BANGKOK: Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said Tuesday she would not resign ahead of national elections set for Feb. 2, her voice filling with emotion as she discussed her family’s role in Thai politics.
Yingluck spoke one day after she announced elections — and one day after the main leader of a protest group seeking her ouster told his followers to stay in the streets even as he insisted his movement had now assumed broad political power.
The brazen claim — unbacked by law or control of any state institutions — has nonetheless been taken seriously by protesters and some Thai media. The Nation newspaper blazed the headline “People’s revolution declared” across its front page.
On Monday, the movement, whose goals and methods one critic described as “fascist,” issued what it titled an “order” calling for Yingluck and her Cabinet to step down from their caretaker posts by late Tuesday night.
Protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban said Tuesday evening that his “People’s Democratic Reform Committee” considered the government already null and void, and said that with the claimed political “vacuum,” there would be an appointment of a prime minister who is “acceptable to the people.” The streets of Bangkok were quiet Tuesday, a national holiday, after weeks of sometimes violent political turmoil.
The protesters accuse Yingluck of serving as a proxy for her billionaire brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who lives in self-imposed exile to avoid jail time for a corruption conviction but still wields immense influence in the country.
Yingluck insisted Tuesday that she would remain the interim head of government until the Feb. 2 elections. “I must do my duty as caretaker prime minister according to the constitution,” she said.
“I have retreated as far as I can. So I ask to be treated fairly,” she said to reporters.
Thaksin, a former telecommunications billionaire, was toppled by a 2006 military coup that laid bare a deeper conflict between Thailand’s elite and largely urban middle class on one side, and Thaksin’s power base in the countryside on the other. That base benefited from his populist policies designed to win over the rural poor.
Ever since, the two sides have been dueling for power, sometimes violently. Since the latest unrest began last month, at least five people have been killed and at least 289 injured.
The protesters were not quieted by Monday’s announcement of new elections, saying they cannot win the polls because of corruption. The opposition Democrat Party, allied with the protest movement, has been defeated by Thaksin-allied parties in every election since 2001.
A decree from King Bhumibol Adulyadej named Yingluck as caretaker prime minister until the elections.
A newly formed group of more than 150 academics and intellectuals calling themselves the Assembly for the Defense of Democracy criticized the anti-government protesters’ claims of having a legal basis for taking over government, describing them Tuesday as “neither constitutional nor democratic.” “They destroy the process of building political will through peaceful means in a democracy and they will lead the country to violent crisis,” the group’s founding statement said.
Thai premier Yingluck rejects resignation call
Thai premier Yingluck rejects resignation call
Russia hits Ukraine with drones, missiles, kills at least 10 in Kharkiv
- Zelensky said that Russia launched 480 drones and 29 missiles targeting the energy sector and railway infrastructure
- “There should be a response from partners to these savage strikes against life“
KHARKIV, Ukraine: Russia launched a barrage of drones and missiles at Ukraine overnight on Saturday, damaging infrastructure and killing at least 10 people, including two children, in the northeast city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia launched 480 drones and 29 missiles targeting the energy sector and railway infrastructure across the country.
“There should be a response from partners to these savage strikes against life,” Zelensky said on the Telegram app.
“Russia has not abandoned its attempts to destroy Ukraine’s residential and critical infrastructure, and therefore support should continue,” Zelensky said, urging partners to continue air defense and weapons supplies.
Ukrainian air defense units shot down 453 drones and 19 missiles, the air force said. But nine missiles and 26 attack drones hit 22 sites, it said.
BALLISTIC MISSILE SLAMS INTO RESIDENTIAL BUILDING
The city of Kharkiv was targeted by both Russian drones and missiles, and 10 people, including two children, were killed after a Russian ballistic missile slammed into a five-story residential building, Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov said.
“When we arrived here 20 minutes after the explosion, I thought I was going to have a stroke. I couldn’t string two words together, and my legs were buckling,” Hanna, a resident of the destroyed building, told Reuters.
“It’s good that I wasn’t there with my child and that my father was with me. It was ordinary people who lived there. What were they targeting?“
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces carried out massive overnight strikes on Ukrainian military-industrial complexes, military airfields and energy facilities, the Interfax news agency reported.
In Kharkiv, 15 people were also wounded, and 19 residential buildings were damaged by the Russian attacks, Syniehubov said.
Commercial and administrative buildings, electricity distribution lines, and cars were also hit, he said.
In Kyiv, three people were injured, and the heating was knocked out in 2,806 residential apartment buildings in four districts across the capital after Russian strikes hit an energy infrastructure facility, Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.
National grid operator Ukrenergo said that emergency power cuts were introduced in seven regions following the Russian attacks.
Ukrainian officials said that Russia also attacked four railway stations and other railway infrastructure in central Ukraine and port infrastructure in the southern Odesa region, setting on fire containers with vegetable oil and damaging a grain warehouse.
