KRAMATORSK | Russian forces are maintaining pressure on the port city of Mariupol and eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, as Kyiv denounces “hundreds of rapes” committed by Russian soldiers since the start of the invasion.
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Russian forces maintained pressure on Tuesday on the port city of Mariupol and in eastern Ukraine, where civilian casualties are revealed over the days even before the great battle promised shortly for control of Donbass.
The Ukrainian governor of the Lugansk region revealed on Tuesday that around 400 civilians had been buried since the start of the war on February 24 in Severodonetsk, a city in the east of the country where the Russian army is on the offensive. .
Morgues in towns in the region are “overflowing with the bodies of dead civilians”, Serguiï Gaïdaï added on Telegram, specifying that mass graves were also dug in the neighboring city of Lysytchansk.
In Mariupol, a city in the south-east besieged for more than 40 days by the Russian army, largely destroyed and where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he feared tens of thousands of deaths among the population, the position of the Ukrainian troops seemed desperate.
According to Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaïlo Podoliak, on Twitter, “Ukrainian soldiers are surrounded and blocked” in the city where “90% of the houses” were destroyed.
“Street fights”
The city is plagued “day and night” with “street fighting”, the Ukrainian governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Telegram on Tuesday. However, he admitted to having “almost no more contact” with Mariupol.
Taking Mariupol would allow the Russians to consolidate their territorial gains on the coastal strip along the Sea of Azov by connecting the Donbass regions to the Crimean peninsula, which they annexed in 2014.
Ukrainian forces “continue to defend Mariupol”, assured the Ukrainian army on Telegram on Monday, ensuring that it was always in contact with the units which “heroically hold the city”.
The Russian army said for its part that it had thwarted an attempt to break through by a hundred Ukrainian soldiers on Monday with armored vehicles that were in a factory north of the city.
The existence of this vast metallurgical complex transformed into a stronghold by the Ukrainian forces of Mariupol, with kilometers of underground, promises a fierce battle for the total control of Mariupol, even the use of chemical weapons, envisaged by the pro-Russian separatists of Donbass .
“Hundreds of rapes”
On Tuesday, President Zelensky denounced “hundreds of cases of rape” observed according to him in the areas previously occupied by the Russian army after the start of the invasion on February 24, “including young underage girls and very small children. children”.
The day before, UN officials had called for investigations into violence against women in Ukraine, and asked to protect millions of children displaced by the conflict. “We hear more and more about rape and sexual violence,” said Sima Bahous, director of the UN agency UN Women.
“Almost daily, new mass graves are found,” said Mr. Zelensky, who was addressing the Lithuanian parliament by video link. “Thousands and thousands of victims. Hundreds of cases of torture. We continue to find bodies in the sewers and cellars.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country denies any abuse in Ukraine, on Tuesday described as “fake” the information accusing his soldiers of having massacred hundreds of civilians in Boutcha, a locality in the northwestern suburbs of Kyiv, after the withdrawal at the end of March of the Russian soldiers who besieged it for several weeks.
AFP nevertheless saw there on Saturday April 2 the lifeless bodies of at least twenty men wearing civilian clothes lying in a street in Boutcha. One of the men had his hands tied and the bodies were strewn over several hundred yards.
Exhumation of civilians
Around Kyiv, the bodies of six people killed by bullets found in a basement in the eastern suburbs, according to the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s Office, were added on Tuesday to hundreds of others found in the past two weeks in the vicinity of the capital. have been under Russian control in recent weeks.
In Andriïvka, a village 30 km west of Kyiv which was still on the front line a few weeks ago, AFP journalists witnessed the exhumation of the bodies of other victims, three men in civilian clothes.
Among them, that of Yuri Kravtchennia. According to his wife, Olessia, he was shot in the street just after the start of the Russian invasion, while standing with his hands up.
As her remains emerged from the ground, Olessia screamed in pain. She rushed to his side but her legs gave way, and she collapsed. “He’s been gone for 41 days and I’m crying. I can’t go on without him,” she said.
In the east, bordering Russia and where Moscow has made the total conquest of the Donbass its priority objective, Kyiv has announced that it expects a major offensive in the short term.
“According to our information, the enemy has almost completed its preparation for an assault on the east. The attack will take place very soon,” warned the spokesman for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Oleksandre Motouzianik.
Civilians continued to flee Lugansk and Donetsk regions, from where six evacuation trains were to leave on Tuesday according to the Lugansk regional administration.
“All my parents are from Russia, I was born there. My father and my mother too. I have family all over Russia. Here, in the Donbass and in Kramatorsk, live people of all nationalities (…) Where did he see Nazis?” asks in Sloviansk, a city in the region, Valentina Oleynikova, 82, who leaves with her husband.
It refers to the Russian president who justifies the invasion of Ukraine with an alleged desire to “denazify” the country.
He ‘won’t stop’
Analysts believe that Vladimir Putin, mired in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance, wants to secure a victory in this region before the May 9 military parade in Red Square marking the Soviet victory over the Nazis in 1945.
Visiting the Russian Far East on Tuesday, Mr. Putin assured that the offensive of his forces in Ukraine was continuing “calmly” and minimizing losses.
“We are going to act harmoniously, calmly, in accordance with the plan proposed from the outset by the general staff,” Mr. Putin said.
He said that if the negotiations, now at a standstill, did not lead, it was because of the “inconsistencies” of the Ukrainian side.
kyiv, for its part, confirmed that the negotiations were “extremely difficult” with Moscow, with an important “emotional side”, according to presidential adviser Mykhaïlo Podoliak.
Vladimir Putin has in fact “decided that he will not stop”, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview published by the weekly Le Point, saying he believed “rather little in our collective ability to put him around”. a short-term negotiating table”.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, on Tuesday in Warsaw, called for an end to “barbarism”, but had to recognize his “mistake” of having bet on economic relations with Moscow, and revealed that he had received a snub from the Ukrainian leadership which “did not wish” to receive him in Kyiv.
More than 4.6 million Ukrainian refugees have fled their country since the invasion ordered by Vladimir Putin on February 24, according to the latest figures published on Tuesday by the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The war in Ukraine has triggered a chain reaction in the global economy with rising energy and food prices that will deepen poverty and hunger, and increase the debt burden, the President of Ukraine said on Tuesday. the World Bank.