The G7 showed its unity on Friday to support Ukraine’s fight “until victory” as war crimes charges pile up against the Russian army.
The United Kingdom on Friday demanded “more weapons” for Ukraine and new sanctions against Russia, and France assured kyiv of the support of the G7 “until victory” on the occasion of a meeting of the Group of Seven foreign ministers in northern Germany.
“We are not at war with Russia, it is Russia that is at war with Ukraine: there is an aggressor and an attacked and we support the attacked,” said French Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
The European Union announced on the occasion of this meeting that it would provide an additional military aid of 500 million euros to Ukraine, thus increasing its financing of the Ukrainian military effort “to 2 billion euros in total “.
Visiting Tajikistan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the EU of having transformed itself into an “aggressive and bellicose” actor.
The G7 Foreign Ministers (Germany, France, Italy, Canada, United States, Japan and United Kingdom), joined by their Ukrainian counterparts Dmytro Kouleba and Moldovan Nicu Popescu, are meeting until Saturday.
“Filtration Camps”
Accusations of crimes were piling up on Friday against the Russian army on Ukrainian soil in the 12th week of war, including the forcible displacement of thousands of people into “filtration camps”.
US channels CNN and Britain’s BBC aired CCTV footage on Thursday depicting it as the murder of two unarmed Ukrainian civilians shot dead by Russian soldiers in the suburbs of kyiv in mid-March.
The soldiers search them before leaving along a business, then they retrace their steps and shoot them in the back.
According to CNN, the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office is investigating these facts on the basis of war crimes charges. AFP was unable to independently verify the images.
This video adds to the many testimonies on the abuses of which kyiv is accused of Russian troops in Ukraine.
Prosecutors in the eastern Kharkiv region and witnesses interviewed by AFP on Thursday accused Russian forces of firing from a tank on March 27 at a house in a village near the second city of Ukraine, killing several civilians.
When the tank arrived, the inhabitants “started going into the house to hide. He shot in the door right after. Four people died, two were injured,” 52-year-old Olga Karpenko told AFP in tears, whose daughter was one of the victims, killed by shrapnel.
A 21-year-old Russian soldier is to stand trial on a war crime charge in Ukraine, the first trial on that charge in the country since Russia began its February 24 invasion.
Return of refugees to the country
The acts of the Russian army will be the subject of investigations, in particular by the special commission of the UN Human Rights Council, which received the green light on Thursday, the International Criminal Court and the authorities. Ukrainians.
The United States on Thursday accused the Russian army of having “forcibly” transferred “several thousand” Ukrainians to “filtration camps”, subjecting them to “brutal” treatment.
Moscow would also have displaced “at least several tens of thousands of other (Ukrainians) in Russia or in territories controlled by Russia”, added the American ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). ), Michael Carpenter.
Kyiv put forward the number of 1.2 million people deported by Moscow to Russia.
Ukraine has also seen more than six million of its own flee the country, of which more than half – 3.27 million – to Poland, underlined the High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR) in Geneva, noting however that the flow of these departures has dried up considerably over the weeks.
The trend has even reversed.
The overall balance, however, still remains largely negative – with 5.9 million departures for 1.56 million returns, again according to border guards.
To restore economy
After aiming to take kyiv, Russian troops retreated from the capital’s surroundings and from the north, paving the way for the return of some of the inhabitants and the reopening of businesses.
“Consumer demand is increasing, connections are being renewed” in Kyiv and its region, Ukrainian Finance Minister Serguiy Marchenko welcomes in an interview with AFP, according to which the return of embassies to the capital “gives a signal citizens to return” and “to relaunch their economic activities”.
Many companies have also transferred their activities to the west of the country, relatively spared, while fighting is still raging in the east and south and Russian strikes continue across the country.
Since the Russian offensive, the Ukrainian high-tech sector has had to adapt, becoming one of the economic lungs of the country and one of the supports of its war effort.
“Most tech companies had developed contingency plans” before the start of the invasion on February 24, Stepan Veselovskiï, president of the trade union “IT Cluster Lviv”, told AFP.
Servers had been transferred to safe areas and backup systems developed abroad, he explains.
When the bombings started, the companies closed their offices in kyiv or Kharkiv, to the east, and their engineers or developers took refuge in Poland, Hungary… or in the west of the country, which was more spared.
To date, the picture is nevertheless disastrous for the country, which was already one of the poorest in Europe before the invasion.
If the International Monetary Fund (IMF) anticipates the collapse of Ukrainian GDP to 35% this year, Mr Marchenko expects a fall of 45 to 50% and assesses the overall damage caused to the economy at this stage at “about 600 billion dollars”.
“When the occupier enters Ukrainian territory, it steals. It does not just destroy infrastructure, businesses, kill people: cereals are stolen, (like) other mineral resources, ”he accuses.
German Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir on Friday called the grain thefts “disgusting”.
On the ground, the Russian Ministry of Defense said on Friday that the Russian army had carried out strikes with sea-to-surface and air-to-surface missiles on a refinery in the Poltava region in the east of the country, as well as on fuel depots.
The governor of the region of Sumy (east) reported on Friday a night strike, without casualties, in the region, and the Ukrainian army warned a little earlier that Russia would “intensify” its attacks on the areas of Cherniguiv and Sumy in the north of the country.