Ukraine war in Newsblog | Does Russia want to simulate an accident at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant?

Day 457 since the beginning of the war: Scholz dampens expectations that Ukraine will soon join NATO. Russia attacked a clinic. All information in the news blog.

10:07 p.m.: According to a newspaper report, Ukraine has asked Germany for the delivery of the German Taurus cruise missile. As the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper” reports, the Federal Ministry of Defense confirmed the request from Ukraine.

According to the “FAS”, a spokesman for the federal government did not want to comment on whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj personally addressed this request to Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), which information from the newspaper suggested.

Taurus cruise missiles have a range of up to 500 kilometers. They are dropped from fighter planes and find their targets on their own. The missile can fly under radar. It is considered an effective weapon against protected targets such as command bunkers or ammunition depots.

9:39 p.m.: The Ukrainian secret service accuses Russia of wanting to simulate an accident at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, which is being occupied by Russian soldiers, in the coming hours. The leak of radioactive substances should be reported and Ukraine held responsible for it, writes the Ukrainian secret service on its website. The information could not initially be independently verified. In the past, Ukraine had warned of such a scenario several times – without it having happened so far.

Russian forces have been controlling the plant, which has six reactors, since March last year. Since then, the nuclear power plant has been repeatedly shot at. Zaporizhia in southern Ukraine is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, announced on Friday that he would present a plan to protect the nuclear power plant to the UN Security Council on Tuesday. Grossi, who has a team of experts on site, visited the nuclear power plant at the end of March and then warned of the “very real danger of a nuclear accident”.

7:59 p.m.: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has declined an invitation from Russian President Vladimir Putin to St. Petersburg in a telephone conversation. “I thanked (Putin) for the invitation to the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg and replied that I cannot come to Russia at the moment,” Lula wrote on Twitter on Friday. Read more about Lula’s cancellation here.

7:28 p.m.: A month and a half before the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) dampened expectations that Ukraine would soon join the defense alliance. The summit will “above all be about organizing concrete support for Ukraine in this situation,” Scholz said after a meeting with representatives of the Baltic states on Friday in Tallinn in response to a question about Kiev’s desire for an official invitation from the NATO at the July summit.

The question at stake now is “how we can improve cooperation in the specific situation of the Russian attack on Ukraine and how we can make it clear that we will maintain this support for as long as it is necessary,” explained scholz

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday that the member countries were divided over the question of Ukraine’s accession. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been invited to the NATO summit on July 11-12 in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.

3:31 p.m.: According to the Ministry of Defense in Kiev, Ukraine expects 48 F-16 fighter jets to free itself from the Russian occupation. “Four squadrons of F-16s (48 aircraft) are just what we need to rid our country of the aggressor,” the ministry said on Twitter.