Russia suspended from UN Human Right Council
Congress votes to suspend Russia’s trade status, enact oil ban
Pink Floyd members reunite to record a song for Ukraine
Kyiv: Ahead of that new offensive, Russian forces are pulling back from several areas in northern Ukraine and moving to Belarus or back to Russia to regroup. Russian troops have left behind crushed buildings, streets littered with destroyed cars, and residents in dire need of food and other aid in a northern Ukrainian city, giving fuel to Kyiv’s calls Thursday for more Western support to help halt Moscow’s offensive before it refocuses on the country’s east.
“The situation in Donbas is heating up and we understand that April will be quite hot, so those who have the opportunity to leave — women, children, the elderly — need to stay in a safe place,” Borys Filatov, the mayor of Dnipro, a city that lies just west of the Donbas, said at a briefing.
Overnight, Russia kept up its barrage on several cities, striking fuel storage sites around Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Chuguev using cruise missiles fired from ships in the Black Sea.
Russia’s 6-week-old invasion failed to take Ukraine’s capital quickly and achieve what Western countries said was President Vladimir Putin’s initial aim of ousting the Ukrainian government. In the wake of that failure and heavy losses, Russia shifted its focus to the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking, industrial region in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s foreign minister begged again Thursday for “weapons, weapons and weapons” from NATO — and the western alliance agreed, spurred into action by atrocities revealed in the wake of the recent Russian withdrawal from areas around Ukraine’s capital. Ukrainian and several Western leaders have blamed the massacres on Moscow’s troops, and the weekly Der Spiegel reported Thursday that Germany’s foreign intelligence agency had intercepted radio messages between Russian soldiers discussing the killings of civilians in the town. Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday night that work has begun to dig through the rubble in Borodianka, another city northwest of Kyiv that was occupied by the Russians. He also said “it is much scarier” there, with even more victims of the Russian troops.
Russia Ousted from UNHRC
The U.N. General Assembly voted Thursday to suspend Russia from the world organization’s leading human rights body over allegations of horrific rights violations by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, which the United States and Ukraine have called tantamount to war crimes. The vote was 93-24 with 58 abstentions. Russia is the second country, after Libya, to have its membership rights stripped at the Human Rights Council, which was established in 2006.
Senate votes 100-0 to limit trade with Russia, ban oil imports
The Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a package to end normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus and codify the administration’s ban on Russian oil imports, capping off weeks of negotiations that had stalled the legislation.
Senators voted 100-0 on two bills. The first ended permanent normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus. The bill also reauthorizes Magnitsky Act sanctions that target human rights violations and corruption with penalties like visa bans or asset freezes. The second bill, which also passed 100-0, codifies the Biden administration’s ban on Russian oil imports.
European Union nations have also approved new sanctions against Russia, including an EU embargo on coal imports in the wake of evidence of torture and killings emerging from war zones outside Kyiv.
