NAt least ten people have died after a Russian missile attack on a popular restaurant in the center of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. Among them are three children, the authorities said on Wednesday. 56 people were injured. The Colombian aid organization “Aguanta Ucraina” (roughly: “Stay strong, Ukraine”) announced on Wednesday that three of its representatives and the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina who was accompanying them were among the injured.
The major city of Kramatorsk is the provisional capital of the Kiev-controlled part of Donetsk Oblast. The Ukrainian secret service SBU arrested an employee of a local gas company on Wednesday. The man is suspected of having spied out the restaurant as a target the day before and having sent pictures of it to a Russian soldier. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack on Kramatorsk as another war crime in his video address on Tuesday evening.
Bern justifies rejection with neutrality
Meanwhile, the Presidents of Poland and Lithuania, Andrzej Duda and Gitanas Nauseda, arrived in Kiev on Wednesday. According to Nauseda, they want to talk about the dangerous situation surrounding the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. The agenda of the NATO summit in July and Ukraine’s accession negotiations to the EU are also to be discussed. Nauseda announced that his country had acquired two modernized units of the NASAMS air defense system for Kiev from Norway. The two batteries of surface-to-air missiles are due to arrive in Ukraine shortly.
According to Vilnius, the purchase contract with the Norwegian manufacturer of the weapon system was signed on Tuesday. The order is worth almost ten million euros. In addition, Lithuania will hand over ten more armored vehicles of the type M113 to Ukraine, it said. On the other hand, the government in Bern on Wednesday rejected the request of the Swiss armaments group Ruag, which wanted to sell 96 stored Leopard 1 battle tanks to Germany, from where they are to be passed on to Ukraine. According to the plans, the tanks were to be repaired in Germany.
The government justified this with neutrality and the War Material Act, according to which no war material may be supplied to countries involved in an armed conflict. The decision is still pending on another tank deal: it is about Leopard 2 main battle tanks that have been decommissioned by Switzerland. Rheinmetall wants to buy them back from Switzerland to replace tanks delivered to Ukraine in Germany. The Swiss government recommends the deal for acceptance.
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