The conflict in Ukraine enters its third week with a warning as extreme as it is disturbing: that of the White House, according to which the risk that Russia “uses chemical weapons” in Ukraine cannot be ruled out. In a Twitter post in which he dismissed the Russian Foreign Ministry’s claims that the US is developing chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine on the border with Russia as “falsehood”, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki indeed stressed that “all we should be alert to Russia’s use of chemical weapons or expect Moscow to use them to create a pretext, that’s a clear pattern. “
The Lavrov-Kuleba meeting
But attempts to bring the conflict back to diplomacy and negotiation continue. Today it is the turn of the meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Serghei Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmitry Kuleba on the sidelines of the Diplomacy Forum in Antalya, Turkey: it is the first face to face between the two since the beginning of the conflict and it was strongly desired – and woven – by the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who tries the role of mediator, to the point that a telephone call between him and the President of the United States Joe Biden is already scheduled, in the early afternoon Italian time.
Zelensky: “Bombs on the war crime hospital”
However, Ukraine continues to burn and after the bombing of the children’s hospital in Mariupol, President Volodymyr Zelensky screams in his anger again: “It’s a war crime”, he says, “it is definitive proof that the genocide of Ukrainians ». Then he once again turns to the Europeans and warns: “You can’t say you didn’t see what happened to the Ukrainians, what happened to the residents of Mariupol.”
Sumy bombed: a 13-year-old and two women die
The bombs have also fallen last night, with Russian planes carrying out raids on north-east Ukraine, in particular on the city of Okhtyrka, in the Sumy region, where at least three dead, a 13-year-old and two women are counted. Thus Zelensky hopes in the humanitarian corridors, recalls that about 35 thousand civilians evacuated on Wednesday and hopes that the evacuation operations can continue within the day, with the opening of three other humanitarian corridors: from Mariupol, besieged for nine days, from Volnovakha in the southeast and from Izioum in the east.
Sony, Nintendo and Heineken are also out of Russia
Day after day, the list of companies that leave Russia in reaction to the military operation launched by Moscow in Ukraine now over two weeks ago is still growing and the latest marches in chronological order are very well known: the Japanese Sony and Nintendo, but also the Carlsberg and Heineken beers, up to the Caterpillar diggers. Finally, at the US Congress the House of Representatives adopted a new budget that includes a huge budget of nearly $ 14 billion for the Ukrainian crisis.