The United States is meeting around 40 allied countries in Germany on Tuesday to further arm Ukraine against Russia, while the UN Secretary General is to meet Vladimir Putin in Moscow for the first time since the start of the invasion. Russian on February 24.
Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin was due to open a meeting around 10:00 a.m. (4 a.m. ET GMT) with his allied counterparts at the US base in Ramstein, Germany, to expedite arms deliveries to Ukraine.
The Ukrainians surprised the world in March by repelling a Russian offensive on kyiv, but face relentless shelling and a slow advance by the Russian army in the eastern Donbass – which pro-Russian separatists have already partly controlled since then. 2014 — and the south of the country. The Russians are showing their objective of taking total control of these two regions.
Ukrainians “can win if they have the right equipment, the right support,” Austin said on Monday, the day after a visit to Kyiv with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, their first visit to Ukraine since the start. of the conflict.
After reluctant to provide offensive weapons to Ukraine, the United States, like Great Britain, France or the Czech Republic have taken the plunge.
Even Germany is expected to announce on Tuesday the delivery of “Guepard” type tanks, specializing in anti-aircraft defense, according to a government source.
According to Mike Jacobson, a civilian artillery specialist, the West wants to allow the Ukrainians to respond to the long-range Russian bombardments, which aim to push back the bulk of the Ukrainian forces so that they can then send tanks and soldiers to occupy the ground.
They hope that the Ukrainian military, with better air defenses, attack drones and intelligence provided by the West, can destroy much of the Russian firepower.
Russian strikes
In the longer term, “we want to see Russia weakened to such a degree that it can no longer do the same kinds of things as invading Ukraine,” Austin said.
President Zelensky assured Monday evening that the Ukrainian victory was only a matter of time. “Thanks to the courage of all Ukrainians, all Ukrainians, our state is a true symbol of the struggle for freedom,” he said Monday evening.
But on the Donbass front, the situation is complicated, and “in terms of morale, it’s not rosy at all”, told AFP Iryna Rybakova, press officer of the 93rd Ukrainian brigade.
Several localities like Izium and Kreminna have fallen over the past two weeks and the Russian army continues to nibble away at ground, pocket by pocket, while for the Ukrainians it has been a matter of containing it for several days.
In the Donbass as in the south, “the enemy is carrying out strikes on the positions of our troops along the entire length of the front line with mortars, artillery and multiple rocket launchers”, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. on Telegram.
In the south, two Russian missiles hit the city of Zaporizhia on Tuesday morning, killing at least one person and injuring an unspecified company, according to the regional administration.
Zaporizhia, a major industrial center on the Dnieper River, to the south of which is also the largest nuclear power plant, has in recent weeks been the reception point for Ukrainian civilians fleeing the siege of Mariupol and other bombarded cities of Donbass.
But the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday that the city is now preparing for an attack by Russian forces from the coast.
Azovstal still pounded
The situation also seems blocked in Mariupol, almost entirely controlled by the Russians but where some 100,000 civilians are still trapped according to kyiv.
Russian forces continue to shell the vast Azovstal metallurgical complex there, where the last Ukrainian fighters are entrenched with, according to them, nearly 1,000 civilians, said Tuesday on Facebook the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kirilenko.
“The shelling continues constantly, with heavy artillery and aviation,” he said. “We can only rely on our own strength,” he added.
Moscow accused kyiv of preventing civilians from leaving Azovstal on Monday. But Ukraine retaliated that there had been no agreement with Russia to guarantee their security.
Guterres in Moscow
The Russian-Ukrainian negotiations seem more than ever deadlocked.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov assured Monday evening that he wanted to pursue them, while accusing President Zelensky of “pretending” to discuss with Moscow.
“He’s a good actor. […]if you look carefully and read carefully what he says, you will find a thousand contradictions,” Lavrov said.
Mr. Lavrov receives the Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres at midday on Tuesday, for his first visit to Russia since the start of a conflict which has upset the major world balances and destroyed all cooperation between Moscow and the West, which chained sanctions and expulsions of diplomats.
He pleaded for a ceasefire in Ukraine “as soon as possible”.
Mr. Guterres must then be received by President Vladimir Putin, before leaving for kyiv.
The conflict has thrown nearly 13 million Ukrainians on the roads, of whom more than five million have fled Ukraine, according to the latest UN figures. The organization estimated on Tuesday that the number of Ukrainian refugees fleeing their country could reach 8.3 million, and that the deterioration of the situation called for a doubling of the appeal for humanitarian aid to help Ukraine, to 2.25 billions of dollars.