Tag Archives: Odessa

Russia Strikes Odessa Port After Signing Deal to Unblock Ukrainian Grain Exports

KYIV, Ukraine—Russia launched a missile attack on Ukraine’s key grain-exporting port of Odessa, officials said, hours after signing an international agreement to ease its blockade of the Black Sea coastline and allow for the safe transport of grain and other foodstuffs necessary to alleviate a looming global food crisis.

The attack on Odessa appeared to violate the terms of the United Nations-brokered agreement signed by Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on Friday, which stipulated that both countries would refrain from attacking port facilities or civilian ships used for grain transport, according to a copy of the agreement reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. U.N. Secretary-General

António Guterres

condemned the strike, saying in a statement that all parties had committed to ensuring the safe movement of Ukrainian grain shipments.

At least two Russian Kalibr cruise missiles hit Odessa, the only major Ukrainian port resisting Russian occupation, damaging infrastructure at the site, Ukraine officials said. Another two of the missiles, which Russia has been launching from warships and submarines, were shot down by aerial defenses, officials said.

A railcar discharging point and a warehouse used for loading grain were destroyed in the attack, according to international grain traders.

The target of the strike was likely a nearby shipbuilding yard, workers at the port said.

“It’s obvious that the agreement with Russia is not even worth the paper it was signed on…Russia is a terrorist state,” said Ukraine’s ambassador to Turkey,

Vasyl Bodnar,

who was present at the signing of the agreement.

Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman

Oleg Nikolenko

said the attack on Odessa was like spitting in the face of the U.N. and Turkey, which facilitated and hosted the negotiations.

“We urge the U.N. and Turkey to ensure Russia’s compliance with its obligations to provide a safe corridor for the grain exports,” Mr. Nikolenko said in a statement posted to Facebook.

A resident of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine, on Saturday carried items out of an apartment damaged by a Russian attack.



Photo:

STRINGER/REUTERS

Russia’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor was there any comment from the Kremlin.

Turkish officials who helped broker the agreement said they had been in contact with Russia, which denied being behind the attack.

“The Russians told us that they had absolutely nothing to do with this attack and that they were examining the issue very closely and in detail. The fact that such an incident occurred right after the agreement we made yesterday regarding the grain shipment really worried us as well,” said Turkey’s Defense Minister

Hulusi Akar

in a statement on Saturday.

Mr. Akar signed the agreements with Ukraine and Russia on behalf of Turkey on Friday. He added that Ankara would continue to fulfill its duties under the grain agreement, which calls on Turkey to help monitor the accord and inspect shipments.

Russia also struck a military airport and a railway station on Saturday in central Ukraine, authorities said, in another long-range attack reaching far beyond the immediate front lines. Ukraine, meanwhile, is continuing to take advantage of Western weapons to stall Russia’s military advance.

Andriy Raikovych,

head of the Kirovohrad region in central Ukraine, said 13 missiles were fired at infrastructure and military facilities overnight, leaving at least three people dead and 13 wounded. Another strike, on Mykolaiv in the south, destroyed a warehouse, authorities there said.

Odessa, the only key port city on the Black Sea still held by Ukraine, was also shelled Saturday, with local media reporting seven missile strikes inside the urban area.

Ukraine’s forces meanwhile used U.S.-made Himar rocket launchers in a systematic shelling campaign seemingly aimed at cutting off vital supplies from the strategically important southern region of Kherson, which Russia has occupied since early in the invasion, Russian and Ukrainian officials said.

Kyiv’s use of Himars launchers to bombard two strategic bridges over the Dnipro and Inhulets rivers has already made tank and truck traffic between Kherson and Russia near-impossible, according to officials and footage from the ground circulating on social media. Ukrainian officials have said that they are preparing a counteroffensive to liberate the Kherson region.

Residents of cities throughout Ukraine have largely become accustomed to the sound of air-raid sirens portending a possible rocket attack, with the majority disregarding advice to find the nearest underground shelter and wait until the danger has passed. Mr. Raikovych asked them to reconsider.

“I continually urge you to not ignore the sirens and immediately go to a shelter,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

The latest round of attacks beyond the front lines comes as Ukrainian forces slow the Russian campaign to take the Donbas region in the east. Ukraine’s strikes on arms depots and strategic bridges in Russian-occupied territory, and its effective use of Himars rocket systems and other Western-supplied arms, have made it much harder for Russia to solidify its occupation in certain regions and to maintain the relentless artillery barrages that have underpinned its piecemeal but steady advance since April.

Analysts say a brief operational pause earlier this month following Russia’s capture of the eastern Luhansk region has given its troops too little time to recover before their campaign resumed this week.

Part of a rocket protrudes from a wheat field in the Kharkiv region.



Photo:

sergey bobok/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

“Russian forces are degraded, they are beat up, tired and exhausted, and they need to regroup in order to be able to regain some of the combat effectiveness which they’d lost over the course of the Donbas campaign and the overall war,” said George Barros, an analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. “An approximately 10-day operational pause is not sufficiently long for the Russian forces to be able to regain the strength that they need.”

While the battlefield picture has ossified in recent days, diplomatic avenues to resolve the crisis have made some headway. In the agreement aimed at ending the grain crisis caused by the war, Ukraine and Russia paved the way for the resumption of exports from Black Sea ports blocked by Russian ships. Delegates from the two countries signed parallel deals Friday at a ceremony in Istanbul, following months of diplomacy led by Turkey and the United Nations.

The agreement could free up about 18 million tons of wheat, corn and other supplies that have been stuck at Ukrainian ports and grain silos for weeks. Grain analysts have said they expect it could take weeks for grain shipments to begin flowing again, if both sides remain committed to the deal.

Late on Friday, Ukraine said operations at some of its ports may resume in as little as three days. Yury Vaskov, Ukraine’s deputy infrastructure minister and a member of the country’s delegation at the talks in Istanbul, told Ukrainian media on Friday that the port of Chornomorsk south of Odessa is preparing to handle the first vessel carrying grain.

River traffic on Thursday near the port of Reni, on the Ukrainian stretch of the Danube.



Photo:

Sergii Kharchenko/Zuma Press

The most active wheat futures contract fell 5.9%, to $7.59 per bushel, in trading on the Chicago Board of Trade Friday, as the deal raised hopes that a restart to Ukrainian grain exports would ease a brewing global food-supply crisis.

The deal has been seen as a limited but promising step toward bringing the two sides closer to a peace deal. Some European Union countries have suggested Ukraine should make concessions to Russia in exchange for peace. But in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday, Ukrainian President

Volodymyr Zelensky

said any pause in the fighting could merely give battered Russian forces a chance to regroup and rearm.

Instead he called for further weapons supplies from the West, and credited the support of Ukraine’s allies for shifting the balance on the battlefield and allowing Ukraine to bog down Russian troops fighting to capture swaths of the country’s east. Shortly after he spoke, the White House on Friday announced another $270 million worth of weapons for Ukraine, including four more Himars and hundreds more Phoenix Ghost drones.

The U.S. also said that the Pentagon is considering providing Ukrainian forces with jet fighters. It is “making some preliminary explorations into the feasibility of potentially providing fighter aircraft to the Ukrainians,” said John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communication. U.S. officials have previously resisted supplying Ukraine with jet fighters over concerns that they could risk a more direct conflict with Moscow.

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at Matthew.Luxmoore@wsj.com, Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com and Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com

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Ukraine-Russia War News: Live Updates on Mariupol, Odessa and Moskva

April 15, 2022, 2:54 a.m. ET

Credit…Yoruk Isik/Reuters

The sinking of one of Russia’s most formidable warships, the Moskva, is a stunning blow for the country — whether the ship sank after an accidental fire, as Russia’s Defense Ministry maintains, or after being struck by missiles, as Ukraine has claimed.

More than 600 feet long and weighing 12,500 tons, according to Russian news agencies, the Moskva was one of the Russian Navy’s largest vessels and the flagship of its fleet in the Black Sea.

That body of water, whose coastline is shared with several other countries, including Ukraine, Georgia and Turkey, has been of strategic importance to Russia for centuries.

The Moskva was deployed to support Russian aircraft and troops in Syria in 2015, and in 2008, it patrolled the coast of Georgia during the Russian-Georgian war.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the Moskva — armed with 16 Vulkan missile launchers with a strike range of more than 400 miles, according to Russian state media — and the rest of the Black Sea fleet have launched missiles into Ukraine several times. The ships also cut off Ukraine’s access to the sea and the economic lifeline it provided.

Although military analysts said the loss of the Moskva was not likely to alter the course of the war, it was an embarrassment for Russia’s military, which has spent billions of dollars to modernize its weaponry.

The ship had the ability to do “significant damage” in the Black Sea, said Gary Roughead, a retired admiral and the former chief of naval operations for the United States. He added that with the Moskva’s demise, Russia has most likely lost a key communications and controls platform.

The loss of the Moskva has been estimated by Forbes Ukraine to have cost Russia $750 million and to be Russia’s most expensive military loss in the war to date.

The vessel was also a symbol of national pride. Its name was “Glory” when it was first put into service for the Soviet Navy in the early 1980s. It was renamed after the Russian capital in 1996, according to Russian state media.

“Picture the aircraft carrier USS George Washington going to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean,” James Stavridis, a retired U.S. Navy admiral and a former supreme allied commander at NATO, said of the ship’s symbolism.

“It’s a significant hit to their prestige to lose something like that,” said Admiral Roughead, adding, “It calls into question the readiness of the fleet.”

The Moskva is the same ship, Ukrainian officials have said, that was famously and obscenely told off by Ukrainian border guards on Snake Island in February.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has said that all crew members on the Moskva — which usually number around 500 — had been evacuated. The ship will now join an unknowable number of other vessels, some more than a millennium old, on the floor of the Black Sea.

James Glanz contributed reporting.

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Hellraiser Clive Barker Hulu Reboot Casts Female Pinhead

Jamie Clayton attends Netflix’s Sense8 series finale fan screening at ArcLight Hollywood on June 7, 2018.
Photo: Greg Doherty (Getty Images)

Fiends, we officially have a new Pinhead. And who’ll be taking on the iconic horror character is a big surprise.

Stepping into the role Doug Bradley embodied in the cult-beloved Hellraiser films, starting with writer-director Clive Barker’s 1987 horror classic, will be Jamie Clayton (Sense8, The L Word: Generation Q). While Pinhead was always, shall we say, a bit androgynous, this marks the first time the Cenobite leader will be played by a woman. According to a press release, the film—which is being made for Hulu and is directed by David Bruckner (The Night House) from a script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, and a story by David S. Goyer—has just wrapped production. The rest of the cast includes Odessa A’zion, Brandon Flynn, Goran Visnjic (The Boys), Drew Starkey, Adam Faison, Aoife Hinds, and Hiam Abbass (Blade Runner 2049). Described as a “loyal, yet evolved re-imagining” of the 1987 film, it counts Barker among its producers.

Speaking of Barker, he sounds highly excited for this new take on his creation. “Having seen some of the designs from David Bruckner’s new Hellraiser film, they pay homage to what the first film created, but then take it to places it’s never been before,” he said. “This is a Hellraiser on a scale that I simply didn’t expect. David and his team are steeped in the story’s mythology, but what excites me is their desire to honor the original even as they revolutionize it for a new generation.” Bruckner, obviously, is pleased to have this stamp of approval. “It’s been such an honor to have Clive onboard to help support and shepherd us through the incredible universe he created so long ago,” the director said. “Combined with a fearless and committed cast, including the amazing Jamie Clayton, who fully embodies the role as the Hell Priest, we’re aiming to create a very special new chapter in the Hellraiser legacy.”

Hellraiser will bring its puzzle box of terrors to Hulu in the U.S. sometime next year, which fittingly marks the 35th anniversary of the first film’s release.


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