Russia announced on Friday that it was aiming for total control of southern Ukraine and the Donbass region nearly two months after the start of the invasion of this country by its army, accused by the UN of actions “that could fall under of war crimes”.
“One of the objectives of the Russian military is to establish full control over Donbass and southern Ukraine,” said a senior Russian military official, speaking of a “second phase of the special operation aiming, among other things, to “ensure a land corridor to Crimea”.
Moscow has scaled back its plans and withdrawn its troops from the kyiv region and the north at the end of March, and Ukraine, which has obtained more substantial arms aid from the West in recent days, continues to assure that it can push the Russian army off its soil.
“They can only delay the inevitable — the moment when the invaders will have to leave our territory, in particular Mariupol,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday evening.
On the ground, the Ukrainian forces continue according to him “to contain the attacks of the Russian invaders” in the East and the South. According to him, the “number one challenge” is currently “to provide our soldiers with all the necessary weapons”.
The strategic port of Mariupol, which Moscow assured Thursday to have “liberated”, still resists the Russian forces, according to kyiv, which affirmed Friday that the Ukrainian fighters “stand firm” in the immense metallurgical complex Azovstal, where are also entrenched civilians.
“The success of the Russian offensive in the south depends on the fate of Mariupol,” regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told AFP on Friday, deeming this city “strategic” for the Ukrainians in their defense of the region. , and for the Russians in their desire to provide a complete land link to annexed Crimea.
“The enemy is concentrating all its efforts on Mariupol”, added Mr. Kyrylenko, while the last Ukrainian fighters are entrenched in Azovstal, with “up to 300 civilians”.
Summary executions
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday that there were still some “1,000 civilians, women and children” and “hundreds injured” at the steelworks.
European Council President Charles Michel, who represents EU member states, asked Vladimir Putin in a telephone interview on Friday to ensure the establishment of humanitarian corridors in Mariupol on the occasion of Orthodox Easter, celebrated on Sunday.
The Kremlin, for its part, affirmed at the end of this interview that kyiv refused the surrender of the last Ukrainian soldiers present in the industrial zone, while the Russian army said it was ready to observe a truce “at any time” “on everything or part” of this site to allow the evacuation of civilians and the surrender of combatants.
Ukrainian authorities regularly accuse Russian forces of targeting routes used by people fleeing the fighting.
“In the temporarily occupied territories, enemy units continue to block the movements of the local population”, as well as “the delivery of humanitarian aid shipments from Ukraine”, assured Friday the Ukrainian ministry of the Defense. For him, “There are cases of civilians and volunteers shot”.
The UN on Friday listed a series of actions by the Russian military that it said could amount to war crimes.
“Russian armed forces indiscriminately bombarded and shelled populated areas, killing civilians and destroying hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure, all actions that could amount to war crimes”, judged a door-in-chief word of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.
The United Nations says it has documented the “murder, including some by summary execution” of 50 civilians in the town of Boucha, a suburb of kyiv.
Guterres in Moscow
Ukraine and Western countries have accused Russian troops of “massacre” and “war crimes” after the discovery of dozens of bodies in this small town northwest of the capital which was taken over on March 31 by the Ukrainian soldiers.
AFP journalists who were able to go there on April 2 saw the bodies of twenty men dressed in civilian clothes scattered over several hundred meters in a street in this locality. One was lying on his bike, others had shopping bags next to them. Another had his hands tied behind his back.
British police for their part said on Friday that they had received around fifty reports of possible war crimes as part of an appeal for witnesses launched to fuel the investigation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and expect to obtain some. more with the arrival in the United Kingdom of a growing number of people who have fled Ukraine.
On Thursday, United States President Joe Biden announced $800 million in new military aid to Ukraine.
Paris, which until now had refrained from specifying the types of armaments delivered to kyiv, said it had supplied Milan anti-tank missiles as well as Caesar self-propelled guns to Ukraine to help it deal with the Russian invasion.
In Moscow, the Russian Defense Ministry, for the first time acknowledging losses in the sinking of the cruiser Moskva – that kyiv claims to have sunk -, established an initial official toll at one dead and 27 missing. He said the other people on board, numbering 396, were evacuated in what he calls an accident.
Negotiations between Moscow and kyiv aimed at resolving the conflict are “skating”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday, saying that a Russian proposal “delivered to Ukrainian negotiators five days ago” and “formulated by taking into account their comments remains unanswered.
UN Secretary General António Guterres, who on Tuesday sent letters to Presidents Putin and Zelensky asking them to be received in Moscow and kyiv, will be received in Moscow by Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, announced on Friday the Kremlin.