war | Hundreds of German civil servants have to leave Russia

Day 460 since the beginning of the war: Zelenskyj makes a declaration of war on Moscow. Two people died in attacks on Kiev on Sunday. All information in the news blog.

1:39 a.m.: Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov describes Russia’s defeat as the most important goal of his country’s forthcoming counter-offensive. “We have to shake the Russians’ certainty that they can win this war. Russia must and will lose this war,” Resnikov told the newspapers of the Funke media group and the French newspaper Quest-France. “We will liberate all temporarily occupied areas of Ukraine until we restore the internationally recognized borders of 1991.” That includes Crimea as well as the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

Resnikov sees real military progress for Ukraine in the summer. “In two or three places on the battlefield, in the south as well as in the east. There will be new waves of Russian soldiers fleeing on our territory,” he told the newspapers.

9:10 p.m.: On June 1, Poland will close its border with Belarus for trucks from the eastern neighboring country and from Russia. According to a decree published by the Ministry of the Interior on Monday, the ban applies until further notice to trucks, tractor units and combinations with trailers or semi-trailers that are registered in one of the two countries.

Poland had previously put 365 other representatives of the government of Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko on a sanctions list. The entry bans against them are a reaction to the upholding of the “draconian verdict” against Polish minority activist Andrzej Poczobut by the Supreme Court of Belarus, the Interior Ministry said on Monday. The Supreme Court of the authoritarian state on Friday confirmed the conviction of the 50-year-old journalist to eight years in a camp for “inciting hatred” and “calling for acts to harm Belarus”.

Immediately after Poczobut’s conviction in February, a dispute between Poland and Belarus began with border closures for freight traffic. In mid-February, Poland first closed the Bobrowniki border crossing. In return, Belarus made border traffic more difficult for Polish trucks and expelled three Polish diplomats. At the end of February, Poland also closed the Kukuryki-Koroszczyn crossing for trucks from Belarus. So far, however, it has been possible for trailers from Belarus to cross the border with a Polish tractor.

7.55 p.m.: In southern Ukraine, a woman in the Odessa region on the Black Sea has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for collecting money for the Russian occupiers, according to the verdict. This was announced by the Ukrainian domestic secret service SBU and published evidence on its Telegram channel.

The woman organized a call for funding for the fighters in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region on social networks. She was arrested in December during an operation aimed against saboteurs. The court sentenced her to eleven years and four months in prison for supporting the aggressor state, it said.

The woman supported two relatives who joined the separatists in Donetsk region in 2016 to fight against Ukrainian forces. Fighting in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after the fall of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The woman’s relatives joined Moscow’s troops after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine a good 15 months ago in order to occupy the city of Mariupol and parts of the Cherson region, it said. The SBU secret service repeatedly reports arrests of collaborators who support Russia.

7:32 p.m.: The federal government has clearly criticized Moscow’s decision to introduce a cap for German civil servants in Russia. This border requires “a major cut in all areas of our presence in Russia,” said the Foreign Office in Berlin at the weekend. It is a “unilateral, unjustified and incomprehensible decision” by Russia. The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, firmly rejected this on Monday: Berlin, not Moscow, started the expulsions.