Sweden and Finland to formally submit Nato bids ‘hand in hand’
Announcement at joint press conference comes as Turkey maintains it will not support the applications
Sweden and Finland will formally submit simultaneous requests to join Nato on Wednesday, the Swedish prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, has said, in a seismic shift in Europe's security architecture after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Finland and Sweden have agreed to go through this entire process hand in hand, and we will tomorrow file the application together," Andersson told a joint news conference with the Finnish president, Sauli Niinisto, in Stockholm.
The first war crimes trial since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine starts in Kyiv on Wednesday. Vadim Shishimarin, 21, has been charged over the death of a 62-year-old man in north-eastern Ukraine on 28 February. The soldier from Irkutsk in Siberia faces a possible life sentence. He understands what he is being accused of," his lawyer, Viktor Ovsiannikov, told AFP, without revealing the case for the defence. Two Russian servicemen are due to go on trial from Thursday, accused of firing rockets at civilian infrastructure in the Kharkiv region.
The chief prosecutor for the international criminal court, Karim Khan, said he sent a team of 42 investigators, forensic experts and support personnel to Ukraine to look into suspected war crimes, in the court's largest ever such operation. Ukraine has accused Russian forces of torturing and killing civilians.
The US announced the launch of a $6m program to capture and analyse evidence of war crimes, including satellite imagery and information shared on social media, so it can be used in ongoing and future accountability mechanisms.
The fate of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers in Mariupol who have ended weeks of resistance at the Azovstal steelworks remains unclear, after the fighters surrendered and were transferred to Russian-controlled territory. The Russian parliament plans to take up a resolution on Wednesday to prevent the exchange of Azov Regiment fighters, who held out for months inside the plant, according to Russian news agencies.
UN chief Antonio Guterres is expected to publicly disclose on Wednesday that he is in talks with Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, the US and the European Union aimed at restoring Ukraine grain shipments and reviving fertiliser exports from Russia and Belarus. The war in Ukraine has fuelled soaring global prices, which Guterres warned would worsen crises in poor countries.
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