Russia’s central election commission on Thursday set the date for regional elections in four Ukrainian provinces that Moscow claims to have annexed for 10 September coinciding with votes in other Russian regions, state news agency RIA reported.
Tass, another state news agency, cited election chief Ella Pamfilova as saying that Russia’s Defence Ministry and Federal Security Service (FSB) considered it possible to hold the votes in September.
Ruslan Stefanchuk, chair of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, has said the European parliament expects that the summits in Vilnius and Washington in the coming months will mark the start of Ukraine’s accession to Nato after strong support for the country’s integration into the Euro-Atlantic community.
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Nato sees no sign that Russia has changed its nuclear stance, the head of the military alliance said Thursday, after the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko claimed that Belarus has already received some tactical nuclear weapons from Moscow.
In an interview on state television on Tuesday, Lukashenko brashly warned that he wouldn’t hesitate to order their use if Belarus faced an act of aggression. The Russian president Vladimir Putin has said the weapons will be deployed to Belarus next month and will remain under Moscow’s exclusive control.
At the Nato headquarters in Brussels, Belgium the secretary general of Nato Jens Stoltenberg told reporters:
We are, of course, closely monitoring what Russia is doing. So far, we haven’t seen any changes in the nuclear posture that requires any changes in our posture.Russia’s nuclear rhetoric and messaging is reckless and dangerous.Russia must know that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Russia has invested heavily in new modern nuclear capabilities and also deployed more nuclear capabilities, including close to Nato borders, for instance, in the high north.”
Nato’s secretive nuclear defense planning group is set to meet on Friday.