Moscow has announced that it is aiming for total control of southern Ukraine and the Donbass region nearly two months after the invasion of the country by the Russian army, accused on Friday by the UN of actions “which may amount to crimes of war “.
“One of the objectives of the Russian military is to establish full control over Donbass and southern Ukraine,” a senior Russian military official said on Friday, referring to a “second phase of the special operation aiming, among other things, to “ensure a land corridor to Crimea”.
Ukraine, which has obtained more substantial arms aid from the West in recent days, continues to assure that it can push Russian forces out of the country.
“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.
This strategic port, which Moscow assured Thursday to have “liberated”, still resists the Russian forces, according to kyiv, which affirms Friday that the Ukrainian fighters “stand firm” in the immense Azovstal metallurgical complex where civilians are also entrenched.
Civilians who cannot hope to take an evacuation corridor on Friday to find peace and security, the Ukrainian government deeming the situation too “dangerous” on the country’s roads.
“I am addressing all those who are waiting to be evacuated: wait, please hold on! “Launched Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk to them on Telegram.
“War crimes”
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, steal and bring a humanitarian crisis closer. They are reducing critical infrastructure to rubble and blocking the delivery of humanitarian cargo from Ukraine. There are cases of civilians and volunteers shot,” said the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense in its morning note on Friday.
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 shelled and shelled populated areas, killing civilians and destroying hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure, all actions that may amount to war crimes,” said Ravina Shamdasani, during a regular UN briefing in Geneva.
Recent satellite images published by the American company Maxar Technologies show, according to the company, “the existence of a site of mass graves in the northwest of Mangouch”, a village 20 kilometers west of Mariupol.
In this village alone, “the occupants would have buried between 3 and 9000 residents”, said the town hall of Mariupol on Telegram.
Fear of a “false referendum”
“They are digging thirty-meter holes and bringing the bodies of our residents of Mariupol in trucks,” the city’s mayor, Vadim Boitchenko, said Thursday during a press briefing broadcast on YouTube. He estimated that Russian shelling had claimed at least 20,000 lives in Mariupol since the siege began.
Mr. Zelensky had estimated earlier, before the leaders of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at 7 billion dollars a month the aid needed to compensate for the economic losses caused by the war.
A call partially heard. On Thursday, US President Joe Biden announced $800 million in new military aid for Ukraine.
The Pentagon said this new tranche of aid included 72 Howitzer howitzers and their vehicles, 144,000 shells and 121 Phoenix Ghost killer drones.
On Thursday evening, Mr Biden called Vladimir Putin’s “great ambitions” a “failure”.
“Zelensky and his democratically elected government are still in power, and the Ukrainian armed forces accompanied by the valiant Ukrainian civilians have foiled the Russian conquest of their country,” he wrote.
This assertion was not enough to dispel the concerns of the Ukrainian president, who accused Russia of seeking to organize a fake independence referendum in the regions of Kherson and Zaporijjia which it occupies in the south of the country.
Makeshift graves
In a video message, Mr. Zelensky asked residents of the occupied areas not to provide any personal data, such as their passport numbers, that would be required of them by the Russian forces.
“It’s not fair to conduct a census. […] It is not to give you humanitarian aid of any kind. It is in fact to falsify a so-called referendum on your land, if the order to organize this comedy comes from Moscow, ”warned the Ukrainian president.
Ukraine had already accused, at the beginning of March, Russia of seeking to stage a “referendum” in Kherson like the one which, in 2014, had sealed the annexation of Crimea by Russia, and which is considered illegal by kyiv and by Westerners.
Around the capital, makeshift graves discovered near a hospital in the devastated town of Borodianka have offered evidence to experts investigating war crimes charges against Russian troops.
Authorities said nine civilian corpses, many of them shot, were exhumed from these graves.
Investigators collected more than 1,000 bodies of civilians from streets, courtyards or makeshift graves around the Ukrainian capital, some of whom had their hands and feet tied or gunshot wounds to the back of their necks, officials said Thursday. responsible.
This investigation is part of the documentation of what Oleksandr Pavliuk, head of the Kyiv regional military administration, described as “atrocities” committed following the invasion of Russian troops, who by were subsequently forced to withdraw from the area.