The Foreign Ministry on Sunday said that Ukraine will send its rescue personnel to assist its Eastern European neighbors with victims of severe flooding over the weekend.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said that, at the president’s instructions, he would send units of the state’s emergency forces to Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic to help where they are needed.
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At least eight people have died in Eastern Europe after “Storm Boris” brought a month’s worth of rain to populations in Prague, Bratislava and Vienna, especially, in a single day. Six of those fatalities took place in Ukraine’s neighbor, Romania, where hundreds of people are still unaccounted for under the debris of destroyed neighborhoods in the eastern Romanian region of Galati. Two bodies were found there on Sunday as rescue operations continue.
Heavy rains in nearby Odesa have also required the response of Ukraine’s emergency services, yet President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered the rescue workers’ foreign deployment in his evening address on Sunday.
“Heavy rains these days, flooding in Odesa Oblast,” he said. “The State Emergency Service of Ukraine, regional and local authorities are all involved.
“Unfortunately, there are also critical situations in our neighboring countries due to these extreme rains. On my instructions, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha offered assistance from the [State Emergency Service] of Ukraine to the affected countries in our part of Europe.”
ISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December, 20, 2024
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk confirmed that Kyiv has offered to send send 100 of its emergency response personnel to Poland to help with the aftermath of severe floods.
Tusk said the gesture was “moving”.
FBI questions suspect armed with assault rifle just outside Trump’s Florida compound who has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine
US investigators on Sunday said they were questioning a man who was found with an AK-47 style rifle on the grounds of the Florida resort of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and who has been a vocal online supporter of Ukraine.
As Trump was golfing on the property alongside fellow New York real estate investor Steve Witkoff, US Secret Service agents charged with the candidate’s protection opened fire on a man later identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, after the bodyguards spotted him wielding an assault rifle.
Routh fled the scene, under fire, in a black Nissan SUV, but was arrested by West Palm County Sherriff deputies nearby.
Trump and Witkoff were unharmed. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents said it was as yet unclear if Routh had fired any shots himself, but investigators said they are treating it as an assassination attempt, nonetheless.
Routh, 58, reportedly visited Ukraine in 2022 and has repeatedly posted about Ukraine on social media. “I AM WILLING TO FLY TO KRAKOW AND GO TO THE BORDER OF UKRAINE TO VOLUNTEER AND FIGHT AND DIE…Can I be the example We must win,” Routh posted to X in March 2022.
In another post, he wrote, “We need to burn the Kremlin to the ground.”
Once the news hit the wires, social media was abuzz with claims of a “fake” assassination attempt.
Trump famously survived an earlier assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July, with a bullet slightly grazing his right earlobe, just days before the Republican National Convention.
The latest incident happened at around 1:30 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday.
The Associated Press reported that Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said that Routh was positioned roughly 300 to 500 yards away from Trump, “concealed in shrubbery that lines the course just a few holes ahead of where Trump was.” Because Trump is merely a presidential candidate, the Secret Service could not establish as wide a perimeter around the property as they normally would do if Trump were actually the president.
“If he was [the president], we would’ve had this entire golf course surrounded. But because he’s not, the security is limited to the areas that the Secret Service deems possible,” Bradshaw said.
CNN reported that security spotted Routh in the bushes a few holes ahead of Trump and Witkoff, who were making their way from the fifth to the sixth hole when the agents opened fire.
Zelensky renews calls on the West to finally OK long-range weapons use deeper into Russia
On a day when Moscow’s glide bombs killed and injured apartment-building residents in Kharkiv, and Russian former president Dmitry Medvedev (dubbed the “Archangel of the Apocalypse”) again rattled his nuclear saber about Kyiv’s use of NATO armament, Zelensky renewed his calls on the West to drop their restrictions on the use of the long-range weapons given to Kyiv to put an end to these attacks on civilians.
The president said that Russia launches “at least 100 such air attacks” per day.
“Only a systematic solution makes it possible to oppose this terror: the long-range solution to destroy Russian military aviation where it is based,” Zelensky said in his regular evening address. “We are waiting for appropriate decisions coming primarily from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy.”
After a guided Russian bomb detonated an apartment building in Kharkiv, rescuers located the dead body of an elderly woman from the rubble.
The mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, announced on Telegram on Sunday night that “updated reports say 41 people have been injured. Among them there are four children, the youngest is one year old.”
Meanwhile, Medvedev warned the US and other allies, in very undiplomatic terms, that Moscow’s “patience” was running out on Western aid to Ukraine, especially with strikes within Russian territory on the uptick.
He said that a nuclear conflict “is really not needed by anyone,” and added that such a response would be “an extremely difficult decision with irreversible consequences.
“However, the pompous Anglo-Saxon imbeciles do not want to admit one thing: any patience comes to an end.”
Medvedev concluded, however, that Moscow doesn’t necessarily need to use the nuclear option as it has access to new non-nuclear weapons technologies that could reduce Kyiv to “a giant molten spot” if and when its patience runs out.
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