“A dangerous moment” for Kyiv
kyiv woke up bruised on Tuesday after an overnight bombardment of an apartment building left at least four people dead. The capital surrounded by Russian forces is emptied of at least half of its 3.5 million inhabitants.
kyiv “is living through a dangerous moment”, summarized the mayor, Vitali Klitschko, during a press briefing where he also decreed the establishment of a curfew. “People are angry. We are ready to defend our city,” he added as Russian forces continued their attempt to encircle the city.
The fighting is also approaching the large strategic city of Dnipro, in the center of the country. Its airport was bombed and largely destroyed overnight from Monday to Tuesday, according to its mayor.
Vladimir Putin’s troops are still trying to capture the southern and eastern towns of Mariupol and Kharkiv, but so far without success, according to the Institute for War Studies, a think tank based in the United States.
Further west, bordering the Black Sea, Mykolaiv, the last lock on the road to Odessa, is also regularly bombarded.
A NATO peace mission requested by Poland
Poland called on Tuesday evening for NATO to lead a “peace mission” in Ukraine.
“This mission cannot be an unarmed mission”, Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski declared in kyiv during a meeting bringing together Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his Prime Minister, Denys Chmygal, as well as the first Polish (Mateusz Morawiecki), Czech (Petr Fiala) and Slovenian (Janez Jansa) ministers.
This mission “must seek to provide humanitarian and peaceful aid in Ukraine”, added Mr. Kaczynski, quoted by the Polish news agency PAP.
It was the first visit by foreign leaders to kyiv since the start of the Russian invasion.
Resumption of talks
Moscow and kyiv held a fourth round of negotiations on Tuesday to try to find a diplomatic solution to the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Russians had “already begun to understand that they will achieve nothing through war”. The latter has also opened the door to the neutrality of his country, one of the Russian demands, by conceding that “Ukraine will not be able to join NATO”.
The Kremlin, for its part, considered premature any “prognosis” on the negotiations with kyiv, after an adviser to the Ukrainian presidency deemed a peace agreement possible by May.
A fine for the Russian TV protester
The employee of a pro-Kremlin Russian TV channel who burst into a newscast to denounce the offensive in Ukraine was released on Tuesday with a simple fine. “No to war. Don’t believe the propaganda. We are lying to you here, ”she chanted live in a sequence that has since gone around the world.
Marina Ovsiannikova nevertheless still risks heavy prison sentences under a recent law cracking down on any “false information” about the Russian army.
French President Emmanuel Macron has said he is ready to offer him “consular protection”, either at the embassy or by granting him asylum.
Falling barrel of oil
The global energy market is starting to calm down after the shock of the invasion in Ukraine. The price of a barrel of benchmark oil in Europe, like that of the United States, closed on Tuesday below 100 dollars for the first time in almost three weeks. This is a 20% drop from last week’s highs.
Western leaders are also multiplying diplomatic approaches to find an alternative to Russian oil blocked in part by sanctions. Russia is the second largest exporter of crude oil in the world.
Thus, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will travel to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on Wednesday to discuss the delivery of black gold. The United States is trying to increase its imports from Venezuela.
Successful evacuations
In almost three weeks of war, more than three million people have fled Ukraine, mostly to Poland, according to the International Organization for Migration. Among them, 1.4 million children, or “virtually one child per second”, underlines Unicef.
Some 20,000 people were able to evacuate Mariupol, a besieged southern city, on Tuesday via a humanitarian corridor, according to the Ukrainian presidency. But up to 300,000 people remain trapped there, holed up in cellars and deprived of everything.
A total of around 29,000 people were evacuated from several besieged Ukrainian towns on Tuesday, according to the same source.
With Agence France-Presse