Live: Ukraine’s Zelensky calls prison strike ‘deliberate Russian war crime’

Issued on: 30/07/2022 – 07:23

5:35am: Russia intends to dissolve Ukraine from world map, says UN envoy to UN

The US ambassador to the United Nations said Friday there should no longer be any doubt that Russia intends to dismantle Ukraine “and dissolve it from the world map entirely.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the UN Security Council that the United States is seeing growing signs that Russia is laying the groundwork to attempt to annex all of the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, including by installing “illegitimate proxy officials in Russian-held areas, with the goal of holding sham referenda or decree to join Russia.”

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov “has even stated that this is Russia’s war aim,” she said. Lavrov told an Arab summit in Cairo on Sunday that Moscow’s overarching goal in Ukraine is to free its people from its “unacceptable regime.”

12:35am: Ukraine’s Zelensky calls prison strike ‘deliberate Russian war crime’

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday the shelling of a prison in the separatist-controlled east holding Ukrainian servicemen was a “deliberate Russian war crime” that had claimed more than 50 lives.

“Today I received information about the attack by the occupiers on Olenivka (the prison’s location), in the Donetsk region. It is a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war. More than 50 dead,” he said in his daily address.

Russia and Moscow-backed separatists had earlier on Friday accused Kyiv’s forces of striking the jail, saying dozens of people died and scores were wounded. Ukraine denied targeting civilian infrastructure or prisoners of war.

Russian television showed what appeared to be destroyed barracks and tangled metal beds. It also showed blurred images of what looked like human bodies.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP and REUTERS)