US decision to supply Atacms missiles to Kyiv ‘just prolongs the agony’ for Ukraine, warns Putin Vladimir Putin has warned Washington’s decision to supply the long-range army tactical missile systems (Atacms), whose use Kyiv confirmed on Tuesday, “just prolongs the agony” for Ukraine, saying the US is wading deeper into the conflict. The Russian president, who was speaking earlier to journalists during a visit to China, was quoted by Reuters as saying: Firstly, this of course causes harm and creates an additional threat. Secondly, we will of course be able to repel these attacks. War is war. But most importantly, it fundamentally lacks the capacity to change the situation on the line of contact at all … This is another mistake by the United States … Putin added: A mistake of a larger scale, as yet invisible but still of great importance, is that the United States is becoming more and more personally drawn into this conflict. And let no one say that they have nothing to do with this. We believe they do. Ukraine had repeatedly asked Washington for the long-range missiles to help it attack and disrupt supply lines, airbases and rail networks in Russian-occupied territory. Several US media outlets reported that Ukraine had used the Atacms missiles in an overnight attack on Tuesday on two airbases in Russian-held territory. Without mentioning the US missiles, Ukrainian special forces said they had carried out an overnight operation named “Dragonfly” striking a military airfield in Berdiansk and another one in the Luhansk region and resulting in “significant losses” on the Russian side. Closing summary The images of EU member state Hungary’s prime minister shaking hands with Vladimir Putin were “very, very unpleasant” and defied logic given Budapest’s past history with Moscow, the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, said. Russian attacks overnight and on Wednesday killed at least seven civilians in Ukraine and damaged the power grid in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials said. The Russian president warned Washington’s decision to supply the long-range army tactical missile systems, whose use Kyiv confirmed on Tuesday, “just prolongs the agony” for Ukraine, saying the US is wading deeper into the conflict. The lower house of the Russian parliament has passed the second and third readings of a bill that revokes Russia’s ratification of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Both were passed unanimously by 415 votes to zero. Ukraine’s foreign ministry later condemned the steps taken, and urged the international community to respond to Moscow’s “provocations”. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, arrived in North Korea on Wednesday, Russian news agencies said, with a Kremlin spokesperson telling the Tass news agency that the two-day visit was expected to lay the groundwork for a future trip to the country by Putin. Russian state television has played footage of crowds greeting the country’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in the pouring rain in Pyongyang, alongside a welcoming party waving pompoms (see earlier post at 13.05). Shortly after arriving in Pyongyang, Lavrov said his visit was an opportunity to discuss implementing the agreements that Putin and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, had signed when they met at Russia’s Vostochny cosmodrome in September. Lavrov hailed Putin’s meeting with Kim as “historic,” saying their talks demonstrated the countries’ “deep interest in the development of comprehensive cooperation”, the Associated Press reports. He said Russia highly appreciated North Korea’s “principled, unequivocal support for Russia’s actions” in Ukraine. A Norwegian navy ship shadowed a Chinese container ship investigated over damage to a gas pipeline in the Gulf of Finland for about 15 hours as it sailed along the western coast of Norway on Monday, vessel tracking data showed. Reuters reports: Finnish investigators on Tuesday said they were looking into the Chinese vessel, the NewNew Polar Bear, and a Russian-flagged ship, the Sevmorput, as well as other vessels, present in the area when a Baltic Sea pipeline was damaged on 8 October. They said the incident was due to “outside activity” and could have been deliberate. The NewNew Polar Bear is a container ship travelling between Europe and China via the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic. On Monday, it left the Baltic Sea and entered the North Sea to head north along the Norwegian coast. A Norwegian coast guard patrol vessel, the KV Sortland, shadowed the NewNew Polar Bear from Monday 0400 GMT off Norway’s southern tip, until around 1915 GMT, when the vessel was 70 km (43 miles) northwest of Bergen, Marine Traffic data showed. The area covered broadly coincides with the area where most of Norway’s exporting gas pipelines are located, as well as some of its key oil and gas platforms. Estonia’s PM dismayed by Orban’s handshake with ‘criminal’ Putin The images of EU member state Hungary’s prime minister shaking hands with Vladimir Putin were “very, very unpleasant” and defied logic given Budapest’s past history with Moscow, Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, has said. Hungary cultivates closer ties with Russia than other EU states, and is seen as the key potential opponent to a decision due in December on whether to open EU accession talks with Ukraine, which would require the unanimous backing of the bloc’s 27 members. Viktor Orbán and Putin held talks in China on Tuesday, with the Hungarian prime minister telling the Russian president he had never wanted to oppose Moscow and is trying to salvage bilateral contacts. “It was very, very unpleasant to see that,” Kallas, one of Ukraine’s staunchest defenders, told Reuters in an interview in Paris. “How can you shake a criminal’s hand, who has waged the war of aggression, especially coming from a country that has a history like Hungary has?” “It is not so distant past what happened in Hungary, what the Russians did there,” Kallas said. The 1956 Hungarian Uprising was crushed by Soviet tanks and troops; at least 2,600 Hungarians and 600 Soviet troops were killed in the fighting. After holding talks with France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, Kallas said Ukraine’s allies should not get distracted by other conflicts and redouble their efforts to show they are in it for the long haul. Joe Biden said he would ask Congress this week for “unprecedented” aid for Israel, which is expected to be part of a $100bn package that includes Ukraine support. A source told AFP that Biden would propose a joint $100bn package for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the migration crisis at the US-Mexico border. The package is intended to bypass congressional chaos and bring Democrats, who have sought additional aid for Kyiv for weeks, together with Republicans, who want funds to tighten controls on the southern border. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said he discussed figuring out ways to strengthen his country’s air defence and naval capabilities during a phone call with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron. Ukraine’s foreign ministry has condemned steps by Russia to revoke ratification of the 1996 comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty (see earlier post at 11.30), and urged the international community to respond to Moscow’s “provocations”. It said that Russia had “already provoked a dangerous imbalance in the global architecture of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation” by suspending participation in the new Start treaty and with the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Russian attacks overnight and on Wednesday killed at least seven civilians in Ukraine and damaged the power grid in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials said (the reported death toll has increased by two since the earlier post at 11.43). Four civilians were killed in a morning missile strike on a residential building in the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia, and a 31-year-old woman was killed in an attack on the village of Obukhivka in the central region of Dnipropetrovsk, they said. A man and a woman were also killed in an overnight attack on the southern region of Kherson, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram. The German government has proposed steps to speed up the integration of tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees into its labour market, Reuters reports. The government is hoping to enlist the support of companies, employment agencies and associations for a voluntary commitment, and appointed a special representative from the federal employment agency, Daniel Terzenbach, to liaise with them. According to the federal employment agency, the employment rate of Ukrainians in Germany is 19%. “But this is far from enough,” the labour minister, Hubertus Heil, told a press conference. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, more than one million people from Ukraine have sought protection in Germany. US decision to supply Atacms missiles to Kyiv ‘just prolongs the agony’ for Ukraine, warns Putin Vladimir Putin has warned Washington’s decision to supply the long-range army tactical missile systems (Atacms), whose use Kyiv confirmed on Tuesday, “just prolongs the agony” for Ukraine, saying the US is wading deeper into the conflict. The Russian president, who was speaking earlier to journalists during a visit to China, was quoted by Reuters as saying: Firstly, this of course causes harm and creates an additional threat. Secondly, we will of course be able to repel these attacks. War is war. But most importantly, it fundamentally lacks the capacity to change the situation on the line of contact at all … This is another mistake by the United States … Putin added: A mistake of a larger scale, as yet invisible but still of great importance, is that the United States is becoming more and more personally drawn into this conflict. And let no one say that they have nothing to do with this. We believe they do. Ukraine had repeatedly asked Washington for the long-range missiles to help it attack and disrupt supply lines, airbases and rail networks in Russian-occupied territory. Several US media outlets reported that Ukraine had used the Atacms missiles in an overnight attack on Tuesday on two airbases in Russian-held territory. Without mentioning the US missiles, Ukrainian special forces said they had carried out an overnight operation named “Dragonfly” striking a military airfield in Berdiansk and another one in the Luhansk region and resulting in “significant losses” on the Russian side. Russia’s central bank halted the circulation of a new 1,000 ruble note Wednesday after Orthodox priests complained that the image of a church dome lacked a cross, even though it does not have one in real life. According to AFP, in a rare U-turn, the central bank changed it’s decision. It said: Currently a decision was taken to stop the production of the notes. It did not enter widespread circulation. The bank had presented new designs of the 1,000 and 5,000 ruble notes earlier this week. One of them featured two religious sites in the majority-Muslim Tatarstan republic: a minaret with an Islamic crescent moon and an Orthodox church with a dome that did not have a cross on it. Both are inside the Kazan Kremlin, in Tatarstan’s capital. Priest Pavel Ostrovsky said on Telegram that the bill was either the result of “the stupidity of the designers” or a “deliberate provocation” by the “followers of Islam” in Tatarstan. He added that “there was no difference what the building looks like in real life” as most Russians do not know its history. After the bank removed the note, the church welcomed the decision as “very correct.” Its spokesperson Vladimir Legoyda said the Orthodox cross “which personifies the religious and cultural identity of the majority of our citizens, is a natural part of the state symbols of our country.”