Day 422 since the beginning of the war: The nuclear authority IAEA is concerned about fighting near the nuclear power plant. Ukraine is building new brigades for the front. All information in the blog.
The most important things at a glance
Belgorod: Apartments evacuated after alleged explosive find
Moscow: Germany expels “masses” Russian diplomats
1:51 p.m.: According to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, Germany has decided on a “mass” expulsion of Russian diplomats. Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday in Moscow. She announced countermeasures. Accordingly, German diplomats should also be expelled from Russia. It was unclear whether the Russian representatives were still being expelled or had already left the country.
There will be a significant limit to the maximum number of employees at German diplomatic missions in Russia, Zakharova said. The German ambassador in Moscow was informed about this earlier this month.
In the course of their serious tensions in the past, Germany and Russia have repeatedly expelled each other’s diplomats. The representations have already been thinned out. The situation had deteriorated significantly with the start of the Russian war against Ukraine.
Experts: Russia disagrees on justification for war
11 clock: Russia is struggling to uphold one of its key justifications for waging aggressive war against Ukraine, Britain said. The Russian state is struggling for consistency in its core narrative that the invasion of Ukraine parallels the Soviet experience of World War II, the British Ministry of Defense said on Twitter on Saturday. Contrary to the Kremlin’s portrayal that Russia wants to “denazify” Ukraine, the head of Wagner’s private army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, recently publicly questioned whether there really were “Nazis” in Ukraine.
Russian authorities, meanwhile, continue to try to unite the public in their country around polarizing myths about the 1940s, the British wrote. In mid-April, the state news agency Ria Nowosti reported “unique” documents from the archives of the domestic secret service FSB, according to which the Nazis were involved in the murder of 22,000 Poles in the Katyn massacre in 1940. In reality, the secret service’s predecessor authority, the NKVD, was responsible for this. In 2010, the Russian State Duma officially condemned Soviet dictator Josef Stalin for ordering the murders.
The alleged liberation of Ukraine from “fascists” and “Nazis” is one of Russia’s main declarations of war. Moscow claims that the government in Kiev is run by “Nazis”.
The night at a glance
Ukraine: 500 fallen soldiers recovered at the front
4.55 a.m.: Search teams from the Ukrainian military have said they have recovered almost 500 bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers since the war began, according to Colonel of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Volodymyr Lyamzin. A total of 600 villages were searched at the front, the Ukrainian state news agency Ukrinform reported. More than 7,000 Ukrainian soldiers are still missing. Oleh Kotenko, Ukraine’s missing persons commissioner, estimates that two-thirds are in captivity.
International Atomic Energy Agency worried about fighting near nuclear power plant
1.21 am: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has warned of a nuclear accident due to the increasing hostilities around the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine. “I saw clear signs of military preparations in the area when I visited the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant three weeks ago,” IAEA Director Rafael Grossi said on Friday, according to a statement from the agency. Since then, the nuclear experts stationed on site have repeatedly registered explosions in the immediate vicinity of the plant, the Argentine added.
