Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday called on Westerners to send him “as soon as possible” fighter planes, starting with the Mig-29s proposed by Warsaw despite a warning from the Kremlin, on the 14th day of the Russian invasion and as sanctions brought Moscow to the brink of default.
“Make a decision as soon as possible, send us planes! Mr. Zelensky launched to Westerners in a new video Wednesday on his Telegram channel. He thanked Warsaw for offering to send Mig-29s to Ukraine and regretted that “no decision” “has (yet) been taken”.
Poland took the Americans by surprise on Tuesday by saying it was “ready to move all its Mig-29 planes to the Ramstein base (in Germany) without delay and free of charge and make them available to the United States government”. for them to deliver them to Ukraine.
Washington, which fears a widening of the conflict because Russia has warned that it would consider the sending of such planes by a third country as a direct involvement in the war in Ukraine, sharply rejected the proposal.
“We don’t believe Poland’s proposal is viable,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
“This is a very undesirable and potentially dangerous scenario,” repeated Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
US Vice President Kamala Harris, who will be in Poland on Wednesday, however, is due to discuss with Polish leaders how to provide “military assistance” to Ukraine, according to US administration officials, who have requested the anonymity.
‘Some progress’
These debates on fighter jets come at a time when tension seemed to be easing slightly on the ground: Russia and Ukraine agreed on Wednesday on ceasefires to allow the establishment of several humanitarian corridors around areas hard hit by the fighting in recent days, which has forced civilians to remain sometimes for days hidden in cellars.
“Some progress has been made” in the negotiations aimed at “putting an end as soon as possible to the senseless bloodshed and the resistance of the Ukrainian armed forces”, declared the spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy Maria Zakharova. She also assured that Russia was not seeking to “overthrow the government” of Ukraine, contrary to what Russian officials have been saying for two weeks.
In particular, corridors have been defined between Russians and Ukrainians to evacuate civilians during the day from Energodar to Zaporozhye (south), from Izium to Lozova (east) and from Sumy to Poltava (north-east), where a corridor had already allowed evacuation of thousands of civilians on Tuesday. Several corridors are also planned to evacuate civilians to Kiev from several towns west of the capital, including Boutcha, Irpin and Gostomel.
According to Mr. Zelensky, just over 5,000 people have already been evacuated from Sumy on Tuesday and 18,000 around Kiev.
Still more refugees
The number of refugees who have fled Ukraine since the invasion by the Russian army on February 24 is increasing day by day, and is now estimated at between “2.1 and 2.2 million people”, the High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi at a press conference in Stockholm.
Tuesday evening, several cities were again the target of Russian attacks. In Severodonetsk, in the east of the country, 10 people died in bombings on homes, according to the head of the Lugansk administrative region. And in the Zhytomyr region, west of Kiev, nine people died in airstrikes.
In the capital, the sirens sounded four times in the night. On Wednesday morning, the musicians of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor German Makarenko, gave a concert on Maidan Square, broadcast live on public television.
As the snow began to fall, they played the Ukrainian anthem and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the European anthem, according to an AFP journalist.
Concern over Chernobyl
To the north, on the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, concern was once again rising over the situation at the Chernobyl power plant. The Ukrainian operator Ukrenergo announced on Wednesday that the power supply to the plant and its safety equipment had been “completely” cut off, due to Russian military actions.
The day before, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had indicated that the systems allowing remote control of the nuclear materials of the plant had ceased to transmit data to it.
The Chernobyl site, where the most serious civil nuclear disaster took place in 1986, and located since then in an exclusion zone, includes decommissioned reactors and radioactive waste installations.
The United States has also expressed concern that Russian forces could “take control” of “biological research” structures in Ukraine and seize sensitive materials.
“Economic War”
In Russia, Western sanctions are increasingly making their effects felt.
The Kremlin on Wednesday denounced the “economic war” declared by the United States against Russia, following Washington’s announcement of an embargo on American imports of oil and gas, in addition to other sanctions.
In the process, the United Kingdom also indicated that it would cease by the end of the year its purchases of Russian crude oil and petroleum products.
President Zelensky warmly thanked his American counterpart for this “signal of maximum power addressed to the whole world”.
He called on the European Union to follow this example by adopting “tough measures, sanctions against Russia for its war”, but without directly calling for a European embargo on oil or gas.
The Europeans, much more dependent than the Americans on Russian crude, refuse for the moment to go that far, while the war is already causing the price of hydrocarbons to soar.
The current energy crisis is “comparable in intensity, in brutality, to the oil shock of 1973”, French Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire said on Wednesday.
The French presidency of the EU nevertheless announced Wednesday morning new European sanctions against Moscow and Minsk. The Twenty-Seven notably added three Belarusian banks to the major Russian banks already disconnected from the international financial platform Swift, and added 14 oligarchs and 146 Russian senators to their list of people targeted by sanctions.
For days, the list of Western companies – including large consumer groups like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola – cutting or suspending all or part of their activities and their links with Russia is growing, adding to the layoffs.
The Russian Central Bank has announced a new measure to defend its economy, with a suspension of foreign currency sales until September 9.
Talks Thursday in Turkey
For its part, the rating agency Fitch again lowered its rating on Russia’s debt on Tuesday, a decision meaning that the risk of a sovereign default is in its eyes “imminent”.
A default by Moscow would be the first since the great financial crisis of 1998.
Another effect of the sanctions: according to the Russian daily Kommersant, Moscow could soon run out of medicines, in particular insulin, in addition to other products manufactured abroad.
Thursday, diplomacy will try to regain its rights, with a meeting announced in Turkey of Russian Foreign Ministers Sergei Lavrov, Ukrainian Dmytro Kuleba, with their Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Cavusoglu as mediator.
President Zelensky suggested, in an interview with the American chain ABC, to no longer insist on Ukraine’s membership of NATO, one of the issues invoked by Moscow to justify the invasion.
He also said he was ready for a “compromise” on the status of the separatist territories in eastern Ukraine, whose independence Vladimir Putin unilaterally recognized.