Global Courant
Here is the situation on Monday, September 25, 2023.
To fight
At least three people were killed and eight injured after Russian shelling and airstrikes on the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson. The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia also attacked the Black Sea region of Odesa and other regions in southern Ukraine. A second shipment of Ukrainian wheat reached Turkey via the Black Sea, according to maritime traffic monitoring sites, despite Russian threats to attack boats going to or from Ukraine after its withdrawal in July from the United Nations-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative. Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-installed head of Ukraine’s Russian-annexed Donetsk region, has imposed a curfew from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. from Monday to Friday. The decree bans any form of public gathering or mass event without official military approval and includes “military censorship of mail and messages sent through telecommunications systems, as well as monitoring of telephone conversations.”
Diplomacy
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Ukraine’s proposed peace plan and the latest UN proposals to revive the Black Sea grain deal were “not realistic.” Polish President Andrzej Duda said Poland remains ready to help Ukrainian grain reach countries outside Europe, despite an ongoing dispute over access to the Polish market. Duda said special transport corridors could be used to transport grain from neighboring Ukraine to ports. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he met leading American entrepreneurs and financiers during his visit to the United States. Zelenskyy said the businessmen, including Michael Bloomberg, Larry Fink and Bill Ackman, were ready to make significant investments in Ukraine’s reconstruction. Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza has been transferred to a high-security prison in Siberia and placed in a small “punishment cell,” his lawyer said. The 42-year-old was convicted of treason for publicly condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Weapons
Pope Francis suggested that some countries were “playing games” with Ukraine by first supplying weapons and then considering withdrawing from their obligations. “A process is starting in which the martyr will certainly be the Ukrainian people and that is something ugly,” the pope told reporters on his way back from a visit to Marseille.
