Europe

WARSAW, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Poland, concerned about fighting around Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, has distributed iodine tablets to regional fire departments to give to people in the event of radioactive exposure, a deputy minister said on Thursday.

Iodine is considered a way of protecting the body against conditions such as thyroid cancer in case of radioactive exposure.

VAALIMAA, Finland, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Finland said on Thursday it was considering barring most Russians from entering the country as traffic across the border from its eastern neighbour "intensified" following President Vladimir Putin's order for a partial military mobilisation.

Finnish land border crossings have remained among the few entry points into Europe for Russians after a string of Western countries shut both physical frontiers and their air space to Russian planes in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

LONDON, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday that any weapons in Moscow's arsenal, including strategic nuclear weapons, could be used to defend territories incorporated in Russia from Ukraine.

Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said that referendums being organised by Russian-installed and separatist authorities in large swathes of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory will take place, and that "there is no going back":

KIEV, Sept. 22 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine and Russia have carried out their largest prisoner exchange since the start of the conflict on Feb. 24, the Coordinating Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said Thursday.

As a result, 215 Ukrainians, including 124 officers, returned home, the agency said.

Among those freed are servicemen from the Azov regiment which fought for Mariupol's Azovstal steel plant, as well as troops from the Ukrainian navy, the State Security Service, the State Customs Service and other agencies.

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary’s governing party said Thursday it wants to poll the country’s citizens on whether they support European Union sanctions imposed against Russia over its war in Ukraine.

Fidesz plans to call for a “national consultation” on energy sanctions which he said had been decided on by the EU’s “Brussels elite,” the party’s caucus leader, Mate Kocsis, said at a news conference Thursday following a closed-door meeting.

LONDON (AP) — On a blustery November day last year Britain’s future king stood before world leaders to deliver a rallying cry that they should “act with all despatch, and decisively” to confront a common enemy.

The clarion call — in the vast, windowless hall of a Glasgow convention center at the opening of the U.N. climate conference — concerned an issue long dear to the heart of the then-Prince Charles.

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — Russian and Ukrainian forces exchanged missile and artillery barrages on Thursday as both sides refused to concede ground despite recent military setbacks for Moscow and the toll on the invaded country after almost seven months of war.

Russian missile strikes in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia left one person dead and five wounded, Ukrainian officials said. Officials in the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk said Ukrainian shelling killed at least six people.

MOSCOW, September 21. /TASS/: Russia at the moment is conducting combat operations not only with Ukraine’s armed forces, but with the collective West, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has said.

"I cannot but emphasize the fact that today we are at war not so much with Ukraine and the Ukrainian army as with the collective West," Shoigu said.

He stressed that Ukraine had almost run out of its own weapons of Soviet manufacture.

MOSCOW, September 21. /TASS/: Russia’s Defense Ministry has determined partial mobilization tasks for all regions of the country. The General Staff has issued the necessary instructions regarding mobilization procedures, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said at the ministry’s board meeting on Wednesday.

He stressed that time was ripe to "put into practice" the experience gained during the annual strategic exercises, and to "timely and efficiently" organize for the notification of all those liable to mobilization.

MOSCOW, September 21. /TASS/: Any prospects for talks with Ukraine after Donbass joins Russia will be impossible, Chairman of the State Duma (the lower house of parliament) Foreign Affairs Committee Leonid Slutsky told reporters on Wednesday.