The European Union on Wednesday accused Russia of gas “blackmail” after it turned off the tap of “blue gold” to Poland and Bulgaria, while Moscow claimed to have destroyed “a large quantity of weapons provided by Westerners to Ukrainians.
For his part, after meeting President Vladimir Putin in the Russian capital the day before, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, arrived in Ukraine, his first visit to this country since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24. . He will travel Thursday to the suburbs of kyiv, to Boutcha, Irpin and Borodianka, theaters of abuses attributed to the Russian army by the Ukrainians.
As the West steps up efforts to arm Ukrainians against Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that “sheds with a large amount of foreign weapons and ammunition, delivered to Ukrainian forces by the United States and European countries, had been destroyed with Kalibr missiles fired from the sea at the Zaporizhia aluminum plant in southern Ukraine.
The governor of this region, however, provided a firm denial: “No ammunition and arms depot was affected in Zaporijjia”, he retorted, hammering that the affected factory “had not been operational since six years “.
Russian troops are bombing bridges and railways to slow down Western arms deliveries to Ukraine, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister said on Tuesday after the destruction of a strategic bridge linking this country to Romania.
About forty countries met on Tuesday in Germany, around the United States, to coordinate an acceleration of the supplies of military equipment that kyiv is demanding.
“Extremely difficult weeks”
The head of British diplomacy Liz Truss was to call on Wednesday, in a speech in London, to “redouble support” for Ukraine and to prepare for a war “in the long term”. “Heavy weapons, tanks, planes — dig into our stocks, ramp up production, we have to do all of that,” she said.
Vladimir Putin meanwhile again warned against any outside intervention in the conflict in Ukraine, promising a “rapid and lightning” response.
Russian forces, which have been stepping up their offensive in Donbass for two weeks, announced on Wednesday that they had carried out airstrikes on 59 Ukrainian targets.
At the same time, the Ukrainian army has, rare on its part, recognized Russian advances in the East, in the Kharkiv region and in the Donbass, a mining basin partly controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
kyiv admitted that the Russians had taken localities stretching from north to south, suggesting that Moscow wants to take a vice in a large pocket still in the hands of the Ukrainians.
“We have extremely difficult weeks ahead,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov warned in a statement on Wednesday.
According to him, the Russian army, “already aware of its strategic defeat, will try to inflict as much suffering as possible” on the Ukrainian soldiers whom he urged to “hold on”.
“The enemy is bombarding massively”
In Kharkiv, whose northern and eastern districts are less than 5 km from the front line, at least three people died and 15 were injured in shelling, Governor Oleg Synegoubov said, adding: “The Russians continue their artillery and mortar fire against residential areas of Kharkiv and its region”.
Despite the bombs, three young volunteers, Nazar, Alexiï and Oleg, the trunk filled to the brim with food, techno music at full blast, deliver humanitarian aid every day in areas of this city regularly targeted by Russian rockets.
“Our main objective is to feed children and the elderly, they need it the most,” Nazar Tishchenko, 34, told AFP.
At the southern tip of the Donbass, in the strategic port city of Mariupol, besieged and devastated, “the enemy is heavily bombarding and blocking our units near the Azovstal factory”, said in its daily report the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
Commander of the 36th Mariupol Marine Brigade, Sergey Volyna, appealed for help again, saying he had 600 wounded soldiers and hundreds of civilians with him.
“My message today is: save the Mariupol garrison, carry out an exfiltration operation for us. People will just die here […] civilians die with us […] the city is almost erased from the surface of the Earth, ”he implored in a message relayed on Telegram.
The gas weapon
Outside Ukraine, the Russian group Gazprom announced on Wednesday that it had suspended all gas deliveries to Bulgaria and Poland, ensuring that these two countries had not paid in rubles, as Vladimir Putin has demanded since March.
Denouncing a new “gas blackmail”, the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen affirmed that these two member countries of the EU and NATO, very dependent on Russian “blue gold”, were now supplied “by their neighbors in the European Union”.
“This is not blackmail”, but a response to “unfriendly acts”, replied Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, an allusion to the freezing of Russian foreign currency reserves held abroad .
These events come at a time when many chancelleries are worried about the risk of spreading the conflict, after a series of explosions, attributed by kyiv to Moscow, in the pro-Russian separatist region of Transdniestria, in Moldova.
“We strongly condemn such actions. The Moldovan authorities will take care to prevent the republic from being drawn into a conflict, ”said Moldovan President Maïa Sandu on Tuesday, urging the population to calm down.
On Wednesday, authorities in the separatist territory said a border village hosting a major Russian army ammunition depot had come under fire from Ukraine.
In this context, former US Marine Trevor Reed, sentenced to nine years in prison in Russia for violence, was exchanged on Wednesday with a Russian pilot who has been incarcerated in the United States since 2010. An exchange which, according to Washington, did not “no” impact on relations between the two countries.
To help Ukraine, the European Commission proposed on Wednesday to suspend all customs duties on products imported from this country into the EU for one year. The proposal still needs to be approved by the European Parliament and the 27 member states.
“This will allow us to support economic activity as much as possible in Ukraine and to preserve our national production”, welcomed President Volodymyr Zelensky in the evening.
The United Kingdom announced on Monday that it had taken such a measure.