War in Ukraine | Russia accused of bombing a school, Zelensky wants to talk to Putin

(Kyiv) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday denounced a new “act of terror” after the bombing of a school in Mariupol housing hundreds of people and said he was ready to negotiate with Vladimir Putin to stop the war, but Moscow continued its destructive strikes, including with a second hypersonic missile.

These new waves of deadly bombardments, in particular on the besieged port city of Mariupol whose streets are, according to testimonies, strewn with corpses, come as negotiations already underway between delegations are struggling to succeed, although Turkey said on Sunday that the parties were “close to an agreement”.

“I am ready for negotiations with (Vladimir Putin). I have been ready for the last two years and I think that without negotiations the war will not be stopped,” Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview broadcast by CNN.

He had previously denounced the bombardment of the Mariupol art school, destroyed by Russian strikes while 400 people – women, children and the elderly – were taking refuge there according to local authorities.

“We know the building was destroyed and peaceful people are still under the rubble. The balance sheet regarding the number of victims is being clarified,” the municipality said on Telegram. These statements could not immediately be independently verified.

To inflict “such a thing upon a peaceful city […]it is an act of terror that will be remembered even in the next century”, was indignant Mr. Zelensky, denouncing a new “war crime”.

Ukraine has accused Russia of bombing a theater in the city on Wednesday where hundreds of residents had taken refuge in an underground shelter. No balance sheet is yet available.

In the capital Kyiv, a shell exploded just outside an apartment building on Sunday, injuring at least five people, two of whom were hospitalized, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

The ten-storey building, located in the Sviatiochine district, is badly damaged, AFP journalists noted on the spot, according to which traces of a fire can be seen, while all the windows have been blown out. Two charred cars lay in the debris-covered yard.

“My sister was on the balcony when it happened, she was almost killed,” said Anna, 30, a resident.

Forehead frozen

The Ukrainian authorities, however, reported a lull on Sunday at midday.

“The front is practically frozen”, there has been “virtually no missile fire on the cities”, and “the Russian air force is hardly active”, declared during a briefing Oleksiy Arestovitch, adviser to the presidency.

In a press release, the Russian Defense Ministry, which claims not to target any civilian objective or residential area, for its part declared that it had destroyed in the Mykolaiv region (south) a reserve of fuel hit “by cruise missiles “Kalibr” fired from the Caspian Sea, as well as hypersonic ballistic missiles fired by the “Kinjal” aeronautical system from the airspace of Crimea”. These missiles belong to a family of “invincible” new generation weapons, praised by Vladimir Putin in his confrontation with Westerners.

In the immediate future, the war in Ukraine is coupled with a humanitarian disaster, and according to the UN no less than ten million Ukrainians, i.e. a quarter of the population, have had to leave their homes to flee the fighting. .

“The war in Ukraine is so devastating that ten million people have fled, either internally displaced or refugees abroad,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said on Twitter.

The humanitarian situation in Mariupol, as in several other besieged towns, is dire. Families have recounted the corpses lying on the streets for days, hunger, thirst and the biting cold of nights spent in cellars with sub-zero temperatures.

A group of 19 children, most of them orphans, are there “in great danger”, stranded in a sanatorium, their guardians having been unable to recover them because of the fighting, their relatives and witnesses told AFP on Saturday.

The bombings also severely damaged the Azovstal steel and metallurgical plant in Mariupol, a port and industrial city of crucial importance for the export of steel produced in the east of the country.

“One of the biggest metallurgical factories in Europe is destroyed. The economic losses for Ukraine are immense,” said MP Lesia Vasylenko, who posted a video on her Twitter account showing thick columns of smoke rising from an industrial complex.

“Absolute humanitarian catastrophe”

In the north of the country, the mayor of Chernihiv, Vladislav Atroshenko, portrayed an “absolute humanitarian catastrophe” in his city.

“The indiscriminate artillery fire in residential areas continues, dozens of civilians are killed, children and women,” he told television.

“There is no electricity, heating and water, the city’s infrastructure is completely destroyed”. In a bombed hospital, “operated patients lie in the corridors in a temperature of 10 degrees,” he said.

Strikes have not stopped in recent days in Kyiv, the capital, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv, a large Russian-speaking city in the northwest, where at least 500 people have been killed since the start of the war, according to official Ukrainian figures. .

For the British Ministry of Defence, Russia “has failed to gain control of airspace and relies heavily on ranged weapons launched from the relative safety of Russian airspace to strike targets in Ukraine”, he analyzed in a press release.

According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Russian troops, whose progress on the ground has been much more difficult than expected in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance, have carried out 291 missile strikes and 1,403 air raids since the start of the invasion. February 24.

In an intervention in Russian posted on the Internet on the night of Saturday to Sunday, President Zelensky affirmed, for the benefit of Russian public opinion, that the corpses of Russian soldiers were strewn on the battlefields and were not not picked up.

“In places where the fighting is particularly fierce, the front line of our defense is simply littered with the corpses of Russian soldiers. And no one is removing these bodies,” he said.

“I want to ask the citizens of Russia: what have you been doing for years to make you stop noticing your losses? ” he added.

According to him, more than 14,000 Russian soldiers have died since the start of the invasion.

The Ukrainian president, who has highlighted his Jewish ancestry in his quest for support against the invasion of his country by Russia, addresses Sunday by videoconference to the Knesset, the Parliament of Israel, a country which is trying to mediate between Moscow and Kyiv.

Australia, for its part, announced on Sunday an embargo on its exports to Russia of alumina and aluminum ore, “which will limit its ability to produce aluminum”, a strategic material for the industry. armaments in particular.

Russia is 20% dependent on Australia for its aluminum ore needs, according to Canberra.

In an interview at Sunday TimesBritish Prime Minister Boris Johnson in turn called on China to take a stand.

“As time goes on and the number of Russian atrocities increases, I think it becomes more and more difficult and politically inconvenient for people, actively or passively, to tolerate Putin’s invasion,” he said. he declared.

As part of the vast economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the West, France indicated on Sunday that it had immobilized nearly 850 million euros in assets of Russian oligarchs – yachts, apartments, bank accounts – on its territory.

In London, their country’s yellow and blue flag flew on Saturday evening over the London Coliseum, home of the English National Opera, where international ballet stars offered a grand humanitarian gala for Ukraine and sent a message of peace.