“Technical pause” in trading; open new humanitarian corridors

John Paul Duch

Newspaper La Jornada
Tuesday, March 15, 2022, p. two

Russia and Ukraine suspended their fourth round of negotiations on Monday, this time held by videoconference –on the surrender of Ukraine, according to the Russians, and a ceasefire with security guarantees in exchange for its neutrality, according to the Ukrainians–, with the commitment to resume it today.

According to Mikhaylo Podolyak, a spokesman for the Ukrainian side, the postponement was due to the need make some definitions and also additional work is required in subgroups. He concluded on an optimistic note: It’s just a technical break. negotiations continue.

New humanitarian corridors were opened yesterday so that the civilian population can leave the cities besieged by Russian troops, for example one that was essential from Mariupol, where the authorities assure that, since the invasion began, 2,178 civilians have already died and the 400,000 that remain in the city lack water, food and medicine.

A 160-car convoy of civilians was able to leave the besieged port of Mariupol, where a Russian shipment of 450 tons of medicine arrived.

The war scenario suggests that the Ukrainian army is resisting at the entrances to the big cities, preparing to start a guerrilla war, and the Russian army is advancing more slowly than might be thought. But Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov explains that President Vladimir Putin ordered to refrain from immediately storming large cities, including kyivsaid.

They justify bombing

Russia considers that the training center –with foreign instructors and that was used as one of the bases of the so-called Foreign Legion, where volunteers and also mercenaries from many countries converge–, destroyed with 30 missiles, a few kilometers away from the border with Poland, a NATO member, was a legitimate objectiveas the United States and its allies continue to sell weapons to the Ukrainian army.

Certainly, to take just one case, Turkey in just the first two months of this year has sold 60 times more weapons to Ukraine than in the same period of 2021, especially drones, projectiles smartautomatic rifles, bulletproof vests and helmets.

The Russian deputy foreign minister, Aleksandr Grushko, told the Rossiya-24 TV channel that he does not exclude that there may be incidents between Russia and NATO over arms supplies to Ukraine. It is something that we are very concerned about, this situation is very dangerous and there is no guarantee that there will be no incidentshe underlined.

Mercenaries from both sides

Meanwhile, in Ukraine the formation of the Foreign Legion continues, which in the words of its foreign minister, Dymitro Kuleba, will be made up of about 20,000 combatants who arrived from 52 countries. It is impossible to know how many of these are really volunteers, who traveled to the Ukraine at their own risk, and how many are mercenaries willing to die for pay.

At least, it is a fact that private military companies in many countries these days offer lucrative contracts on their websites, depending on combat experience and the missions to be fulfilled. Usually, it is not revealed who finances the mercenaries, but it is not difficult to imagine that the money comes from the United States, either covertly or through aid granted to Ukraine, while the organization of the legion falls to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

On the other side, they do the same thing. Aside from the 16,000 Syrians and other Middle Eastern citizens that Russian President Vladimir Putin told Defense Minister Serguei Shoigu that it is necessary to help transfer to the battlefields if they voluntarily express the desire to defend the civilian population of Donietsk and Luhansk.

But also in the Internet chats that retired Russian soldiers tend to frequent –although the Constitution prohibits the use of mercenaries and fighting for money is punishable by imprisonment–, people are invited to anyone who wants to eat salo (salt-cured bacon, which is associated with something eaten a lot in Ukraine) to call a telephone number to enroll in the following excursion.

In addition, the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, boasts on his local social networks that the members of his personal guard who are fighting in Ukraine They managed to seize an important arms depot that the neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists ran away from..

Controversy around civilian targets

In the midst of the confusion generated by the categorical declarations, on both sides, you cannot put your hands on the fire for one of the versions that excludes the other. At the same time, logic helps clarify who is telling the truth in each specific case.

An example from this Monday: Ukraine claimed that Russia bombed a residential building in kyiv, images that went around a part of the world and that no Russian television channel was shown. Was there any point in launching a missile at that building to destroy the apartments of families who ran to the underground shelters with the alarm siren?

No one has wanted to answer this simple question. It is convenient for some that the countries that support them continue to believe that the Russians are massacring the civilian population and the others also do not want people who are informed only through their television to see a burning building in kyiv.

The answer, inadvertently, was perhaps given by Anton Gueraschenko, adviser to the Minister of the Interior of Ukraine, when he posted on his social networks the news that our anti-aircraft defense managed to intercept a Russian cruise missile, which accidentally fell on top of a building on the outskirts of kyiv.

And Russia also reported that the center of the city of Donietsk, the capital of one of the separatist regions, was hit today by a Ukrainian missile, which according to Russian radio caused 17 civilian deaths and the Ukrainians deny it as a provocation to blame them for the same thing. they attribute to the Russians in their country.

But one of the biggest propaganda fallacies of this war is the recent Russian bombing of a maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol. Russian television – the only official source of information in Moscow – asserted that it was a set-up by the Ukrainians, based on what an anonymous Internet channel stated, which said that the maternity ward was empty and that one of the pregnant women was an acquaintance. blogger.

In one photo, the blogger, Mariana Podgurskaya, really pregnant, is indeed going down the stairs of the maternity hospital, but the other image of an injured pregnant woman, bleeding, who unfortunately died this Monday, just like her fetus, is another person .

After denying it before as invention of Ukrainian propaganda, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed that motherhood was indeed attacked because neo-nazis they used those admitted as human shield and therefore it was a military targetbut both he and the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vasili Nebenzia, questioned his version by mentioning which maternity hospital it was.

The ones they named, judging by the photos released by the Russians themselves, are not buildings that are together, but correspond to maternity hospital number 1 and hospital number 3, located in different parts of Mariupol.

Without agreeing with one or the other, it is obvious that there is a difference between the current rulers in Russia and those in 1995, and that with a president sick with alcoholism, Boris Yeltsin: then, 150 Chechen guerrillas, during the Russo-Chechen war, took over a hospital in the city of Budionovsk, in Staprovol, to demand a ceasefire and negotiate. The Russian authorities did not think twice and gave priority to freeing the hostages. They did not send three missiles saying that the hospital was empty or that they were using it as human shieldeven if it was true.