Europe

BUDAPEST, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Hungary will veto any European Union sanctions against Russia affecting nuclear energy, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told state radio on Friday.

Ukraine has called on the 27-nation EU to include Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom in sanctions but Hungary, which has a Russian-built nuclear plant it plans to expand with Rosatom, has blocked that. 

Orban reiterated in an interview that sanctions on nuclear energy "must obviously be vetoed".

OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount of metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates.

The Nordic country, a major oil and gas exporter, is considering whether to open its offshore areas to deep-sea mining, a process that requires parliament's approval and has sparked environmental concerns.

KYIV, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Ukraine on Friday battled Russian troops trying to pierce its lines in the east and northeast before Kyiv takes delivery of tanks from its Western allies, saying the fighting showed it needed more weapons to repel the invaders.

Kyiv said fierce battles were under way, a day after at least 11 people were killed in missile and drone strikes which were widely seen in Ukraine as a response to the promises by important allies to send it tanks.

STOCKHOLM, Jan. 26 (Xinhua) -- "The migratory situation in the European Union (EU) is strained," the member states' justice and home affairs ministers agreed at their Council meeting here on Thursday.

"There is an urgent need to strengthen the external borders, increase returns, and prevent irregular migration," they said, according to a statement issued by the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the EU.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian shelling killed at least 10 Ukrainian civilians and wounded 20 others in a day, the office of Ukraine’s president reported Friday as the country worked to recover from an earlier wave of Russian missile strikes and drone attacks.

MOSCOW (AP) — A former Russian Orthodox monk, who denied that the coronavirus existed and defied the Kremlin, was handed a seven-year prison sentence Friday.

Nikolai Romanov, 67, who was known as Father Sergiy until his excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Church, urged his followers to disobey the Russian government’s lockdown measures and spread conspiracy theories about a global plot to control the masses.

A court in Moscow convicted him of inciting hatred. His lawyer immediately announced plans to appeal.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The global chemical weapons watchdog said Friday that its investigators found “reasonable grounds to believe” Syria’s air force dropped two cylinders containing chlorine gas on the city of Douma in April 2018, killing 43 people.

A report by a team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons offered the latest confirmation that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons during his country’s grinding civil war.

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — The foreign ministers of France and the Netherlands paid an official visit on Friday to a military base in Romania where both nations station troops as a part of a NATO battlegroup that was bolstered in the wake of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

Catherine Colonna of France and Wopke Hoekstra of the Netherlands visited the military base in Cincu, central Romania, along with their Romanian counterpart, Bogdan Aurescu.

26 Jan 2023; MEMO: France has promised to speed up the handover of its colonial archives to Algeria, and to clean up the sites where it conducted nuclear tests in the Sahara Desert in the 1960s, the ministry of foreign affairs in Algiers has announced.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia fired more missiles and self-exploding drones at nearly a dozen Ukrainian provinces early Thursday, causing the first war-related death in Kyiv this year and killing at least 11 people overall, according to Ukrainian authorities.