Ukraine hopes to be able to continue evacuating civilians from Mariupol on Monday, as Russian forces continue their offensive on Donbass and the Europeans finalize a plan for a gradual embargo on Russian oil.
A hundred people were already evacuated at the end of the week from the huge Azovstal steelworks, the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance in this strategic port in southern Donbass almost entirely under Russian control. They were expected Monday evening in Zaporijjia, a town some 200 km to the northwest and still under Ukrainian control, even if the front line is getting closer.
Vehicles from UNICEF and international NGOs and dozens of journalists were waiting for them in a parking lot on the outskirts of Zaporizhia transformed into a reception point for refugees, AFP noted.
The evacuations, which began on Saturday in coordination between Ukraine, Russia, the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), allowed, for the first time in two months of siege and bombing of the city, to evacuate “more than 100 civilians” holed up in the cellars of the huge Azovstal steelworks, with the last Ukrainian fighters, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Today, for the first time since the start of the war, this vital humanitarian corridor has started to function. For the first time, there were two days of real ceasefire on [ce] territory” of the steel complex, he rejoiced Sunday evening.
According to the Russian army, 57 people left for the north, towards territories occupied by the Russians, and 69 towards territories controlled by the Ukrainians.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, however, recalled that “hundreds of civilians remain stranded in Azovstal”.
A new evacuation train was to start Monday morning around 7 a.m. local (midnight in Quebec) but the buses had not yet arrived at the assembly point after 1 p.m., Mariupol town hall said on its Telegram account. The head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kouleba, nevertheless assured later that the operations were “in progress”, without further details.
May 9 commemorations in Russia
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, thousands of civilians have left this great port city transformed into a field of ruins, populated by half a million inhabitants before the war and where between 100,000 and 120,000 people according to the Ukrainian authorities.
Ukrainians estimate that at least 20,000 people have died there since the Russian siege began in early March.
In the rest of Donbass, the Russian forces continue their offensive, with particularly intense fighting around Izium, Lyman and Rubizhne, which the Russians are trying to “take control to prepare their attack on Severodonetsk”, one of the major cities of Donbass still controlled by kyiv, the Ukrainian general staff said on Monday.
The situation “is currently difficult”, recognized the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, while saying it was “convinced that we will succeed in stopping and repelling the enemy to Russian territory”, he said.
With the approach of May 9, the date when Russia commemorates with great fanfare the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, the governor of the Luhansk region said he expected “an intensification of the bombardments”.
But to those who predicted a particular Russian military action on this occasion, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, opposed a denial. The Russian military “will not artificially adjust its actions to any date, including Victory Day”, he said in an interview with Italian TV channel Mediaset broadcast on Sunday.
However, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense considered it possible on Monday that Moscow would take the opportunity to “raise the question” of the integration into the Russian Federation of the pro-Russian “republics” of Donbass, whose independence Moscow recognized just before to invade Ukraine. Or to announce “the preparation of a referendum” on the independence of the region of Kherson, in the south of Ukraine, of which the Russian forces took control at the beginning of March.
kyiv has been accusing Moscow for several weeks of wanting to organize such a referendum in the Kherson region, very close to Crimea, as was done by the pro-Russian separatists of Donbass in 2014.
A Russian official in Kherson announced last week that the ruble would be introduced as the region’s official currency on May 1, to phase out the use of Ukraine’s currency, the hryvnia, an act of “annexation” to kyiv.
Lavrov’s “odious”, “scandalous” remarks
Asked by Mediaset about Russian claims that the war aims to “denazify” Ukraine when President Zelensky is Jewish, the head of Russian diplomacy caused an outcry by saying: “I could be wrong, but Hitler had also Jewish blood. »
His Israeli counterpart, Yaïr Lapid, judged these remarks “scandalous, unforgivable and a horrible historical error”, and summoned the Russian ambassador for “clarifications”. kyiv called them “odious”, and Berlin denounced a “absurd” statement. »
The Ukrainian army also claimed to have destroyed with Bayraktar drones two Russian Raptor-type patrol boats near Serpents’ Island, in the Black Sea, which has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.
Return of Western embassies to Kyiv
Western countries, which have accelerated their deliveries of heavy weapons to help Ukraine resist the Russian offensive, are gradually reopening their embassies in kyiv, closed or moved to Lviv, in the west, at the beginning of the Russian invasion.
After several European countries, the United States hopes “to return to kyiv by the end of the month” of May, indicated from Lviv the American charge d’affaires Kristina Kvien.
“The priority is staff safety. If the security agents tell us that we can come back to kyiv, then we will go back,” she said.
The Europeans are working on their side to toughen their economic sanctions against Moscow. The Ministers of Energy of the Twenty-Seven were to meet Monday afternoon in Brussels to refine a timetable for the gradual cessation of their imports of Russian oil, which represent 30% of their oil imports.
A contract with the Russian group Rosatom to build a nuclear reactor in northern Finland has also been canceled due to the additional “risks” linked to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish-majority consortium said on Monday. the project.
Estimated at more than 7.5 billion euros, this 1,200 megawatt reactor project, located in Pyhajöki, dates back to 2010 and had already suffered from numerous delays and uncertainties.
In almost 10 weeks of war, more than 5.4 million Ukrainians have left their country, according to the UN, and more than 7.7 million have left their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
No reliable assessment is available, but the conflict has already caused thousands of civilian and military deaths.