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Investigations into the suspected sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia with Europe are "progressing well," despite World War II munitions on the seabed, Denmark said Thursday, Agence France-Presse reported.
"It's a zone marked by the presence of munitions -- used or not -- from World War II," Danish Defense Minister Morten Bodskov told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of the NATO defence alliance in Brussels. "There's a lot of stuff at the bottom of the sea, so it's not so easy."
The two Nord Stream pipelines were damaged by four explosions under the Baltic Sea at the end of September, causing major gas leaks.
Sweden has announced that preliminary underwater inspections backed up suspicions of probable sabotage.
Ukraine could extradite Russian war crimes suspects to the International Criminal Court (ICC) even though Moscow is not a member, the tribunal's prosecutor said on Thursday, accordant to Agence France-Presse.
Kyiv authorities could send Russians to the Hague-based court if trials could not take place in Ukraine for legal reasons, ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan said.
Russia, which invaded Ukraine on February 24, refused to join the ICC when the court was set up in 2002 to try people for offenses including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
"Legally yes it wouldn't represent an obstacle to our jurisdiction," Khan told journalists at the headquarters of the EU's judicial agency, Eurojust.
The ICC opened its own probe into the war in Ukraine shortly after Russia invaded, but has said it is keen for Ukraine to bring suspects to justice where possible.
A court in Belarus's eastern region of Mahilyou has sentenced a man to 11 years in prison on charges of joining a group involved in damaging railways to disrupt the supply of Russian arms and troops to Ukraine, .
The Minsk-based Vyasna (Spring) human rights center said on October 13 that the Mahilyou regional court handed down Alyaksey Shyshkavets' sentence a day earlier.
Shyshkavets was arrested in March. He was found guilty of assisting an extremist group by creating an online chatbot to recruit members to commit unlawful acts in Belarus, according to the court.
Shyshkavets was among some 60 men and women arrested for their alleged involvement in damaging Belarus's railways to impede the progress of Russian troops and arms into Ukraine since the start of Moscow's invasion of its neighbor in late February.
A released this week shows that almost two-thirds of Americans are keeping track of the Russia/Ukraine crisis, and while a majority support the U.S. providing weapons to Ukraine, most believe that this could cause the war to escalate, with just over half afraid that the U.S. may be headed toward a nuclear war with Russia.
Ukraine's top prosecutor said on Thursday his office had opened criminal proceedings relating to Russian missile strikes that struck Kyiv and cities across Ukraine this week,
Speaking at a joint press conference with International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan in The Hague, Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin described the strikes since Monday as "a classic act of terror" by Russia.
He said the more than 112 Russian missile strikes, Moscow's biggest aerial offensive since the start of its invasion on February 24, had killed 17 people and injured 93.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday defended her government’s decisions to buy large quantities of natural gas from Russia, which was her country’s primary gas supplier when she left office, .
Speaking in Lisbon, Merkel said that “you always act in the time you are in” and that she doesn’t regret her decisions. She said that it was clear that Germany needed to diversify its energy supplies as it moved away from nuclear and coal-fueled power generation and that gas would be needed during that transitional period.
Merkel said that “from the perspective of that time, it was very rational and understandable to get pipeline gas, including from Russia, that was cheaper than LNG from other parts of the world.”
She added that “even in the Cold War, Russia was a reliable energy supplier.”
Hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their country since President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial” mobilization on September 21. Current Time, a co-production of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and VOA, asked men who have crossed the borders into Georgia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan what they think about the war in Ukraine.