Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Tuesday near the front, not far from Bakhmout, the main battlefield in eastern Ukraine where the Ukrainian army has been resisting a Russian offensive for months.
This trip also comes at a time when Russia accuses its neighbor of increasing drone attacks against airfields on its territory. Strikes that kyiv does not recognize, but which illustrate the difficulties encountered by the invasion launched on February 24 by Vladimir Putin.
The Ukrainians continue to suffer power cuts, the day after a new series of Russian bombardments on the energy infrastructure of their country.
President Volodymyr Zelensky released two videos of him in Donbass, a region which Moscow claimed for annexation in September, without however fully controlling it.
“Eastern Ukraine is the most difficult axis (of the front),” Mr. Zelensky told soldiers on the occasion of Armed Forces Day. “Thank you for your resilience,” he added, before presenting decorations to some of these men.
In another video made in front of the entrance to the city of Sloviansk, the Ukrainian head of state greeted “all those who gave their lives to Ukraine”.
Mr. Zelensky goes regularly near the front, something that the master of the Kremlin has never done so far, preferring videoconferences from his office or his residence.
Vladimir Putin has made only rare trips, such as on Monday to annexed Crimea, where images showed him driving a truck over the bridge linking this peninsula to Russia, which had been partially destroyed in early October in a attack attributed by Moscow to kyiv.
Sloviansk is also a symbolic city because it had been occupied in 2014 for a few months by pro-Russian separatists armed by Russia before being taken over by the Ukrainians.
It is also located 45 kilometers from Bakhmout, which Russian forces have been trying to conquer since the summer at the cost of considerable destruction, without succeeding for the moment. Moscow has deployed not only soldiers there, but also the men of the paramilitary group Wagner which has recruited convicts.
The capture of Bakhmout would finally constitute a success for the Russians, who, since the autumn, suffered setbacks, forced to retreat in the northeast and south.
Faced with the multiplication of these humiliating defeats, the Kremlin has also decided, since October, to concentrate its attacks on Ukrainian energy installations, depriving the population of electricity, even water and heating, at the very moment when the winter arrives with its negative temperatures, its snow and its ice.
“Dangerous Factor”
On Tuesday again, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu explained these “massive strikes” by the need to “reduce Ukraine’s military potential”.
If the Kremlin keeps swearing that it will overcome the Ukrainian resistance, the last few months have proved very difficult for the Russian military, faced with Ukrainians motivated and armed by their Western allies.
Mr. Putin has already had to resolve to mobilize 300,000 reservists, civilians therefore, to reinforce his lines.
Moscow has also denounced in the past two days Ukrainian attacks on military airfields, including two, targeted on Monday, which are several hundred kilometers from the border. Kyiv has not officially admitted any responsibility for these actions.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov for his part described these attacks as a “dangerous factor”, adding, without providing details, that “necessary measures will be taken”.
On Tuesday morning, another drone attack in the Kursk airfield area, near the Ukrainian border this time, set fire to an oil tank.
President Putin, for his part, convened his Security Council to discuss issues related to “internal security”, said Mr. Peskov without further details.
And kyiv and Moscow have carried out a new exchange of prisoners, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced, noting in a press release that “60 Russian servicemen” had been released on Tuesday in this operation.
“No doubt” to find new buyers of Russian crude
On the sanctions front, Russia has continued to play down the importance of the capping of its crude oil price by the West, which is thus trying to reduce the oil windfall financing its war effort.
“I have no doubt that there will be buyers for our oil products,” said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.
The announcement on Friday by the European Union (EU), the G7 and Australia of a ceiling on the price of Russian oil for export at 60 US dollars will “fragment” the world economy “in many areas” , he estimated.
On the same subject, Russian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Energy, Alexander Novak, who has already warned that Moscow will no longer deliver oil to countries that adopt the capping mechanism, repeated on Tuesday that it would ” lead to an even greater increase in prices” on world markets, against a backdrop of already high inflation in many countries.
According to Mr. Novak, the price cap introduced by the West “is not a tragedy” for Russia despite “supply chains to change” and “an uncertain situation”.
“Trading companies will find mechanisms among themselves to sell the products concerned”, he assured, even if he once again said “not to rule out” a drop in Russian oil deliveries in the coming months in the face of these “uncertainties”.