Russian forces heavily shelled the port cities of Mykolaiv and Mariupol on Saturday, but appeared to be marking time around Kiev, which fears possible encirclement.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed Moscow’s “fundamentally different approach” to recent talks with Kiev, explaining that Russia was no longer content to “just issue ultimatums”. He lamented that “Western partners [de l’Ukraine] are not sufficiently committed” to this approach.
On the ground, in the port city of Mykolaiv, in the south of the country, the bombardments hardly ceased overnight from Friday to Saturday, affecting in particular a cancer center and an ophthalmological hospital, according to a journalist from the AFP.
“They fired on these civilian areas, without any military objective”, was indignant Dmytro Lagotchev, the head of the hospital.
Another major target of Russian strikes, Mariupol, a strategic port in the south-east besieged for twelve days, has run out of food. The city is also deprived of water, gas, electricity and communications.
An “almost desperate” situation, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and “the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet”, according to the head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kouleba, who had quantified the number of civilians killed on Friday at 1,582.
For his part, Russian General Mikhail Mizintsev, quoted by Russian news agencies, blamed Ukrainian “nationalists” for this situation in Mariupol, where “hundreds of thousands of people including foreigners” are trapped.
The Ukrainian government said on Saturday that a mosque had been bombed, in which about 80 civilians, including Turks, had taken refuge, but the information was denied by one of them.
According to the president of the Mariupol Souleiman Mosque Association, Ismail Hacioglu, reached by the Turkish channel HaberTürk on Saturday early afternoon, the mosque area was under fire, but the mosque itself did not was not touched.
On Saturday morning, local media reported that anti-bombing warning sirens were sounding throughout Ukraine, including Kiev, Odessa, Dnipro and Kharkiv.
The Russian strikes notably destroyed Vassylkiv airport on Saturday morning, about 40 kilometers south of Kiev, and an oil depot also hit caught fire, according to local authorities.
Ukrainian military intelligence said on Facebook on Saturday that Russian soldiers had fired on civilians who were using an evacuation corridor near Kiev the day before, killing 7 people including a child.
In Kharkiv, northeast, doctors at a hospital told AFP they spent two days pumping the ashes from the stomach of an eight-year-old child whose house had been blown up by a Russian missile, without succeeding in removing all those present in the lungs.
“Lies”
These attacks on civilians have sparked a new wave of accusations that Russia is committing war crimes.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in return accused Ukrainian forces of “flagrant violations” of humanitarian law, during a phone call with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Mr. Putin notably mentioned “extrajudicial assassinations of opponents”, “civilian hostage-taking” or even the “deployment of heavy weapons in residential areas, near hospitals, schools and gardens of children,” according to a Kremlin statement.
“Lies”, reacted the French presidency after their meeting, during which the three men discussed Paris and Berlin’s request for “an immediate ceasefire” and “the start of a diplomatic solution.
Zelensky on guard
In terms of security guarantees, “Ukraine will not be able to trust Russia after this bloody war. Such security guarantees must be offered by other foreign leaders,” said the Ukrainian president.
Mr. Zelensky made these remarks while a meeting took place Thursday between the heads of Russian and Ukrainian diplomacy in Turkey, the first at this level since the beginning of the conflict.
Previously, three sessions of talks at the level of delegations had taken place. These talks are continuing by videoconference, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Saturday, declining to give more details. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak confirmed the holding.
Kiev fears encirclement
On the ground, the Russian forces seemed to be marking time in the suburbs of Kiev, both to the west and to the east, countered by the Ukrainians, according to AFP journalists on the spot.
In Irpin, on the western outskirts of Kiev, which had been heavily bombed in the previous days, a Ukrainian soldier showed journalists on Saturday a Russian tank destroyed by a British brand anti-tank missile.
The Russian forces have however advanced enough to raise fears of an upcoming encirclement of the capital, where only the roads to the south remain clear and which is preparing for a “fierce defense”, according to the Ukrainian presidency.
The Russian army also reports advances on the front in the separatist region of Donbass, claiming to have destroyed “a total of 3,491 Ukrainian military infrastructures”, including “123 unmanned aerial vehicles, 1,127 tanks and other armored combat vehicles”. .
During his press conference on Saturday, the Ukrainian president for the first time gave a figure on the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed since the Russian invasion on February 24. “We have about 1,300 soldiers who have perished,” he said, saying that the Russian army has lost “about 12,000 men”.
These reports provided by both sides are at this stage unverifiable.
Nearly 2.6 million people have fled Ukraine since February 24 and around two million people are also internally displaced, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The Russian Ministry of Defense also reported the delivery by the Russian army of more than 100 tons of humanitarian aid “to the liberated colonies in the Kharkiv region”.
Economic pressures and diplomacy
Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday called on Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz to help free the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, kidnapped the day before by the Russians, according to Kiev.
“We expect world leaders to show us how they can influence the situation,” he said.
His calls for NATO intervention went unheeded, but the Western camp sent funds and military aid to Kiev.
On Friday, US President Joe Biden once again ruled out any direct action against nuclear-armed Russia, warning that this would lead to a “Third World War”. But he also warned that Russia would pay “a heavy price” if chemical weapons were used in Ukraine.
Westerners favored economic pressures, which they increased on Friday by paving the way for punitive tariffs against Moscow. Washington further announced a ban on iconic Russian products such as vodka, seafood and diamonds. The United States and the European Union have also decided to stop exporting their luxury goods to Russia.
The escalation of sanctions could continue, President Macron warned on Friday after a summit of European leaders in Versailles.
For his part, Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency, warned that the sanctions could, according to him, cause the fall of the International Space Station (ISS) by affecting the Russian segment of the station which serves in particular to correct the orbit of the orbital structure.