War in Ukraine | Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian ministers

(Warsaw) US President Joe Biden met on Saturday in Warsaw with the Ukrainian Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense, during their meeting with their American counterparts.

Mr. Biden, whose first meeting with senior Ukrainian officials since the start of the war, engaged in an informal conversation with the head of diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba, seated at a long table where the Ukrainian minister was also seated. of Defense Oleksii Reznikov, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

MM. Kouleba and Reznikov made the surprise trip to Warsaw. The meeting took place in a room in the Warsaw hotel where Mr. Biden had spent the night, decorated with Ukrainian and American flags.

The American president had met the head of Ukrainian diplomacy in Washington on February 22 – two days before the start of the Russian offensive.

Mr. Blinken then met Mr. Kouleba in Poland, on the Ukrainian border, on March 5.

Arriving in Poland on Friday after a series of international meetings in Brussels, Mr. Biden is due to meet on Saturday with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda, meet Ukrainian refugees in a reception center set up at the national stadium in Warsaw and deliver a late afternoon speech at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday accused Russia of fueling a dangerous arms race by highlighting its nuclear arsenal, during a video intervention at the Doha Forum.

Zelensky also called on Qatar, one of the world’s leading liquefied natural gas exporters, to increase production to counter Russian threats to use the energy “for blackmail”.

On the front, around Donetsk and Luhansk, the two major cities of Donbass, where Moscow has announced that it will now concentrate its efforts, the Ukrainian army staff claims to have “inflicted significant losses on the Russian invaders”, in its last bulletin published on Saturday at dawn. It reports three planes shot down, eight tanks destroyed and some 170 soldiers killed on the Russian side.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported a battle for control of two villages near Donetsk, Novobakhmutivka and Novomykhailivka.

The Russian ministry also claimed that Kalibr-type rockets destroyed an arms and ammunition depot in the Zhytomyr region, near the village of Velyki Korovyntsi, west of Kyiv, on March 25. A fuel depot was also hit near the port city of Mykolaiv (south), according to the same source.

Statements to be taken with caution, each side engaged in an intense battle for information, in a context of great difficulty in verifying from an independent source what is happening on the ground, a little more than a month after the launch of the Russian invasion.

The Russian command had surprised by announcing Friday “to concentrate the bulk of the efforts on the main objective: the liberation of the Donbass”, contrasting with the will displayed by Moscow so far to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine” as a whole and not not only in this region where the two pro-Russian separatist “republics” are located.

fate of generals

At the same time, the greatest vagueness reigns as to the fate of the Russian generals who died in Ukraine, seven in number according to Kyiv. The latest killed is General Yakov Rezantsev, according to Western officials on condition of anonymity.

According to these same sources, another general, Vladislav Yerchov, was removed from his post by the Kremlin because of the heavy losses suffered by the Russian troops. But there again, while Ukrainian media evoke a “purge” linked to Russian losses in Ukraine, only the death of one of its generals has been confirmed by Moscow.

In this context, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made his first public appearance in two weeks, according to images broadcast on Saturday in Russia, an absence which had raised questions that the Kremlin had tried to sweep away. Moscow had also dismissed speculation about the minister’s state of health.

Outside the Donbass, the Russians remain very present.

Thus, around Kyiv, whose mayor has just decreed a new curfew from Saturday evening to Monday morning, the fighting continues to “repel the enemy offensive”, according to the Ukrainian general staff, specifying that the front line had not moved.

The forces of Kyiv claim to continue their counter-offensive on Kherson, in the south of the country, the only large city to have been entirely conquered by the forces of Moscow.

Franco-Turkish-Greek initiative

In Mariupol, a strategic Ukrainian port located on the Sea of ​​Azov, more than 2,000 civilians were killed, according to the municipality. Some 100,000 of its inhabitants are still stuck there and lack everything, according to President Zelensky.

Friday evening, Emmanuel Macron announced that France, Turkey and Greece were going to carry out “a humanitarian operation” to evacuate “in the very next few days” civilians from the besieged city.

Neo-Nazi militia for some, Ukrainian heroes for others: the Azov regiment, entrenched in besieged Mariupol, is also at the heart of the propaganda war between Kyiv and Russia.

Pro-Russian social networks – starting with the Twitter accounts of the Russian embassies in Paris or London – are buzzing with testimonies and comments on the supposed atrocities of this regiment, presented as “fascist” or “Nazi”.

Thousands of victims

In addition to Polish and Ukrainian leaders, Joe Biden has planned to travel to Poland to a reception center for Ukrainian refugees and is to deliver a speech on the conflict which in one month has left thousands of Ukrainians dead, including 135 children, according to Kyiv.

Since February 24, more than 2.2 million people fleeing the conflict have entered Poland, according to Polish border guards, out of about 3.7 million in total who have gone abroad, according to the UN , including 1.8 million children.

Faced with this human tragedy, the momentum of solidarity for Ukraine does not weaken across Europe.

This is the case in the small English town of Diss, which sends aid trucks, prepares beds for refugees and even raises funds thanks to a cocktail in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, with vodka and blue curaçao.

railway bridge

In Germany, an unprecedented “railway bridge” has been established to deliver humanitarian aid to Ukraine. The operation of the Deustche Bahn (DB), the German rail company, resonates like a distant echo of the famous “airlift” organized during the Cold War by the West to help the city of Berlin victim of a Soviet blockade.

On the economic front, Washington and Brussels announced on Friday the creation of a working group aimed at reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels, thanks in particular to the supply of American gas.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Friday evening punishing prison sentences of up to 15 years for “false information” about Moscow’s action abroad, an additional repressive weapon to control information on its offensive in Ukraine.