As a missile hits a Kyiv apartment building, survivors lose a lifetime's possessions in seconds
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — With trembling hands and labored breath, Serhii Slobodiannyk meticulously searched his fire-damaged apartment, seeking to salvage any of his family’s treasured belongings following a Russian missile attack on Kyiv.
“Everything I had worked for over 30 years was destroyed in less than a second,” says Slobodiannyk, still dressed in the clothes he managed to throw on in his burning apartment Tuesday.
He and his wife, Olena, had moved into the building in Kyiv’s Solomianskyi district in 1984. Now the structure is uninhabitable — ravaged by fire, part of its facade torn off, and a huge crater gouged next to it by the missile that struck at 7:40 a.m.
Two of the building’s residents were killed and 54 were injured in Tuesday’s bombardment that also killed two others elsewhere in the region surrounding Kyiv. The barrage was part of Russia’s recent winter campaign against urban areas in the nearly 2-year-old war.
It was the first attack in months in which an apartment building suffered such heavy damage in Kyiv, where air defenses have been strengthened considerably since the start of the war.
The attacks have left many residents rattled and anxious.
In Slobodiannyk’s apartment, family photos hung on the charred walls, burned books were strewn on the shelves, and a damaged exercise bike stood useless in the corner.
The 63-year-old moved painfully, his feet still sore from being cut by shards of glass as he and his wife scrambled to safety in the smoky minutes after the flat was set ablaze. They had to climb to the ninth floor and escape via the roof because the fire engulfed the stairwell, blocking their way out.
On Wednesday, Slobodiannyk and his wife were among over 100 residents and volunteers who gathered at the building in freezing temperatures and snow to clear away debris and save anything they could.
Curious onlookers also stopped by, approaching the massive crater to taking photos and videos in an attempt to grasp the scale of the destruction. New Year’s decorations could be seen in the windows of blackened apartments.
It was the second big missile attack that Russia unleashed in less than a week, as air raid sirens provided a grim soundtrack to the holidays for millions across Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had launched at least 500 missiles and drones in the last five days.
Bohdan Stanekevych, who wasn’t home when the missile struck, inspected the ruins of his first-floor apartment Wednesday.
When part of the Kyiv region was occupied in the first days of the invasion in 2022, he and his family stayed in their other house near Bucha, spending most of the time in the basement, and he had believed that was the most difficult time of the war.
Until now.
“Today you’re alive, and tomorrow everything is gone. How can you find strength here?” he asked.
As his apartment burned on Tuesday, Slobodiannyk said he believed he and his wife were going to die.
“We were preparing to say goodbye to our lives because it was so hard to breathe,” he said.
But they and their neighbors were found by emergency crews, who led them to safety.
On the building’s fifth-floor, in the apartment above his, a woman who was a university professor was killed by flying glass.
“I can say that I am coming back today with victory,” Slobodiannyk said, adding that he survived when the blast hurled a carpet over him, shielding from the broken glass.
“It was like a tornado,” he recalled. Now they are moving in with family members.
His wife, Olena, described their survival as a one-in-a-million chance.
“Our relatives survived the Second World War, and we are going through this,” she said with a nervous smile.
How Ukrainian special forces secured a critical Dnipro River crossing in southern Ukraine
KHERSON, Ukraine (AP) — Their first battle plan was outdated the moment the dam crumbled. So the Ukrainian special forces officers spent six months adapting their fight to secure a crossing to the other side of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine.
But it wasn’t enough just to cross the river. They needed backup to hold it. And for that, they needed proof that it could be done. For one of the officers, nicknamed Skif, that meant a flag — and a photo op.
Skif, Ukrainian shorthand for the nomadic Scythian people who founded an empire on what is now Crimea, moves like the camouflaged amphibian that he is: Calculating, deliberate, until the time to strike.
He is an officer in Center 73, one of Ukraine’s most elite units of special forces — frontline scouts, drone operators, underwater saboteurs. Their strike teams are part of the Special Operations Forces that run the partisans in occupied territories, sneak into Russian barracks to plant bombs and prepare the ground for reclaiming territory seized by Russia.
Their mission on the more dynamic of the two main fronts in the six-month counteroffensive reflects many of the problems of Ukraine’s broader effort. It’s been one of the few counteroffensive successes for the Ukrainian army.
By late May, the Center 73 men were in place along the river’s edge, some of them almost within view of the Kakhovka Dam. They were within range of the Russian forces who had controlled the dam and land across the Dnipro since the first days after the February 2022 full-scale invasion. And both sides knew Ukraine’s looming counteroffensive had its sights on control of the river as the key to reclaim the occupied south.
In the operation’s opening days, on June 6, an explosion destroyed the dam, sending a wall of reservoir water downstream, killing untold numbers of civilians, and washing out the Ukrainian army positions.
“We were ready to cross. And then the dam blew up,” Skif said. The water rose 20 meters (yards), submerging supply lines, the Russian positions and everything else in its path for hundreds of kilometers. The race was on: Whose forces could seize the islands when the waters receded, and with them full control of the Dnipro?
For most Ukrainians who see them on the streets in the nearly deserted frontline villages of the Kherson region, they are the guys in T-shirts and flip-flops — just regular people. The locals who refused to evacuate have all become accustomed to the sounds of war, so even their unnerving calm in the face of air raid alarms, nearby gunfire and artillery doesn’t seem unusual.
AP joined one of the clandestine units several times over six months along the Dnipro. The frogmen are nocturnal. They transform themselves from nondescript civilians into elite fighters, some in wetsuits and some in boats. In the morning, when their operations end, they’re back to anonymity.
They rarely take credit for their work and Ukrainians rarely learn about their operations. But Russian military statements gleefully and erroneously announcing the destruction of Center 73 are an indication of their effectiveness.
JUNE 2023
The men had the most modern equipment, night-vision goggles, waterproof rifles that can be assembled in a matter of seconds, underwater breathing apparatus that produces no surface bubbles, and cloaks that hide their heat signature during nighttime raids.
It was a matter of days before the start of the counteroffensive, and Center 73 had already located the Russian positions they would seize on the Dnipro River islands. Skif’s men were within earshot of the June 6 explosion that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam, flooded vast stretches of the Kherson region, and upended Skif’s attack plan.
An AP investigation found Russian forces had the means, motive and opportunity to blow up the dam.
Both the Russians and Ukrainians retreated from the river to regroup — Russians to the south and Ukrainians to the north.
Abandoned homes, clubs, shops became headquarters, with banks of computer screens filling the rooms and improvised weapons workshops nearby. Always secretive, frequently changing locations, they meticulously plan every operation, they sleep only a few hours during the day with curtains closed.
They wake around sunset, load gear into a 4X4 and drive to a different point on the riverbank to scout new routes for a counteroffensive, provoke Russian forces into shooting at them to pinpoint the enemy’s location, retrieve soggy caches of supplies with their boat. Periodically, they captured a Russian soldier stuck in a tree or found a clutch of landmines washed up on shore.
And they themselves were stuck. Other special forces took part in battles in eastern Ukraine, the other main front in the counteroffensive. Skif’s men waited patiently for the water to subside so they could seize positions and lay the groundwork for the arrival of infantry and marines in the Kherson region.
Skif, a veteran of the 2022 battle for Mariupol who had survived 266 days as a prisoner of war, wanted to fight. He had been part of Center 73 before Mariupol and rejoined after he was freed in a POW exchange.
Ukraine created its special forces in response to Russia’s lightning-fast annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbas in 2014, a precursor to the wide-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“We realized that we were much smaller in terms of number than our enemy,” said Oleksandr Kindratenko, a press officer for Special Operations Forces. “The emphasis was placed on quality. These were supposed to be small groups performing operational or strategic tasks.”
He said they were trained and equipped in part by Europeans, including those from NATO countries, but their own recent battle experience means they are now as much teachers as students.
Tasks that the unit considers routine — scouting as close to Russians as possible, planting explosives under their noses, underwater operations — most soldiers would consider high-risk. High-risk missions are practically a death wish.
Skif knew he first had to plan and persuade the generals that if his men could secure a bridgehead — a strategic crossing point — it would be worthwhile to send troops. And that would mean high-risk river missions.
“My phone book is a little graveyard,” he said. “A lot of good, decent people are dead. They were killed on the battlefield. One burned to death in an armored truck. One was shot by howitzers. Somebody stepped on a landmine. Everyone died differently, and there are so many of them.”
JULY – AUGUST 2023
The water retreated in July. The Russians and Ukrainians advanced again toward the river from opposite directions, the Russians from the south and Ukrainians from the north.
Groups of Center 73 scouted and advanced along the river. The mission for Skif’s unit was to reclaim an island near the dam, now a web of cracked mud and dead trees. Their network of spies in the Kherson region, as well as drones and satellite images, told them where Russian forces had re-positioned.
They disembarked the boats and moved in, walking through the bare branches of the forest through swarms of mosquitoes so loud their bodycam picked up the sound. One of the men tripped a wire connected to a grenade and flung himself as far as he could away from the Russian explosive.
Just as the shrapnel pierced his back, mayhem broke out. The injured Ukrainian crawled toward the unit’s waiting boat 3 kilometers (2 miles) away, as the Russian troops who set the boobytrap rained gunfire on them. Skif’s men made it to the boat, which sprang a leak, and retreated back to their side of the Dnipro. Russians established their position on the island, and it took weeks more for the Ukrainians to expel them.
Then new orders came. Go upstream and breach Russian defenses beneath a destroyed railway bridge.
The men had an often-underestimated advantage over their Russian enemy: Many Ukrainians grow up bilingual and understand Russian communications intercepted in real time, while Russian soldiers need a translator for Ukrainian.
So when Skif’s unit started picking up Russian radio communications by the railway bridge, they immediately grasped how many men they were up against and the kind of munitions they would face. They made the crossing, avoided the Russians, and waited for backup,
That’s when their advantage evaporated. In a single battle, the Russians sent Iskander missiles and dozens of drones, dropping hundreds of grenades.
“In the air, they had absolute dominance compared to us and they held the ground,” he said.
The backup was nowhere near enough. Ukrainian forces retreated under heavy fire. More men out of commission and another difficult task ahead.
SEPTEMBER — OCTOBER 2023
A lucky thing happened soon after that battle. A Russian officer who claimed he’d been opposed to the war since its beginning was sent to the front in Kherson. It was, he later said, every bit as bad as he’d feared.
He made contact with Ukrainian intelligence and said he had 11 comrades who felt similarly. The group surrendered to Skif and his men.
The Russians told Skif exactly what he needed to know about their unit on the island they were now tasked with taking, just outside the village of Krynky.
He was sure he could take the island and more with 20 experienced men. But not without the promise of sufficient backup so Ukrainian regular forces could hold the territory. Fine, his commander said. He’d get the backup — if he returned with footage of his unit in the village hoisting the Ukrainian flag.
And that’s how, in mid-October, a Ukrainian drone carrying the national blue and yellow flag came to fly above Krynky at just the moment Skif and his men made their way to the occupied village across the river. They got their photo op to prove the road was cleared, sent it to the military headquarters, and established the bridgehead.
NOVEMBER — DECEMBER 2023
Multiple Ukrainian brigades were sent to hold the position and have been there ever since.
But nighttime temperatures are dipping well below freezing, and Ukrainian forces are vastly underequipped compared to the Russians nearby. Holding and advancing in winter is much harder on soldiers’ bodies and their morale.
In recent weeks, Russia has sent waves of glide bombs — essentially enormous munitions retrofitted with gliding apparatus to allow them to be launched from dozens of kilometers (miles) away, as well as swarms of grenade-launching drones and Chinese all-terrain vehicles, according to the Institute for the Study of War and the Hudson Institute, two American think-tanks analyzing open-source footage from the area.
In a news conference earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the battle and acknowledged Russian forces had pulled back “several meters.” But he insisted Ukrainian forces were battling pointlessly and losing far more than they gained.
“I don’t even know why they’re doing this,” Putin said.
Despite having never fully controlled the territory during the six-month counteroffensive, Russia claims it as its own.
And Ukrainian forces and Center 73 keep fighting into the new year.
“This is our work,” Skif said. “No one knows about it, no one talks about it, and we do it with little reward except to benefit our country.”
Ukraine: a divided America seeks moral clarity in a war against democracy
Americans have been consumed by the war in Ukraine with intensive media coverage across news platforms. This is unusual. Foreign affairs do not usually consume the American public unless the US is directly involved and American lives are at risk.
What explains this intense interest and what does it mean for a deeply polarised American political culture dealing with its own crisis of democracy? Some commentators read it as a symbolic moment of consensus in a divided nation. In the view of Fox News journalist Howard Kurtz,
the country is pretty unified on the Ukraine crisis, and the space between Republicans and Democrats has visibly narrowed … vast majorities in each party favour the ban on Russian oil and gas, even with the knowledge that it will boost prices here at home. That’s about as close to consensus as we ever come in this country.
This is an appealing analysis, given the deep divisions in the US. However, it is misleading. The broad public interest in the war is not producing a new consensus but mirroring the crisis in American democracy – albeit in a skewed fashion.
The intensive coverage of the war in Ukraine has elevated particular frames reflecting American interests. By far the most prominent is that this is a war in defence of democracy – though this is often presented less as a geopolitical matter than as a dramatic spectacle of “a plucky country slaying a dictatorship”.
But the popularity of this framing does not constitute a consensus, as politicians and pundits seek to spin the meaning of the war in their own interests.
US president, Joe Biden, and his Democratic Party are keen to promote the war on democracy frame, hoping it will draw attention to what they view as threats to democratic institutions in the US. Undoubtedly, they further hope it will provide the president with a much-needed bounce in the polls at a time when his approval ratings hover at a dire 42% with challenging mid-term elections on the horizon.
Many conservatives bluntly repudiate attempts to associate threats to democracy in the US with the war in Ukraine. Others, further right and mostly allied with the previous president, Donald Trump, claim that the war reflects back on America to reveal the weakness of Biden’s leadership. Trump himself has championed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” on Putin’s part.
There is also a counter-narrative from the left that has had some airing, but little mainstream traction – to argue that the intense interest in the war by Americans reflects a Eurocentric (or racist) attitude. They point to the overt bias of anchors and correspondents and the hypocrisy in sidestepping previously vaulted standards of independent journalism. There are many examples.
The war in Ukraine has become a Rorschach test of Americans’ perceptions of and anxieties about democracy. Neither liberal democracy at home, nor its global equivalent – a rules-based liberal world order – are as taken for granted as they once were.
For the broader public, following the war across media platforms, their intense interest represents a desire for moral clarity amid the disruptions and confusion of ethnocentric nationalism, populist politics and conspiracy theory roiling the public sphere.
Many Americans are seeing in this war a form of conflict that is much easier to grasp and engage with than the domestic civic fractures. It is a good war, a “David versus Goliath” conflict, with clear lines of good and evil. As such, it is also a distraction, for such moral clarity obscures as much as it reveals about domestic or international challenges to democracy.
And so Fox’s national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin can say to her audience, “If you look in [Vladimir Putin’s] eyes, you see someone who has gone completely mad”. As journalism, this is ridiculous – but it mimics the collective avoidance of disquieting realities.
In the same broadcast, Griffin goes on to claim that Russia’s invasion represents “a moment in history … something we have not seen for generations”. This claim chimes with a common narrative among American journalists and pundits commenting on the war on Ukraine – that it represents a return of history, understood as great power aggression.
Such claims either directly or indirectly reference US political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s famous proclamation of “the end of history” – that the end of the cold war represented a globally defining triumph of free market liberal capitalism over communism.
A similar claim is made by former defense secretary Robert Gates, who writes that: “Putin’s invasion … has ended America’s 30-year holiday from history.” For Gates, and many other foreign policy alumni and experts in the US, the war should serve as a wake-up call and an opportunity to reconstitute a global Pax Americana.
Fukuyama himself has added to this chorus, seeing in the western surge of support for Ukraine a resurgent liberalism. “There’s a lot of pent-up idealism,” he writes. “The spirit of 1989 went to sleep, and now it’s being reawakened.”
What is remarkable about all this talk about the return of history is the amnesia it represents, conveniently forgetting that America’s military never took a holiday from history over the last 30 years – as the people of Iraq and Afghanistan can attest – and that America’s efforts to bring democracy to other parts of the world have been deadly and disastrous.
The apparent American consensus about the war in Ukraine is reducing that war to a spectacle of imperilled democracy that only further cements Americans collective amnesia about the failings of liberal democracy around the world. The reasons for America’s political decay at home and its relative decline abroad will not be found in the eyes of Vladimir Putin.
Pope's ex-envoy tried in Paris for sex assaults, without him
PARIS (AP) — A sexual assault trial for the Vatican’s former ambassador to France went ahead without him Tuesday after he produced a doctor’s note saying it was too dangerous for him to travel from Rome to Paris in the midst of France’s resurgent coronavirus epidemic.
Lawyers for the accusers of retired Archbishop Luigi Ventura asked that the trial be pushed back because he wasn’t present.
But the court ruled against a postponement and then heard detailed testimony from multiple men that Ventura groped their buttocks in public settings.
The accusers included a former seminarian, Mahe Thouvenel, who said he was grabbed repeatedly by the clergyman when they celebrated Mass in December 2018.
“These are facts that happened to me, that hurt me, and I suffered a lot,” he said.
Asked in court what he would have said to Ventura had the former envoy attended the trial, Thouvenel replied: “Monseigneur, why did you do that?”
Represented by his defense team, Ventura was tried in absentia on five counts of alleged sexual assault. Three of his alleged victims who filed police complaints of groping and inappropriate touching on their buttocks were in court.
Ventura has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. Sexual assault is punishable by up to five years imprisonment and fines in France.
His lawyer, Solange Doumic, argued that the case had been blown out of proportion, to become “the trial of the Vatican, of hidden homosexuality at the Vatican.”
She characterized the accusations as “minor.” She said Ventura touched hips or backs but his intentions were never sexual, that any gestures lasted no more than a few seconds, and that he might not have realized they could be regarded as inappropriate. She also said Ventura had experienced behavioral problems since he was operated on for a brain tumor in 2016.
Explaining his absence to the court, she said Ventura’s doctor deemed it “completely unreasonable” for the 75-year-old to travel to Paris as its hospitals are again struggling to handle coronavirus cases.
Exceptionally, the Vatican last year lifted the ambassador’s diplomatic immunity, allowing for his trial.
But during Tuesday’s hearing, the prosecutor, Alexis Bouroz, produced a Vatican letter that said Rome still reserves the right not to apply any eventual punishment for Ventura, if he is convicted.
The prosecutor agreed that the trial should proceed without Ventura. He said he didn’t believe the retired archbishop would come for any future court hearings, and so delaying it would just waste time.
“The only question I ask myself is why does he deny the facts?” he said. “This question will remain unanswered.”
He asked for a 10-month suspended jail term.
Lawyers for the alleged victims seethed at the suggestion that the Vatican could spare Ventura punishment, if he is convicted.
“The Holy See doesn’t give a hoot for your deliberations,” Thouvenel’s lawyer, Edmond Frety, told the three judges.
The court said it would deliver its verdict on Dec. 16.
Thouvenel said his seminary kicked him out after he filed a police complaint. Under questioning from Ventura’s lawyer, he put his right hand on the top of his right buttock to show one of the spots where he was allegedly groped.
“It’s violent,” Thouvenel said. “It sticks in your memory.”
Another of the accusers, Mathieu De La Souchere, alleged that Ventura touched his buttocks repeatedly during a reception at Paris City Hall.
The judge said that, during prior questioning, Ventura explained his behavior by saying he had a “Latin” temperament and that there was nothing sexual about his gestures.
“Mr. Ventura is lying,” De La Souchere told the court.
“There is talk of a hand on a buttock,” he said. “It was more than that.”
The Vatican recalled Ventura last year and he later retired. The Vatican has recalled other diplomats when they get into trouble during overseas postings.
In the most high-profile case, the Vatican recalled its ambassador to the Dominican Republic and prepared to put him on trial in the city-state’s criminal tribunal for allegedly sexually abusing young boys. But he died before the trial started.
Ventura’s trial came the same day that the Vatican released a much-awaited report into Theodore McCarrick, a once-influential American cardinal who was defrocked by Pope Francis in 2019 after a Vatican investigation confirmed decades of rumors that he was a sexual predator.
Russian peacekeepers deploy to secure Nagorno-Karabakh truce
MOSCOW (AP) — Dozens of Russian peacekeepers destined for Nagorno-Karabakh began deploying Tuesday, hours after Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to halt fighting over the separatist region and amid signs the cease-fire would hold where others hadn’t.
The truce came after significant advances by Azerbaijani forces that the Armenian-backed leader of Nagorno-Karabakh said made it impossible for his side to carry on. It was celebrated in Azerbaijan, but left Armenians bitter, and many stormed government buildings overnight, demanding Parliament invalidate the agreement.
The two countries have been locked in a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh for decades, and there were concerns the hostilities could escalate and draw in Turkey, which threw its weight behind Azerbaijan, and Russia, which has a security pact with Armenia.
If the truce proves lasting, it would be a major diplomatic coup for Russia, which appears to have brokered a deal where others failed and was in a tight spot since it has ties with both sides. Turkey also seemed to come out well, though it remained to be seen if it would be able to expand its influence by securing a higher-profile role in the peace process.
Nagorno-Karabakh lies within Azerbaijan but has been under control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994. Heavy fighting erupted in late September — the biggest escalation of the conflict in a quarter-century — and has left hundreds, possibly thousands, dead. That includes some 1,300 Nagorno-Karabakh troops, according to the region’s officials, and scores of civilians on both sides.
Several cease-fires announced over the past six weeks crumbled almost immediately, but the current agreement appeared to be holding, with neither side reporting any more fighting since it came into force.
It came days after Azerbaijan, which has claimed numerous territorial gains, pressed its offensive deeper into the region and took control of the city of Shushi, strategically positioned on heights overlooking the regional capital of Stepanakert.
Nagorno-Karabakh’s separatist leader Arayik Harutyunyan admitted on Tuesday that “had the hostilities continued at the same pace, we would have lost all of Artsakh (an Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh) within days.”
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said it was “extremely painful for me personally and for our people,” calling the situation a “catastrophe.”
But Pashinian said he was left with no choice and the army had told him it was necessary to stop the fighting.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev called the agreement “a glorious victory.”
The pact was announced by President Vladimir Putin personally early Tuesday, several hours after Azerbaijan downed a Russian helicopter that was flying over Armenia, killing two crew members aboard.
The agreement calls for Armenian forces to turn over control of some areas it held outside the borders of Nagorno-Karabakh, including the Lachin region, which the main road leading from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia passes through. The agreement calls for the road, the so-called Lachin Corridor, to remain open and be protected by Russian peacekeepers.
It also calls for transport links to be established through Armenia connecting Azerbaijan and its western exclave of Nakhchivan, which is surrounded by Armenia, Iran and Turkey.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday that at least 22 planes will be used to transport the peacekeepers, and 12 have already landed in Armenia, on their way to Nagorno-Karabakh. A total of 1,960 Russian peacekeepers are to be deployed under a five-year mandate.
Russia, France and the U.S. — co-chairs of the Minsk Group, set up in the 1990s by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to mediate the conflict — have been trying to secure a cease-fire for weeks, but the efforts yielded little progress.
Putin on Tuesday called the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh “a truly great tragedy” and expressed satisfaction over “agreements reached to end the bloodshed.” Some lawmakers touted Russia’s success.
“Russia managed to do what neither (U.S. President Donald) Trump, nor (French President Emmanuel) Macron did — to end a war,” Yelena Panina, at lawmaker in Russia’s lower house of Parliament, said Tuesday. “Our country has once again reaffirmed its status of a guarantor of peace in South Caucasus.”
The truce was also welcomed by Iran, which has borders with both Armenia and Azerbaijan and has been worried by the fighting after stray mortar rounds and rockets on occasion injured people and damaged buildings in rural areas near the borders.
Turkey hailed Azerbaijan’s “victory.”
“This is a great success,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told a news conference. “Territories that were under occupation for 30 years are being taken back.”
Leaders of Azerbaijan and Turkey announced that Ankara will be involved in monitoring the cease-fire along with Moscow as part of a peacekeeping center, which will be set up to host both Russian and Turkish military.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Tuesday that the center will be located in Azerbaijan and isn’t connected to the peacekeeping efforts outlined in Tuesday’s agreement. Rather, it is “a completely different mission, another part of joint efforts,” Zakharova said.