The Russian offensive continues on Saturday in Ukraine where Russian missiles were fired from Belarus, Moscow’s diplomatic ally, as the war enters its fifth month.
kyiv has castigated Moscow’s condemnations of the green light given Thursday by the 27 countries of the European Union to the Ukrainian candidacy. Aid to Ukraine is on the menu of a G7 summit which opens Sunday in Germany, before that of NATO for two days from Tuesday in Madrid.
“This only shows Russia’s weakness,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kouleba tweeted on Saturday.
The day before, Moscow had denounced a “geopolitical grab” of the space of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS bringing together several countries of the former USSR) to “contain Russia”, ensuring that “this aggressive approach of the European Union has the potential to create new schisms and much deeper crises in Europe”.
kyiv also accused Moscow of wanting to “draw” Minsk “into the war” after the Ukrainian army said 20 missiles were fired from Belarusian soil and by planes targeting the village of Desna, in the Cherniguiv border region. (northern Ukraine) on Saturday around 05:00 local time, with no casualties.
Attacks had already been carried out from Belarus at the very beginning of the Russian invasion launched on February 24.
For its part, Moscow claimed to have killed “up to 80 Polish mercenaries” in a bombardment in eastern Ukraine, also destroying 20 armored combat vehicles and eight Grad multiple rocket launchers in high-precision weapons strikes on the Megatex zinc plant in Konstantinovka, Donetsk region, according to a Defense Ministry statement on Saturday.
This claim was not independently verifiable. Moscow frequently claims to “eliminate foreign mercenaries” who came to fight in Ukraine.
Tensions
Tensions are high between Russia and Poland, a NATO member that supplies arms to Ukraine. The mayor of Smolensk in Russia on Friday evening confirmed the removal of the Polish flag from the Katyn memorial commemorating the 1940 massacre of some 25,000 Poles on Stalin’s orders.
In Kharkiv (north-east), the second city in Ukraine which has resisted pressure from Russian forces since the start of the offensive, missiles are once again falling daily on the city center.
During the night from Friday to Saturday, one of them hit an administrative building near the hotel where an AFP team was staying, and a fire broke out without causing any casualties, according to the emergency services. Ukrainians. The building had been bombed before. “The Russians are finishing what they started,” a soldier on the spot told AFP on Saturday, who did not reveal his identity.
On Friday, AFP found that a stray dog was eating human remains in Chuguiv, about 30 kilometers southeast of Kharkiv, where authorities said six people were killed in a bombardment on Tuesday. This city is located between Kharkiv and the Russian positions.
In the South, the Russian Defense Ministry added in its statement on Saturday that “more than 300 Ukrainian soldiers and foreign mercenaries and 35 heavy weapons units were liquidated in one day in the Mykolaiv region”.
In the east, the Russian army continues to advance. Ukrainian forces were ordered on Friday to withdraw from the city of Severodonetsk, a crucial step for Moscow, which wants to conquer the entire industrial basin of Donbass, already partially under the control of pro-Russian separatists since 2014 and which Moscow has sworn to completely conquer. .
The withdrawal was announced as the Russians are gaining ground near Lyssychansk, a neighboring town of Severodonetsk just across the Donets River and another important target for Moscow.
Ukraine continues to demand more heavy weapons to counter Russian strike power, particularly in the Donbass.
“Fire Parity”
“I stressed the need to achieve fire parity with the enemy, which will allow us to stabilize the situation in the most threatened region of Lugansk, where Severodonetsk is located,” the commander said on Facebook. head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valeriï Zaluzhniï, reporting on his Facebook page on a telephone conversation with his American counterpart, General Mark Milley.
The governor of Lugansk, Serguiï Gaïdaï, had indicated once again on Friday that in Severodonestk “all the essential infrastructures have been destroyed. 90% of the city is damaged, 80% of the houses will have to be destroyed”.
These massive bombings eventually made the Ukrainian soldiers give in, but without necessarily fundamentally changing the situation on the ground, according to experts.
“The Ukrainian units are exhausted, bloodless. They had terrible losses with completely neutralized battalions”, explains a high-ranking French officer on condition of anonymity, evoking units of 300 or 400 men of which there remained only about twenty able-bodied.
But for all that, “the overall vision – a slow war of entrenched positions – has hardly changed”, assures AFP Ivan Klyszcz, researcher at the Estonian University of Tartu. “The withdrawal was probably planned before and perhaps considered tactical,” he said, pointing out that Ukrainian resistance allowed kyiv to consolidate its rear.
The Ukrainian forces “are in the process of operating a professional and tactical withdrawal in order to consolidate positions that they will be better able to defend”, also judged an American official at the Pentagon, on condition of anonymity.