kyiv woke up this Tuesday under a curfew ordered by its authorities and with confirmation from the Government of Ukraine that its military forces recovered a key suburb of the capital, while in the south of the country, Russian troops maintained the siege against the city. port of Mariupol after President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected an ultimatum to hand it over in exchange for the safe departure of civilians.
The invading forces were accused of causing a humanitarian catastrophe in Mariupol, where some 350,000 people are trapped without water or electricity.
That port has been bombed relentlessly and more than 2,000 people have died, according to local authorities, in what the head of European Union (EU) diplomacy, Josep Borrell, described as a “massive war crime.”
Mariupol is a key target because it would serve Russia as a bridge between forces in Crimea and Moscow-controlled territories to the north and east, the AFP news agency reported.
Zelensky, meanwhile, again made a public appeal to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to accept a face-to-face dialogue that includes all the issues that are necessary to achieve at least a partial end to the war.
Zelensky acknowledged in an interview published yesterday by the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine, also known as Suspilne, that the negotiations have made little progress, so he urged Putin to hold a face-to-face talk open to all issues, ” in any format.”
“If I have this opportunity and Russia has the desire, we could address all issues,” he said.
“Would we solve everything there? No, but there is a possibility that we can at least partially stop the war,” he added.
This morning, on the 27th day of the invasion, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced that its forces recaptured the kyiv suburb of Makariv after a fierce battle.
The recovered territory allowed Ukrainian forces to retake control of a key route and block Russian troops from encircling kyiv from the northwest.
With troops bogged down in many places, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces are increasingly concentrating their air power and artillery on Ukraine’s cities and the civilians who live there.
However, the Ukrainian government admitted that Russian forces were able to partially seize other northwestern suburbs, including Bucha, Gostomel and Irpin, some of which had been under attack almost since the Russian army began the invasion on February 24.
With troops bogged down in many places, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces are increasingly concentrating their air power and artillery on Ukraine’s cities and the civilians who live there.
The invasion has expelled more than 3.5 million people from Ukraine, according to the United Nations.
The talks between Russia and Ukraine continued by video, but failed to reach any agreement.
Zelensky reiterated Monday night on Ukrainian television that Ukraine “already understood” that it cannot join NATO, and suggested that the country would be open to further discussions on the status of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and the region. eastern Donbass, in the hands of Russian-backed separatists, but said that was a topic for another time.
The situation in Donbass, where the Russian-speaking provinces Donetsk and Lugansk are located, was one of the origins of the conflict, since Russia demanded for years that Ukraine comply with the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Peace Agreements.according to which both provinces could vote their regional authorities and have the Russian language as official and school education.
Russia assures that this did not happen, but, on the contrary, the Ukrainian government maintained a “criminal” military confrontation against the separatist militias that, according to United Nations figures, left at least 14,000 dead between 2015 and 2021.
The UN General Assembly will resume tomorrow the debate that began at the beginning of this month on the situation arising from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, official sources reported.
The meeting was requested in writing by Ukraine and several of its allies, and its realization was later confirmed by the President of the Assembly, the Maldivian Abdulla Shahid.
Germany, Canada, the United States, Estonia, France, Georgia and Ukraine, among others, want to “study the humanitarian consequences of the aggression” from Russia, they said in a letter to Shahid.
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, again rejected on Monday night that his country has chemical or biological weapons in Europe and warned that instead it is Russia that is analyzing using them in its invasion of Ukraine.
“(Russian President Vladimir Putin) claims that we, the US, have biological and chemical weapons in Europe, that is simply not true, I guarantee you; he is also suggesting that Ukraine has biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine, that is a clear sign that he is considering using both,” Biden warned.
The president spoke at the quarterly meeting of executive directors of the Business Roundtable, an opportunity in which he denied Moscow’s accusations, according to the Sputnik news agency.
