The US on Tuesday announced a ban on imports of Russian oil, firing one of its biggest economic weapons against Moscow, which yesterday accused Washington of declaring an economic war on Russia that was sowing mayhem in the energy markets.
US President Joe Biden said the US oil embargo on Russia would cut “the main artery” of Moscow’s economy, and vowed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would “never be a victory” for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Britain said it would join the US in phasing out Russian oil by the end of the year, while oil giants BP and Shell announced an immediate halt to Russian oil and gas purchases.
Photo: Reuters
The EU also said it would slash gas imports by two-third.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov cast the West’s sanctions as “hostile bacchanalia” that had roiled global markets and warned that it was unclear how far turbulence on global energy markets would go.
Russia might rethink its energy-supply commitments in light of the sanctions, he told reporters.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“European leaders unanimously recognize that Russia is fulfilling all its contractual obligations without interruption and in full,” Peskov said. “But you see the hostile bacchanalia that the countries of the ‘collective West’ have caused of course makes the situation very difficult and forces us to seriously think about this.”
Meanwhile, renewed efforts to evacuate civilians from besieged and bombarded Ukrainian cities were under way yesterday, as authorities seek to rescue people from increasingly dire conditions. Days of shelling have largely cut residents of the southern city of Mariupol off from the outside world, and forced them to scavenge for food and water.
Authorities announced another ceasefire to allow civilians to escape from Mariupol, Sumy in the northeast, Enerhodar in the south, Volnovakha in the southeast, Izyum in the east and several towns in the region around the capital, Kyiv.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors have largely failed due to attacks by Russian forces, and there were few details on yesterday’s new effort.
However, air raid sirens repeatedly went off in the capital and explosions could be heard there, raising tensions in the rattled city.
Mariupol, where nearly half of the population of 430,000 is hoping to flee, has been surrounded by Russian forces for days. Corpses lie in the streets, and people break into stores in search of food and melt snow for water. Thousands huddle in basements, sheltering from the Russian shells pounding the strategic port on the Azov Sea.
Thousands of people are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, in two weeks of fighting since Putin’s forces invaded.
The UN estimates that more than 2 million people have fled the country, the biggest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of World War II.
The crisis is likely to get worse as Russian forces step up their bombardment of cities throughout the country in response to stronger-than-expected resistance from Ukrainian forces.
Russian losses have been “far in excess” of what Putin and his generals expected, CIA Director William Burns told a US congressional meeting on Tuesday.
An intensified push by Russian forces could mean “an ugly next few weeks,” he said, adding that Putin was likely to “grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties.”
The British Ministry of Defence yesterday said that fighting continued northwest of Kyiv. The cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Mariupol were being heavily shelled and remained encircled by Russian forces.
Russian forces were placing military equipment on farms and amid residential buildings in the northern city of Chernihiv, Ukraine’s general staff said.
In the south, Russians dressed in civilian clothes were advancing on the city of Mykolaiv, a Black Sea shipbuilding center of half a million people, it said.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military was building up defenses in cities in the north, south and east, and forces around Kyiv are “holding the line” against the Russian offensive.
Ukraine’s state-run nuclear company Energoatom yesterday said that radioactive substances could be released from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant because it cannot cool spent nuclear fuel after its power connection was severed.
It said that fighting made it impossible to immediately repair the high-voltage power line to the plant, which was captured by Russian forces.
Energoatom said there were about 20,000 spent fuel assemblies at Chernobyl that could not be kept cool amid a power outage.
Their warming could lead to “the release of radioactive substances into the environment. The radioactive cloud could be carried by wind to other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Europe,” it said in a statement.
EXPRESSING GRATITUDE: Without its Taiwanese partners which are ‘working around the clock,’ Nvidia could not meet AI demand, CEO Jensen Huang said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and US-based artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Nvidia Corp have partnered with each other on silicon photonics development, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said. Speaking with reporters after he met with TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) in Taipei on Friday, Huang said his company was working with the world’s largest contract chipmaker on silicon photonics, but admitted it was unlikely for the cooperation to yield results any time soon, and both sides would need several years to achieve concrete outcomes. To have a stake in the silicon photonics supply chain, TSMC and
‘DETERRENT’: US national security adviser-designate Mike Waltz said that he wants to speed up deliveries of weapons purchased by Taiwan to deter threats from China US president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, affirmed his commitment to peace in the Taiwan Strait during his confirmation hearing in Washington on Tuesday. Hegseth called China “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to US national security” and said that he would aim to limit Beijing’s expansion in the Indo-Pacific region, Voice of America reported. He would also adhere to long-standing policies to prevent miscalculations, Hegseth added. The US Senate Armed Services Committee hearing was the first for a nominee of Trump’s incoming Cabinet, and questions mostly focused on whether he was fit for the
IDENTITY: Compared with other platforms, TikTok’s algorithm pushes a ‘disproportionately high ratio’ of pro-China content, a study has found Young Taiwanese are increasingly consuming Chinese content on TikTok, which is changing their views on identity and making them less resistant toward China, researchers and politicians were cited as saying by foreign media. Asked to suggest the best survival strategy for a small country facing a powerful neighbor, students at National Chia-Yi Girls’ Senior High School said “Taiwan must do everything to avoid provoking China into attacking it,” the Financial Times wrote on Friday. Young Taiwanese between the ages of 20 and 24 in the past were the group who most strongly espoused a Taiwanese identity, but that is no longer
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake and several aftershocks battered southern Taiwan early this morning, causing houses and roads to collapse and leaving dozens injured and 50 people isolated in their village. A total of 26 people were reported injured and sent to hospitals due to the earthquake as of late this morning, according to the latest Ministry of Health and Welfare figures. In Sising Village (西興) of Chiayi County's Dapu Township (大埔), the location of the quake's epicenter, severe damage was seen and roads entering the village were blocked, isolating about 50 villagers. Another eight people who were originally trapped inside buildings in Tainan
RSS