Europe Watch

MOSCOW, April 24. /TASS/. Joint nuclear exercises by France and Poland will not intimidate Moscow, Andrey Kartapolov, chairman of the Russian State Duma (lower house of parliament) Committee on Defense, told TASS.

The media reported earlier that Paris and Warsaw planned to conduct joint air force exercises over the Baltic Sea involving Rafale fighter jets “equipped with nuclear warheads” to simulate strikes against targets in Russia.

“As for these drills, it’s absolutely clear to us that using aircraft and nuclear weapons against a country that has the world’s best air and missile defenses would in fact mean nuclear suicide. That said, these drills cannot intimidate us, but such plans mean that our relations with France and Poland, which have always been far from perfect, are going to be even more unfriendly,” Kartapolov noted.

A gunman who killed at least six people in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, before taking hostages and barricading himself inside a supermarket on Saturday has been shot and killed by police, Ukrainian officials said.

Ukraine’s special tactical police units stormed the store after attempts to contact the gunman with a negotiator failed, the head of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, Ihor Klymenko, said in a statement on social media. The attacker was killed while resisting arrest, he said.

Speaking to reporters at the scene, Klymenko said that the gunman had killed four bystanders while on the street, before entering the supermarket and killing a fifth person.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that a sixth victim, a young woman, died from her injuries in the hospital.

An Associated Press reporter on the scene saw the bodies of the victims in the street covered by emergency blankets before they were taken away.