Russia yesterday condemned Ukraine’s “unfriendly” stance over the war with Georgia and efforts to restrict Russia’s Black Sea fleet that has a base in Ukraine.
“Ukrainian authorities have recently been pursuing policies that cannot be seen as anything other than unfriendly towards Russia,” the foreign ministry said in a strongly worded statement.
Western officials have expressed concern that Ukraine’s large ethnic Russian population could leave it exposed to intervention from Moscow after its war in the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Russia said it was defending Russian nationals when it sent in troops to halt a Georgian offensive on South Ossetia.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko last month raised tensions by imposing restrictions on the Russian fleet, requiring ships to seek permission at least 72 hours prior to crossing the Ukrainian border.
The announcement, which came after the Black Sea fleet took part in armed conflict with Georgia, also called for talks on the future of the fleet’s base in the southern port of Sevastopol.
The Russian foreign ministry statement said the fleet was “a stabilizing factor both for relations between Russia and Ukraine and in the context of regional stability.”
“The rights of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine are being abused and there is a policy targeted at excluding the Russian language from the public life of the country,” the statement said.
Russia also accused Ukraine of siding with the pro-Western government in Georgia, saying: “We have not heard words of pity or compassion on the death of civilians in Tskhinvali and of Russian peacekeepers.”
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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