Europe

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A top adviser to Ukraine’s president has cited military chiefs as saying 10,000 to 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the country’s nine-month struggle against Russia’s invasion, a rare comment on such figures and far below estimates of Ukrainian casualties from Western leaders.

MOSCOW, December 1. /TASS/: The Russian Foreign Ministry denounced on Thursday a Bundestag resolution classifying the mass starvation in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1932-1933 as genocide as yet another attempt to justify the campaign to demonize Russia being inculcated in Ukraine.

"This is yet another attempt to justify and prop up the Western-sponsored campaign being inculcated in Ukraine to demonize Russia and to pit ethnic Ukrainians against the Russians and other ethnicities in Russia and across the former USSR," the Ministry said in a statement.

MOSCOW, December 1. /TASS/: Russia hits only those infrastructure facilities in Ukraine that have military significance, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a press conference on European security issues on Thursday.

"The infrastructure that is now under attack is crucial to the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces and nationalist battalions," Lavrov said.

MOSCOW, December 1. /TASS/: The fortunes of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen have plunged by almost $74.3 billion this year, according to the released Bloomberg Billionaires Index calculated among other things on the basis of corporate stock prices.

MINSK, December 1. /TASS/: Belarus is aware of active militarization in the neighboring countries, but it does not think that hostilities against it can begin in the near future, Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin said on Thursday following a meeting of key military, law enforcement and security officials at President Alexander Lukashenko’s office.

Dec 1 (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday big problems had accumulated in the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, accusing the West of spurning the chance to make the OSCE a real bridge with Russia after the Cold War.

At a news conference, Lavrov gave a long recital of Russian historical grievances against the West, saying the "reckless enlargement" of NATO had devalued the basic principles of the 57-nation OSCE, Europe's top security and rights watchdog.

VILNIUS, Dec 1 (Reuters) - The European Union needs patience as it sanctions Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, as most measures will only have an impact in the medium and long term, Lithuania's prime minister said in an interview at  the  Reuters NEXT conference on Thursday.

"My message is - we need to have patience. Because there are no sanctions that can switch Russia off overnight. It is not possible, we should not look for this," Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte said.

MADRID, Dec 1 (Reuters) - Bomb disposal experts defused a fifth letter bomb on Thursday as Spain stepped up security to confront a spate of explosive devices sent to high-profile targets, including the prime minister and the Ukrainian ambassador in Madrid.

Early indications suggest that all five of the packages were sent from within Spain, the country's Deputy Interior Minister told journalists.

KYIV, Dec 1 (Reuters) - Ukraine's military said on Thursday Russia had pulled some troops from towns on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River from Kherson city, the first official Ukrainian report of a Russian withdrawal on what is now the main front line in the south.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s parliament on Wednesday approved a resolution recognizing as genocide Ukraine’s 1930s “Holodomor,” a famine believed to have killed more than 3 million Ukrainians under the repressive rule of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

The resolution was brought to the lower house, or Bundestag, by the three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition and the main opposition bloc. After a debate attended by Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, it passed with their support in a show of hands, while the two other opposition parties abstained.