Los Russian Wagner mercenaries threaten Poland with an armed incursion from Belarus, while the Russian Army again targeted historic Odessa, bombing apartment blocks, port facilities and the city’s largest Orthodox cathedral.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I will. The Wagnerites have started to make us uneasy. We want to go to the West, give us permission. And I tell them, why do you want to go to the West? To go on a trip to Warsaw, to Rzeszow,” Belarusian President Alexandr Lukashenko said at the start of a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg.
The meeting coincided withimages of “death and destruction” in Odessa -as Pope Francis described them-, an attack that the Western chancelleries did not hesitate to describe as a “war crime”.
“Ukraine needs a full-fledged anti-aircraft shield. It is the only way to defeat Russian missile terror,” Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky said on his Telegram channel.
Lukashenko assured Putin that Minsk will keep the Wagnerites under control at the Moguiliov base, as agreed after the failed armed rebellion led by said group just a month ago, and that will not allow them to move, since their “state of mind is bad.” Today’s was precisely the first meeting between the two leaders since the uprising, in which the Belarusian interceded and managed to convince Wagner’s boss, Yevgueni Prigozhin, to withdraw to Belarus.