In a video released by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin called soldiers on the front lines in Ukraine “authentic heroes of the people.”
“In recent years, enterprises of the militaryindustrial complex have increased the production and supply of the most demanded weapons to the troops,” the head of state added.
Hours earlier, Ukrainian police announced a new wave of Russian missile and drone attacks that killed three people in Odessa, in the south of the country.
The attack caused a fire in civilian infrastructure, which has since been checked on the messaging platform Telegram, police added.
The governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region (centraleast), Sergiy Lysak, also described on Telegram a “night of horror” in which rescue teams searched for people “buried under the rubble of a badly damaged building” and whose apartments were “completely destroyed “be. ”
In the daily report published this morning, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Army referred to night attacks by Russian drones and missiles in the country, adding that air defense shot down 23 drones.
The United States will today announce new sanctions against Russia, this time targeting more than 500 companies “linked to its support and war machine,” a Treasury spokesman told FrancePresse news agency.
“It will be the whole thing [de sanções] the most important since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine,” the source specified.
The sanctions are imposed by the Departments of Foreign Affairs and Finance and represent the majority of sanctions adopted since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022.
The White House had promised severe sanctions in response to the death last week of Alexei Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief critic, in an Arctic prison.
On Thursday, after meeting with Navalny's widow and daughter, Biden said the sanctions would be “targeted at Putin, who is responsible for the death.”
Since the beginning of the war, thousands of measures have been imposed against executives, businessmen, banks, companies and entire sectors of the Russian Federation's economy.
The United States and other Ukraine allies had hoped to disrupt and isolate the Russian economy through a series of sanctions targeting the financial sector and sources of revenue such as oil sales.
But Putin worked with Iran and other countries to minimize the impact of international sanctions, resulting in the Russian economy growing at an unexpectedly healthy pace, the International Monetary Fund signaled.