Europe

LONDON, March 2 (Reuters) - Britain's security services missed a "significant" opportunity to take action which might have prevented a 2017 deadly suicide bombing at the end of an Ariana Grande pop concert in Manchester, an inquiry into the attack concluded on Thursday.

Twenty-two people - the youngest aged just eight - died in the blast and more than 200 were injured when a man detonated a homemade bomb at Manchester Arena as parents arrived to collect their children following the U.S. singer's show.

LARISSA, Greece, March 2 (Reuters) - Anger and sorrow grew in Greece on Thursday over a devastating train crash that killed dozens of passengers along with crew members near the central city of Larissa in the country's worst rail disaster.

Carriages were thrown off the tracks, crushed and engulfed in flames when a high-speed passenger train with more than 350 people on board collided head-on with a freight train on Tuesday. They were on the same track.

LONDON, March 2 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday Russia had been hit by a "terrorist attack" in the southern Bryansk region bordering Ukraine, and vowed to crush what he said was a Ukrainian sabotage group that had fired at civilians.

Ukraine accused Russia of staging a false "provocation", but also appeared to imply some form of operation had indeed been carried out by Russian anti-government partisans.

March 2 (Reuters) - The founder of Russia's Wagner mercenary force on Thursday published a video showing his fighters inside Bakhmut, the small Ukrainian city Wagner has been fighting to capture for months.

Wagner has spearheaded Russia's assault on Bakhmut, which had a pre-war population of 75,000, and has made steady but incremental progress around the city's outskirts in recent months, endangering Ukraine's supply lines.

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary has further delayed a vote on ratifying Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession bids, according to an updated schedule published Thursday on the National Assembly’s website, the latest in a series of postponements that have frustrated Western allies.

The delay, which pushes the vote back by two weeks to the parliamentary session beginning March 20, comes as Hungary remains the only NATO member country besides Turkey that hasn’t yet approved the two Nordic countries’ bids to join the Western military alliance.

GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) — A senior Russian diplomat warned Thursday that increasing Western support for Ukraine could trigger an open conflict between nuclear powers.

Speaking at the U.N. conference on disarmament, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov denounced the U.S. and its allies for openly declaring the goal of defeating Russia in a “hybrid” war, arguing that it violates their obligations under international agreements and is fraught with the war in Ukraine spilling out of control.

BERLIN (AP) — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday called on China to refrain from sending weapons to Russia and instead use its influence to press Moscow for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.

“My message to Beijing is clear: use your influence in Moscow to press for the withdrawal of Russian troops, and do not supply weapons to the aggressor Russia,” Scholz said in a speech to German parliament.

THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) — Emergency crews cut trough the mangled metal paneling of a passenger train on Thursday, progressing “centimeter by centimeter” in their efforts to pull more bodies from the burned wreckage of a head-on collision in northern Greece that left at least 43 people dead. Rail workers went on strike to protest years of underfunding they say has left the country’s rail system in a dangerous state.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian officials accused Ukrainian saboteurs on Thursday of crossing into western Russia and attacking local villages, an accusation that Ukraine denied and alleged would be used by Moscow to step up attacks.

The exact circumstances of the incident reported in the Bryansk region were unclear, including what the strategic purpose of such an attack would be.

1 Mar 2023; MEMO: Russia's Foreign Ministry said, on Wednesday, that Moscow would only agree to extend the Black Sea grain deal, which allows grain to be safely exported from Ukrainian ports, if the interests of its agricultural producers are taken into account, Reuters reports.