This happened last night: ‘Russia shoots UN boss in the back’ and British and American are killed at the front

The Ukrainian capital was hit by five rockets just as Ukrainian President Zelensky concluded his talks with UN chief António Guterres. A rocket reportedly hit a residential area less than a kilometer from where the two were together. It is not clear whether this was a possible attack on the Ukrainian president. According to Oleksiy Arestovych, a Ukrainian government adviser, it was all close and Guterres had been “shot in the back by Russia”. Earlier this week, the UN chief sat at the long table with President Putin in the Kremlin. “For a cruise missile, the distance between the point of impact and Guterres’ location is about the same as two millimeters for a gun. So the shot just missed his temple,” said Arestovych.

US Defense spokesman John Kirby told CNN he would analyze exactly what happened, but “at the moment we don’t have a clear picture of what exactly was affected”. In his belated video address, President Zelensky reported that the Russians had also simultaneously attacked Odessa and other Ukrainian cities with missiles. According to him, this showed that “we cannot relax yet and we should not think that the war is over”. Russia declined to comment on the high-profile missile strikes on Kiev. The Ministry of Defense in Moscow reported that the air force hit dozens of military targets in Ukraine on Thursday. According to Ukraine, a military hospital near besieged Mariupol was also on the Russian list. There would have been a death.

In a report in Time magazine, Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky speaks extensively about his experiences during the war in his country. He tells, among other things, how the Ukrainian army warned him in the first days of the war about Russian paratroopers who landed in Kiev and tried to overpower him. Earlier this month, Time reporter Simon Shuster spent two weeks in the bunker in the Ukrainian capital from which Zelensky operates. “Russian troops arrived just minutes away from Zelensky at the start of the war,” Shuster was told by a senior presidential adviser there. Russian gunfire could have been heard as far as the president’s office.

For the first time since the start of the war, a British citizen has been killed on the battlefield in Ukraine. The British channel Sky News reports that it is 36-year-old war veteran Scott Sibley, who is said to have left for Ukraine as a volunteer to fight against the Russians. A second British soldier is missing. A 22-year-old American, Willy Joseph, who worked for an American mercenary organization was also killed, his mother heard yesterday. The Ukrainian authorities estimate that some 20,000 foreign fighters have joined the army of the beleaguered country, among them many Americans, British and also other Europeans, but especially Georgians and Belarusians. Foreigners, including Syrians, are also fighting on the Russian side.

The United Kingdom will send 8,000 troops to Eastern Europe in the coming months to participate in military exercises. According to British media, it is one of the largest commitments made by the British army since the Cold War. The exercises will take place this summer in an area stretching from North Macedonia to Finland. The British will train together with tens of thousands of troops from NATO and the Joint Expeditionary Force (JET), which also includes Finland and Sweden. British Lieutenant General Ralph Wooddisse called the deployment “an important contribution by the United Kingdom to defending Europe and deterring the Russian aggressor”. He finds the exercises of “fundamental importance”.

US President Joe Biden asked Congress on Thursday for an additional $33 billion (€31.4 billion) to support Ukraine in the fight against Russian invasion forces in the south and east. That is a multiple of the amount that the US has already made available so far. By far the largest part, about 20 billion dollars, is directly intended for military purposes. In addition, 8.5 billion is earmarked for economic aid and 3 billion for humanitarian aid.

Ukraine and Bulgaria have agreed on close military and economic cooperation. Ukrainian President Zelensky announced this after a meeting with Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov. In Bulgaria, damaged Ukrainian military equipment must be repaired, among other things.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accuses Russian President Vladimir Putin of wanting to destroy democratic forms of government. “His war is against everything that constitutes democracy: freedom, equality before the law, self-determination, human dignity,” Scholz wrote in a guest article for the German channel ‘Welt’.