Two Russian towns, Timonovo and Soloti, close to each other and about 25 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, had to be evacuated when a powder keg caught fire on Thursday night with no injuries reported. It is the same type of incident that occurred on Tuesday in Maiske, in Crimea, which forced the temporary displacement of some 2,000 people while artillery shells stored in the arsenal flew into the road, according to video recordings. Timonovo and Soloti, with less than a thousand inhabitants each, belong to the Belgorod region, from where Russian forces fire on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, as happened yesterday, when five missiles hit an industrial area and killed of at least one woman.
The Kyiv government refrained from commenting, much less claiming responsibility for these actions, but military sources cited by Western media have no doubt that Ukrainian forces are taking the war to a different phase. Just yesterday, again in Crimea, explosions were observed near the Kerch bridge, which connects the peninsula with Russia, and the Belbek air base, which is located at the Sevastopol airport itself. Russia said that in Kerch a drone had been shot down by its anti-aircraft force and that something similar had happened near the Belbek base on Thursday night. However, a video shared on social networks showed a dense column of smoke from a fire and trajectories of anti-aircraft tracer bullets with the crackle of ammunition as background sound.
All this occurs when sources quoted by the British press consider half of the Russian air force belonging to the Black Sea fleet to have been liquidated. Nine aircraft were destroyed on August 9 at the Novofiodorovka base in Saky, and last Tuesday it was rumored that the Hvardyiske base was also attacked at the same time as the Maiske powder keg. This degradation of Russian power in a peninsula constituted as a large military base had its climax much earlier, however, with the sinking of the flagship of the fleet, the Moskva, on April 14, and the death, on March 20, of his deputy commander at the siege of Mariupol. It is not surprising, then, that on Wednesday there was a change at the head of the fleet. The new head, Vice Admiral Víktor Sókolov, said yesterday, quoted by the Tass agency, that this year he will receive 12 new ships, planes and land vehicles.
The Pentagon also made its announcement yesterday: a package for Ukraine worth 775 million dollars with more Himars rocket launchers (the weapon that is proving most useful to the Ukrainians), howitzers, Javelin anti-tank systems and surveillance drones. Russia is making little headway in Ukraine, the Pentagon men said at the same time. It is true that, in recent weeks, no type of initiative has been observed, while the Ukrainians attack their rear in preparation for what they have been announcing as a counteroffensive in the south of the country.
But the most important crisis scenario remains at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. After the meeting on Thursday in Lviv between the Ukrainian president, Zelensky, the Turkish, Erdogan and the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, in which all seemed to agree that Russia must leave the plant unconditionally, which Moscow judged " unacceptable”, Emmanuel Macron called Vladimir Putin yesterday. It was his first conversation since May 28, the Kremlin noted, and the French president thus seemed to preempt Erdogan, who said he would speak with the Russian.
Putin agrees to a visit to the plant by experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which would indicate that the withdrawal demand is rather rhetorical. In fact, and as the Elysée made known –and also Moscow, through the Russian governor of Zaporizhia–, Putin also accepted that the technicians arrive at the plant –occupied by the Russian army since May– through Ukrainian territory (crossing the the Dnieper River, presumably) and not through the Crimea, as Moscow had suggested.
