling for closer ties with Russia due to his deep mistrust of the United States.
France warns Russia against blackmail over Iran nuclear talks
France warned Russia not to resort to blackmail over efforts to revive a nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, after Moscow demanded a U.S. guarantee that sanctions it faces over Ukraine would not hurt its trade with Tehran.
Russia raised the potential stumbling block on Saturday, just as months of indirect talks between Tehran and Washington in Vienna over reviving the pact struck in 2015 appeared headed for agreement.
In Tehran, a foreign ministry spokesperson said Iran was awaiting an explanation of the Russian demand via "diplomatic channels", adding however that the talks should not be affected by sanctions imposed on Moscow, whose contribution to negotiations so far had been constructive.
read more
On Saturday, a senior Iranian official speaking to Reuters had called Russia's move unconstructive.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that Russia wanted a written U.S. guarantee that Moscow's trade, investment and military-technical cooperation with Iran would not be hindered by Western sanctions imposed since Russia invaded its neighbour.
A French presidency official told reporters late on Sunday that diplomats tended to treat each issue on its merits and not conflating them.
"Because otherwise, in reality, it's just blackmail and not diplomacy," he told reporters.
All parties involved in the talks say progress has been made toward the restoration of the pact to curb Tehran’s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief, which the United States abandoned in 2018. But both Tehran and Washington have said there are still some significant differences to overcome.
Western officials say there is common interest in avoiding a non-proliferation crisis, and they are trying to ascertain if what Russia is demanding regards only its commitments to the Iran deal. That would be manageable, but anything beyond that would be problematic, they say.
However, diplomats told Reuters that at least two key issues remained unresolved between Tehran and Washington, including the extent to which sanctions would be rolled back.
Iran's top security official, Ali Shamkhani, called on Washington on Monday to make political decisions.
read more
"Priority of Iranian negotiators is to resolve remaining issues that are considered (a)... red line. Rapid access to a strong deal requires new initiatives from all parties," Shamkhani tweeted on Monday.
'TRYING IT ON'
The French presidency official urged Russia to assess what was at stake in Vienna, "that is to say Iran's return to respecting its obligations under the JCPOA," referring to the 2015 deal by its formal name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
A European diplomat added: "The Russians are really trying it on and the Iranians aren’t happy although of course not saying too much publicly. We’re trying to find a way through."
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought on Sunday to dispel talk of obstacles, saying the sanctions imposed on Russia over Ukraine had nothing to do with the nuclear deal.
"I believe it's not for communication with journalists at this stage, sorry to say," Russia's chief negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov said when asked to clarify Moscow’s position on Monday.
European negotiators have temporarily left the talks as they believe they have gone as far as they can and it is now up to the two main protagonists to agree, three diplomats said.
Russia's concerns about the impact of Western sanctions on its dealings with Iran follow a push by senior Iranian officials for deeper ties with Russia since the election of Iran's hardline president Ebrahim Raisi last year.
Iran's top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, has been calling for closer ties with Russia due to his deep mistrust of the United States.
"BREAKING
Gold price nears $2,000"
