War in Ukraine, Day 87 | Russia is studying the prospect of exchanging prisoners

(Kyiv) Russia will study the possibility of exchanging fighters from the Ukrainian Azov regiment taken prisoner for Viktor Medvedchuk, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, said Saturday a deputy and Russian negotiator, Leonid Sloutski.

“We are going to study the question,” said Mr. Sloutski, a member of the Russian delegation during the last negotiations with Kyiv, quoted by the Ria Novosti news agency, in response to a question about such an exchange.

Speaking from the separatist city of Donetsk, in southeastern Ukraine, he said that the possibility of such an exchange will be raised in Moscow by “those who have the prerogatives”.

Viktor Medvedchuk, 67, is a well-known Ukrainian politician and businessman close to the Russian president who was arrested in mid-April in Ukraine, while he had been on the run since the start of the Kremlin offensive in late February.

Mr. Medvedchuk had been under house arrest since May 2021 after being charged with “high treason” and “attempted looting of natural resources in Crimea”, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

On Friday, the Russian army announced that the last Ukrainian defenders of the strategic city of Mariupol, holed up for weeks in the huge Azovstal steelworks, had surrendered. Among them are members of the Azov regiment, an ultranationalist unit that the Kremlin considers “neo-Nazi”, and that Kyiv hopes to free in exchange for Russian prisoners.

On May 26, the Russian Supreme Court must consider a request to classify the regiment as a “terrorist organization”, which could complicate an exchange of these prisoners.

The leader of the Donetsk separatists, Denis Pushilin, said on Saturday that the Ukrainian soldiers who had defended the Azovstal factory and had surrendered should be tried.

“I believe that the court is inevitable: justice must triumph,” said Mr Pouchiline, quoted by Ria Novosti, during the press conference where Leonid Sloutski also spoke.

Russia continues to shell the Donbass

Russia continued its shelling of eastern Ukraine on Saturday and claimed to have destroyed a stockpile of Western-delivered weapons with cruise missiles, as US President Joe Biden signed legislation providing massive new aid from 40 billion dollars in Kyiv.

In Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in an interview that the current phase of the war, where the Russians are concentrating their efforts in the east, “will be bloody”, but that in the end it will have to be resolved “through diplomacy “.

“Discussions between Ukraine and Russia will inevitably take place,” he told Ukrainian television ICTV, while talks that were sketched out in Turkey a few weeks ago remained a dead letter.

He said he was once again ready if necessary for a meeting “at presidential level” with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, who has so far never followed up.

“These are our territories, and step by step we will liberate our territories”, he added a few hours later during a press conference with Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa, to whom he repeated that Ukraine had at this stage especially “need for armored vehicles”.

Russia has so far claimed to have struck with cruise missiles in the northwest of the country a large stockpile of weapons supplied by the West to Ukraine.

Russian “counter-sanctions”

“Long-range, high-precision Kalibr missiles, launched from the sea, destroyed a large consignment of arms and military equipment supplied by the United States and European countries, near Malin railway station, in the Zhytomyr region,” the Russian Defense Ministry said. It was not possible to verify this information from an independent source.

For his part, US President Joe Biden signed, during an official visit to Seoul, the law adopted Thursday by Congress providing a gigantic envelope of 40 billion dollars in support of Ukraine, in particular for its war effort.

Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed in a tweet, in Ukrainian and English, the release of aid “now more necessary than ever”.

Moscow, for its part, issued a new list of 963 American personalities banned from entering Russia. These “counter-sanctions” aim to “constrain the American power in place, which tries to impose on the rest of the planet a neocolonial “world order” […] to change its position and recognize new geopolitical realities,” according to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

In the names of a handful of officials including President Joe Biden, his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the head of the Pentagon Lloyd Austin or the CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg, the new list adds government officials, parliamentarians, but also members of civil society. Up to Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman, who is accused of having recorded a video in 2017 in which he claimed that Russia was orchestrating a “plot” against the United States.

On the ground, after failing to take control of Kyiv and its region at the end of February and in March, Russian troops are now concentrating their efforts in an offensive against eastern Ukraine, where the fighting is intense.

On Friday, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense stressed that the situation in this region “showed signs of aggravation” with “intense fire” from Russian forces “along the entire front line”.

Seven civilians were killed and 10 injured on Saturday in the Donetsk region, governor Pavlo Kyrylenko announced on Telegram on Saturday.

bombed church

Ukrainian police said on their Facebook account that they had evacuated around 60 people, including children, from a bombed church in Bogorodychné, a village in the region. There were no casualties, according to the same source.

Further north, the governor of the Kharkiv region (northeast), Oleg Sinegoubov, said that localities around this city had been targeted by numerous artillery fire in the past 24 hours, which one dead and 20 injured.

Near Kharkiv, the second city of the country close to the Russian border, the time was Saturday for burials in the military square of the cemetery of Bezliudikova, a village liberated a month ago at the cost of fierce fighting.

“They were found with five other bodies that we could not identify. It is suspected that they were executed. They were killed by bullets in the back of the head,” confides on condition of anonymity a soldier on the spot, about the first two soldiers buried. It was not immediately possible to find out more or to verify these suspicions.

In Rivne (northwest), a Russian missile targeted “military infrastructure” in the city, regional governor Vitaliy Koval said on Telegram. Close to the Polish border, this city has very rarely been attacked since the beginning of the conflict.

In the martyr city of Mariupol (southeast), largely destroyed by the conflict, nearly 2,500 men from the Ukrainian forces have taken themselves prisoner this week, according to the Russians.

These resistance fighters, who remained entrenched for weeks under the bombs in the Azovstal steel complex after the capture of the city by the Russians, “will be brought home”, promised Volodymyr Zelensky in his interview with ICTV, referring to discussions in courses with France, Turkey and Switzerland on this subject, without further details.

This last pocket of resistance in the strategic port on the Sea of ​​Azov, “passed under the complete control of the Russian armed forces” after the surrender of the last Ukrainian soldiers, said Friday evening the spokesman of the Russian Ministry of Defense. .

Kyiv rejects the term surrender, referring to an operation aimed at “rescuing our heroes” and exchanging them for Russian prisoners.

“No alternative” to the EU

On the diplomatic field, the Ukrainian president returned on Saturday to the European future of his country, once again rejecting the proposal for a “European political community” from his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

“We don’t need alternatives to Ukraine’s candidacy for the European Union (EU), we don’t need such compromises,” he said during his press conference with the Portuguese Prime Minister.

“Because, believe us, it will not be compromises with Ukraine in Europe, it will be another compromise, between Europe and Russia,” he continued.

Mr. Macron had presented the project of “the European political community” on May 9 in the midst of a debate on the launch of the process of Ukraine’s accession to the EU, explaining that it would take “decades” for Ukraine to join the EU.

For its part, Finland, a member of the European Union, saw its supply of Russian gas cut off on Saturday by the giant Gazprom, which argues that Helsinki refused its new conditions of having to pay it in rubles.

The Finnish company Gasum has assured that it can obtain gas from other suppliers and continue its activities “normally”.

The Nordic country, already deprived since mid-May of its imports of Russian electricity, has angered Moscow, like Sweden, by deciding to apply for NATO membership. Finland thus joins Poland and Bulgaria among the countries to which Gazprom cut gas because they refused to pay in rubles, as it demanded in April.