🚨Vladimir Putin could use chemical weapons to break the siege of Mariupol.
Warnings from the US of “clear signs” Russia is considering using chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine have raised the spectre of gas attacks🧵👇 telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…
⚠️There are fears Ukraine may soon experience scenes all too familiar from Syria…
…where witnesses described watching helplessly as their loved ones choked to death after chemical weapons were used
🗣️“The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t?” Fiona Hill, the British-born Russia expert and former White House advisor said last month
🗣️“The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok.
“Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia...The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants”
🇺🇸US intelligence has been remarkably accurate in predicting Russia’s actions in the war so far, and the timing of the latest warning raises concerns for the fate of Mariupol.
The city has held out for almost a month against relentless shelling
Russia appears hellbent on capturing the Mariupol, and has committed more than 6,000 troops to the battle without success.
➡️Electricity, food, water and medical supplies have been cut off, yet still residents refuse to surrender
It is the sort of scenario where many observers fear Putin could turn to weapons of mass destruction
🇺🇦Mariupol is a strategic port, but at this point its significance may lie more in Putin’s need for something he can sell to Russians as a victory.
Seizing the city would give Russia a land bridge to Crimea and cut Ukraine off from the Sea of Azov
🔴But there are doubts over Russia’s capability to carry out sustained traditional chemical weapons attacks of the sort seen in Syria and in the Iran-Iraq war.
Here's the latest on the global tech outage from reporter @matthfield:
Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.