Month: March 2022

Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who hosted the Oscars in 2017 and 18, said: “Usually when someone’s asked to leave and refuses to go, that’s when security comes in and takes that person away. But in this case, they decided to give him an Oscar and let him back on stage to speak.”

“Putin started it last Wednesday, with his first comment about requiring the change to payment in roubles, and now the EU has responded at a political level, saying: ‘Well, no, we won’t,’” he told the BBC World Service. “Something has got to give here.”

Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said talks had been “meaningful” and Ukraine’s proposals on neutrality would be put to President Vladimir Putin, holding out the possibility of a summit involving Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. However, he made clear that before that could happen a treaty would have to be drafted and approved by negotiators, and then […]

While 140,000 civilians have managed to escape from besieged Mariupol, another 170,000 are still trapped there, the city council says. Relentless Russian shelling for more than three weeks has reduced the city to ruins, its terrified civilians hiding in cellars, desperately short of water, food and medicine.

“It’s not an Oscar and it’s not an award, it’s really just an acknowledgement,” ceremony producer Will Packer told Little Gold Men. “And to me, that’s a good thing. This ceremony doesn’t have to be all awards, bereft of entertainment, just all about the amazing artists and craftspeople. We can do both.”

“The combat capabilities of the Ukrainian armed forces have been substantially reduced, which allows us to concentrate our main efforts on achieving the main goal: the liberation of Donbas,” he added, referring to an area in eastern Ukraine largely in the hands of Russian-backed separatists.

A spokesperson for the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (UNOHR), whose monitoring mission in Ukraine has been documenting the abductions, told the BBC that those being targeted “are mostly representatives of local communities, journalists and people who were vocal about their pro-Ukrainian positions”.

This, says Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, is the “new normal” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia will get exactly what it didn’t want – more, not less Nato near its border. Nato battlegroups will stretch all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea for the foreseeable future.