Ukraine plans to seek nearly $44bn from Russia for the damage linked to an increase in climate-warming emissions from the ongoing war, a government minister told Reuters. The move marks the first time a country is claiming damages for such an increase in emissions, including from the fossil fuels, cement and steel used in fighting the war, and from the destruction of trees through resultant fires. “A lot of damage was caused to water, to land, to forests,” said Pavlo Kartashov, the country’s deputy minister for economy, environment, and agriculture. “We have huge amounts of additional CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases,” Kartashov said in an interview on the sidelines of the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil.
A Russian missile strike wounded at least 32 people in Ukraine’s Kharkiv overnight, its governor said early Wednesday, the third such attack on the eastern region in three days. Moscow has been intensifying its daily drone and missile barrages in recent months, targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and hitting a number of civilian sites ahead of winter. Kharkiv governor Oleg Synegubov said at least 32 people were wounded in the latest overnight attack, including two children and an 18-year-old girl.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will head to Turkey on Wednesday seeking to revive the United States’ involvement in diplomatic efforts to end the Russian invasion. Zelenskyy said he wanted to reinvigorate frozen peace talks, which have faltered after several rounds of Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul this year failed to yield a breakthrough. Moscow has not agreed to a ceasefire and instead kept advancing on the front and bombarding Ukrainian cities. Zelenskyy will meet his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara on Wednesday, he told reporters at a press conference in Madrid on Tuesday.
The United States on Tuesday approved a $105m sale to Ukraine to upgrade and sustain Patriot missile defences, as Russia keeps pummelling its smaller neighbour. The state department said it informed Congress of the deal for parts, training and services on the Patriots, which Ukraine relies on to shoot down incoming missiles. “The proposed sale will improve Ukraine’s ability to meet current and future threats,” a state department statement said.
Poland has identified two people responsible for an explosion on a railway route to Ukraine, prime minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday, claiming that they were Ukrainians who collaborated with Russian intelligence and that they had fled to Belarus. The blast on the Warsaw-Lublin line, which connects the Polish capital to the Ukrainian border, followed a wave of arson, sabotage and cyber-attacks in Poland and other European countries since the start of the war in Ukraine.
Spain will provide Ukraine with a fresh military aid package worth 615m euros ($710m) to support its fight against Russia’s invasion, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez announced on Tuesday. Speaking at a Madrid press conference alongside visiting Zelenskyy, Sanchez said that around 300m euros of the package would be allocated to “new defence equipment”. “Your fight is ours,” Sanchez said, adding that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “neo-imperialism” seeks to “weaken the European project and everything it stands for”.
During his trip to Spain Zelenskyy made also took the opportunity to view Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”, a move laden with symbolism. Among the last century’s most famous paintings, “Guernica” depicts the horrors of war – specifically the bombardment of civilian targets. The enormous, black-grey-and-white painting features screaming women, flailing horses and a gored bull. Picasso used them to represent the bombing by Nazi and fascist Italian war planes of the town named Guernica in 1937, during Spain’s Civil War.
