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The United States on Thursday committed another $2.5 billion in food assistance to Africa, pledging to help the continent cope with rising prices blamed in part on Russia's invasion of breadbasket Ukraine, Agence France-Presse reported.
President Joe Biden laid out the new commitment at the close of a three-day summit that brought nearly 50 African leaders to Washington.
Biden told leaders that the United States was concerned about rising hunger triggered "in part due to Russia's unprovoked war against Ukraine."
Poland's Interior Ministry says a gift that the country's top police commander received during a recent visit to Ukraine exploded at national police headquarters in Warsaw,
The ministry said the the explosion in a room next to the commander's office on Wednesday morning caused him and a civilian employee to suffer minor injuries. It didn't specify what object the Polish commander had received during a working visit to Ukraine on Sunday and Monday.
It said Thursday that the Polish government has asked Ukraine for an explanation of what happened. Poland is an ally of Ukraine and has offered the neighboring country military and humanitarian aid since Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24.
Since early October, Russia has launched multiple seven large-scale missile and drone attacks of this kind, causing power, water, and heating outages in cities and towns across the country while also killing dozens of people. The latest came on Thursday,
Moscow opened this new front in its war against Ukraine after suffering a series of major setbacks on the battlefield, seemingly hoping that as winter descends, severe conditions will force Ukraine into concessions -- something it has failed spectacularly to do so far.
The infrastructure assaults have added to ire against Russia in the West --"Targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure with the clear aim to cut off men, women, children [from] water, electricity, and heating with the winter coming…are acts of pure terror,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in October -- and pose a persistent, serious threat.
But as citizens, authorities, and energy companies learn to deal with the blackouts and other problems caused by power outages, there are growing indications that Moscow's efforts on the “energy front” may end up falling flat.
“We have no choice but to survive,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former economy minister who is an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told RFE/RL at the Kyiv School of Economics, where he is president.
Russian shelling killed two people including a Red Cross worker in Kherson on Thursday and completely cut power in the southern city, Ukrainian officials said, with temperatures near freezing,
The UN's human rights chief set out evidence of what he said was Russian killings of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in the first months of the wary.
And the commander of Ukraine's armed forces warned they expected a fresh Russian attack on Kyiv early next year.
The Grisly Job of Exhuming the Dead in Ukraine: In the woods of eastern Ukraine, a team of volunteers are scraping the dirt from a corpse and searching for anything that might identify who it was. One of them finds a cross -- a possible clue. He says it's always an honor for him if the team manages to return a body to its family.
U.S. officials say the Pentagon will expand military combat training for Ukrainian forces, using the slower winter months to instruct larger units in more complex battle skills,
The U.S. has already trained about 3,100 Ukrainian troops on how to use and maintain certain weapons and other equipment, including howitzers, armored vehicles and the High Moblity Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS. But senior military leaders for months have discussed expanding that training, touting the need to improve the ability of Ukraine’s battalion-sized units to move and coordinate attacks across the battlefield.
The officials spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity because the program has not been publicly announced.
European Union governments agreed on Thursday on a ninth package of sanctions against Russia over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, EU diplomats said, Reuters reported.
The package will be formalized through what the EU calls a "written procedure" by Friday noon.
"Sanctions agreed. Written procedure until tomorrow noon," one of the diplomats said.
President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia would expand trade cooperation with new partners, including by sharply increasing gas exports to China, to combat Western sanctions,