Ukraine on Monday accused Russia of further stepping up its deadly bombardment in the east, where its troops are fiercely resisting. According to Moscow, the Ukrainian army has for its part struck drilling platforms in the Black Sea off Crimea, annexed in 2014.
On the threshold of a week described as “historic” by the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, with a summit in Brussels which could grant kyiv the status of candidate for entry into the European Union, the tension has also risen sharply. further north between Russia and Lithuania, which restricted Russian freight transit by rail to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
Russia denounced a “hostile” act. If transit “is not restored in full, Russia reserves the right to act to defend its national interests”, warned the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Kremlin considered the situation “more than serious”.
The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, then declared that Lithuania applied European sanctions on the transit of certain types of exports between Russia and Kaliningrad, but did not impose any blockade on the Russian enclave. “Lithuania has not adopted any unilateral or national restrictions. It’s wrong. It applies EU sanctions”, insisted Josep Borrell, according to whom “we must be worried when Russia announces retaliatory measures”.
Moscow did not specify the nature of its threat. Kaliningrad, the former Prussian city of Königsberg annexed in 1945, which has become a Russian enclave in the European Union, is a strategic bridgehead for the Russians, who have installed Iskander ballistic missiles there capable of carrying out nuclear strikes in Western Europe and there anchor their military fleet.
As for Lithuania, a former Soviet republic with strained relations with Moscow, it is a member not only of the EU, but also of NATO, which has troops there.
More bombs
In Ukraine, the presidency said Monday that Russian shelling was increasing in the region of Kharkiv, the country’s second city, which has resisted pressure from Russian forces since the start of the offensive on February 24.
In the Donetsk region, the intensity of the shelling “is increasing all along the front line”, added the presidency, which reported one dead and seven injured, including a child.
In Severodonetsk, “the Russians control most of the residential areas”, but “more than a third of the city remains controlled by our armed forces”, according to the head of the local administration, Oleksandr Striouk. Fighting is raging around this key agglomeration to control the whole of Donbass, an industrial basin in eastern Ukraine partially controlled since 2014 by pro-Russian separatists supported by Moscow.
Serguiï Gaïdaï, the regional governor, confirmed the fall of the village of Metolkine, on the south-eastern outskirts of Severodonetsk, which the Russian Minister of Defense had announced on Sunday.
Crucial position in the Black Sea
The Russians accused the Ukrainians of hitting three drilling rigs at their oil and gas complex off Crimea on Monday morning. “There are three wounded and seven missing,” the governor installed by Moscow after the 2014 annexation of the peninsula, Sergei Aksionov, said on Telegram. According to him, 94 people were evacuated.
This is the first reported strike against hydrocarbon infrastructure off Crimea since the Russian invasion began on February 24. But the Ukrainian army had already struck several times, with cruise missiles fired from the coast, Russian ships in the Black Sea, including the cruiser Moskvaflagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, sunk in mid-April.
Russia, however, retains control of this area of the Black Sea, and its blockade has the effect of preventing the export by cargo ships of millions of tonnes of cereals, of which Ukraine is one of the world’s main producers.
Moscow argued on Monday that the rise in grain prices was “the fault of Western regimes, which act as provocateurs and destroyers”, according to Russian diplomacy spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
The Ukrainian president, in a videoconference speech to members of the African Union, said that the Russians “need this crisis” and “deliberately aggravate it”.
Deploring that “Africa [soit] hostage of those who started the war”, he indicated that “difficult negotiations” were underway to unblock Ukrainian ports, with no progress so far.
The European Union, through the voice of the head of its diplomacy, accused Moscow of committing “a real war crime” by blocking these exports. “Twenty million tonnes of wheat remain stuck in Ukraine. This creates hunger, even starvation. This is a deliberate attempt to use food as a weapon of war”, denounced Josep Borrell.