Ukrainian oil, gas facilities burn as West prepares new sanctions against Russia
CBC
The latest:
Russian forces have attacked oil and gas facilities in Ukraine, sparking huge explosions, officials said on Sunday, as Western allies prepared new sanctions, including banishing key Russia banks from the main global payments system.
Ukrainian forces were holding off Russian troops advancing on the capital, Kyiv, said President Volodymyr Zelensky, as the biggest assault on a European state since the Second World War entered its fourth day.
Russian missiles found their mark, including a strike that set an oil terminal ablaze in Vasylkiv, southwest of Kyiv, the town's mayor said. Blasts sent huge flames and billowing black smoke into the night sky, online posts showed.
There were also reports of heavy fighting near Ukraine's second city, Kharkiv, in the northeast, where Russian troops blew up a natural gas pipeline, a Ukrainian state agency said. The gas blast there sent a mushroom cloud up into the darkness.
"The enemy wants to destroy everything," said the mayor of Vasylkiv, Natalia Balasinovich.
Russian troops later entered Kharkiv, an Interior Ministry adviser, Anton Herashchenko, said on Telegram. Videos posted by him and a state agency showed several military vehicles moving on a street and, separately, a burning tank.
Russian-backed separatists in the eastern province of Luhansk said a Ukrainian missile had blown an oil terminal in the town of Rovenky.
Russian President Vladimir Putin launched what he called a special military operation on Thursday, ignoring weeks of Western warnings and saying the "neo-Nazis" ruling Ukraine threatened Russia's security — a charge Kyiv and Western governments say is baseless propaganda.
Reuters witnesses in Kyiv reported occasional blasts and gunfire in the city on Saturday night but it was not clear where this was coming from.
"We have withstood and are successfully repelling enemy attacks. The fighting goes on," Zelenskiy said in a video message from the streets of Kyiv posted on his social media.
A U.S. defence official said Ukraine's forces were putting up "very determined resistance" to Russia's air, land and sea advance, which has sent hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing westwards, clogging major highways and railway lines.
On Saturday, Canada, the U.S. and other allies agreed to block "selected" Russian banks from the SWIFT global financial messaging system, which moves money around more than 11,000 banks and other financial institutions worldwide, part of a new round of sanctions aiming to impose a severe cost on Moscow for the invasion.
They also agreed to impose "restrictive measures" on Russia's central bank to limit its ability to support the ruble and finance Putin's war effort.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast the U.S. announcement that the fragile ceasefire in Gaza would advance to its second phase as largely symbolic, raising questions about how its more challenging elements will be carried out.
A U.S. federal officer shot a man in the leg in Minneapolis after being attacked with a shovel and broom handle while trying to make an arrest Wednesday, federal officials said.
The death toll from unrest in Iran climbed to almost 2,600, a rights group said on Wednesday, as Tehran stepped up diplomatic contacts with U.S.-allies in the region over a crisis that has drawn threats of intervention from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Erfan Soltani, a 26-year-old Iranian man, has been sentenced to death in Iran, according to human rights groups. It comes amid widespread protests in the country and a deadly government crackdown.
The United States is telling its citizens to leave Iran, as Washington maintains its pressure on Tehran to cease its crackdown on protesters and U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to strike the Iranian government over the issue.
U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States may meet Iranian officials and was in contact with the opposition as he weighed a range of strong responses, including military options, to a violent crackdown on Iranian protests, which pose one of the biggest challenges to clerical rule since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
A crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran has killed at least 538 people and even more are feared dead, activists said Sunday, while Tehran warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be "legitimate targets" if America uses force to protect demonstrators.
For years, many of Venezuela’s exiles in Spain — leading opposition figures and citizens — have hoped for a day when ousted president Nicolás Maduro would no longer be in power.
The U.S. attack on Venezuela has shifted the ground for guerrilla groups operating across the country's borderlands with Colombia, raising fears of possible betrayal by Venezuelan regime officials, while opening the door to a wider conflict should U.S. boots ever hit the ground, local security experts say.
Protests sweeping across Iran neared the two-week mark on Saturday, with the country’s government acknowledging the ongoing demonstrations despite an intensifying crackdown and as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world.
Russia didn’t just use a hypersonic missile to target a site in western Ukraine near the border with Poland, in the European Union, but high ranking officials then went on to boast about the power of the nuclear-capable weapon, in what some saw as a clear warning to the West.
The official White House narrative of how a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed a U.S. citizen in her vehicle in Minneapolis is bumping hard up against what can be seen in videos of the incident.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a Minneapolis motorist on Wednesday during the Trump administration's latest immigration crackdown on a major American city — a shooting that federal officials claimed was an act of self-defence but that the city's mayor described as "reckless" and unnecessary.