Also on today’s menu:
Russia Makes Arrests In Bridge Explosion
Reevaluating Relationship With Saudi Arabia
Fight Over Rosetta Stone
The Group of Seven nations committed to continue supplying Ukraine’s “urgent requirements” for military equipment and demanded that Russia “completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its troops and military equipment from Ukraine,” including Crimea and all “annexed” regions.
Russia’s Monday missile attack on several Ukraine cities destroyed administrative buildings and residences, causing widespread outrage, as well as increased optimism in the Biden administration that fence-sitting countries would join in condemning Russia in a vote scheduled for later this week in the United Nations General Assembly.
Both the United States and Russia have been heavily lobbying among the U.N.’s 193 member nations, 35 of which abstained the last time the assembly voted on a condemnation resolution, just 10 days after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in February. The vote is nonbinding but is seen by its U.S. sponsor and Western allies as an important test of global rejection of Russia.
Russia Makes Arrests In Bridge Explosion
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed the main intelligence department of the Ukraine's Ministry of Defense, its head Kyrylo Budanov, and its employees and agents organized the “terrorist attack” on the Kerch Strait road-and-rail bridge which connects Russia with Crimea, Russian state media RIA Novosti reported Wednesday. “At the moment, five citizens of Russia, three citizens of Ukraine and Armenia, who participated in the preparation of the crime, have been detained as part of a criminal case,” the report by FSB and the Russian Investigative Committee said.
The report said the explosive device was concealed in rolls with polyethylene construction film on 22 pallets.
The bridge is strategically important because it links Russia’s Krasnador region with the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 in a move roundly criticized by the international community.
Reevaluating Relationship With Saudi Arabia
President Biden is reevaluating, and potentially altering, the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia following the announcement by a Saudi-led coalition that it would slash oil production, the White House said Tuesday.
That move by OPEC Plus last week to cut its oil output by 2 million barrels a day could boost oil prices in the United States and worldwide, potentially hurting consumers during a tough winter, and its timing a month before the midterm elections was a political blow to Biden that some in the president’s circle saw as a personal shot at the president.
Since then, calls to revisit America’s support for Saudi Arabia have emerged in Congress and elsewhere. Officials said Tuesday that Biden is doing so.
Fight Over Rosetta Stone
Thousands of Egyptians are demanding the repatriation of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum back to its home country. The iconic artifact, which helped scientists finally decode Egyptian hieroglyphs almost exactly 200 years ago, has been in English hands since Napoleon gave it up — with 16 other artifacts — as part of the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801.
The latest campaign to reclaim the antiquities has gathered more than 2,500 signatures in an online petition launched by a group of prominent archeologists who are urging Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to “work through diplomatic and legal means” to retrieve the antiquities.
According to the group and those who have signed on, the objects are integral to Egypt's national heritage, and their continued display in European institutions deliberately ignores a history of colonialist looting and exploitation.
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