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JOHANNESBURG - SA and Finland may be friends, but the two countries differ on the Russia-Ukraine war.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and his Finnish counterpart, President Sauli Väinämö Niinistö, spent a considerable amount of time discussing the war which started in February last year.
They laid bare their views during a joint press briefing after Niinistö’ s state visit at the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Tuesday. Ramaphosa again stood firm on South Africa’s ‘non-aligned’ position while Niinistö outright condemned Russia for invading Ukraine.
Niinistö said, “The war in Ukraine and how it started is that the big neighbour attacks a smaller one from different sides of the country.” He said it was ‘a full invasion’ and it had aroused feelings among Europeans that it was wrong.
“When people have an opinion, it reflects on politics and this feeling was surely noted. Why (our) government decided to help Ukraine in Finland was because we were attacked by the Soviet Union in 1939 and we were left almost alone. This is in our memory.”
A Finnish journalist asked Ramaphosa why SA has resisted calls to condemn Russia.
Reiterating SA’s position, Ramaphosa said, “We have been very clear right from the beginning that conflicts of whatever nature are best resolved through negotiation.”
This, Ramaphosa said, was a lesson be‘be’stresolv‘edthrough‘negotiation‘. taught by the late president Nelson Mandela. He said when Mandela was in prison he always said apartheid should
UKRAINE - Ukrainian secret service agents tried to assassinate Vladimir Putin with a kamikaze drone laden with explosives but their top secret mission failed after the UAV crashed a few miles short of their target, it has been claimed.
The Ukrainian forces reportedly launched the UJ-22 drone, laden with 17 kilogrammes of C4 plastic explosives, from Ukraine on Sunday with the aim of reaching a newly-built industrial estate near Moscow, where Putin was due to visit, German newspaper Bild claims.
But before the deadly drone reached the Rudnevo industrial park on its apparent mission to assassinate the Russian despot, it crashed mere miles away from the site, Bild claimed while citing a tweet by Ukrainian activist Yuriy Romanenko.
Claims
Romanenko, who claims to have close ties to Kyiv’s intelligence services, alleged that Ukrainian secret service agents had received ‘information’ about Putin’s apparent trip to the industrial site and had decided to launch the deadly drone in an attempt to assassinate the president.
He claimed that the kamikaze drone that had crashed in Voroskogo village, 12 miles east of the Rudnevo industrial park was the one that Ukrainian forces had launched as part of the assassination plot.
In a tweet cited by Bild, Romanenko said: ‘‘Putin we are getting closer. Everyone saw the news about the drone that flew to Moscow, but did not explode? So, this drone flew for a reason. ‘Last week, our intelligence officers received information about Putin’s trip to the industrial park in Rudnevo. Accordingly, our kamikaze drone took off, which flew through all the air defenses of the Russian Federation and crashed not far from the industrial park.’’