What you need to know | War in Ukraine, Day 37

(Kyiv) Russia on Friday accused Ukraine of carrying out an airstrike on its soil, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky assured that the Russian army was regrouping for “powerful attacks” in eastern Kyiv. country.

A new attempt to evacuate thousands of civilians stranded in dire humanitarian conditions in the southern city of Mariupol continued on Friday under the aegis of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“It is not yet clear if this will happen today,” said a spokesman in Geneva, Ewan Watson. “There are a lot of moving parts and not all the details are worked out to make sure it happens safely,” he explained Friday morning.

For her part, Roberta Metsola, the Maltese President of the European Parliament, is expected in the morning in Kyiv, we learned from a source of this institution. She is the first leader of a European institution to visit the Ukrainian capital since the start of the Russian invasion.

In Russia, the governor of the Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, on Friday accused Ukraine of carrying out a helicopter attack on what he described as an “oil depot” in this city located at a forty kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

This is the first time that Russia has reported Ukrainian helicopter strikes on its territory since the start of the conflict. The spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov, however, did not speak on the subject on Friday.

The manager of a typography near Belgorod claimed that his business was also hit by helicopter fire. “Helicopters fired at us with rockets,” he told state news agency TASS.

The Kremlin said on Friday that the attack would weigh on Russian-Ukrainian talks to end the offensive in Ukraine.

“It is clear that we cannot consider this as something that will create the appropriate conditions for the continuation of negotiations,” said Dmitri Peskov, spokesman for the Russian presidency.

Kyiv has not immediately said anything about this operation.

The strike, the first of its kind if confirmed to be the work of the Ukrainian Air Force, comes as Russia has repeatedly claimed to have full control of the air in Ukraine.

The Kremlin has also reaffirmed that this was the case.

“Mastering the air during the special military operation is an absolute fact. About the incident [de Belgorod] it will be up to our armed forces to assess it,” he said.

“Partial withdrawal”

In Ukraine itself, the armed forces claimed to have liberated 11 localities in the Kherson region (south). Two people were killed and two others injured in Russian shelling on Thursday, regional governor Sergey Gaidai said on Telegram on Friday.

The Russians “continue their partial withdrawal” from the north of the Kyiv region towards the Belarusian border, indicated the Ministry of Defense, which denounces numerous acts of “looting” on the part of Russian soldiers.

” In certain regions […] the occupiers are trying to force contractors to switch to the Russian rouble,” he said.

Russia had indicated earlier this week that it intended to reduce its activity in Kyiv and Cherniguiv in order to transfer its strike power from the north to the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east.

“It’s part of their tactic,” repeated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky overnight from Thursday to Friday.

“We know they are moving away from areas where we are beating them to focus on areas that are very important…where it can be difficult for us,” he added. In particular, the situation in the east of the country is “very difficult”.

“In the Donbass and in Mariupol, in the direction of Kharkiv, the Russian army is strengthening in anticipation of powerful attacks,” the president further declared.

This refocusing portends a “protracted” conflict, which could last for months, the Pentagon has warned.

Military experts believe that Moscow has abandoned its plan to advance simultaneously along several axes in the North, East and South, due to the difficulties encountered in the face of stronger than expected Ukrainian resistance.

According to US officials, Russia moved around 20% of its troops from around Kyiv after failing to take the city.

But the strikes on the capital continue and Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said it was likely troops “will be repositioned, probably in Belarus, for re-equipment and resupply and use elsewhere in Ukraine”.

More than a month after the invasion of Ukraine, Mariupol, a strategic port in the south-east of the country, on the Sea of ​​Azov, remains besieged and pounded relentlessly. At least 5,000 people have died and 160,000 civilians are still believed to be stranded in the city, according to Ukrainian sources.

Evacuation attempt

A new evacuation attempt is scheduled for Friday. The ICRC delegation in Ukraine tweeted that it was in the nearby town of Zaporizhia, where buses from the beleaguered town are supposed to arrive.

The Ukrainian government had for its part announced that it had sent dozens of coaches to Mariupol.

People who managed to leave the besieged city and NGOs described catastrophic conditions there, with civilians holed up in cellars, deprived of water, food and communication, and corpses littering the streets. The municipality also accuses Moscow of having evacuated “against their will” more than 20,000 inhabitants to Russia.

On the diplomatic front, the EU will try to persuade China to give up helping Moscow to counter Western sanctions, during a virtual summit on Friday with Beijing.

Ruble accounts

Previously, Vladimir Putin had announced that he was banning European leaders and the majority of MEPs from entering his territory, in response to all-out sanctions targeting Moscow.

And he threatened buyers of Russian gas from “unfriendly” countries with cutting off their supply if they did not comply with Kremlin demands, a move intended to prop up the ruble that would mainly affect the highly dependent European Union.

“They have to open ruble accounts in Russian banks. And from these accounts they will have to pay for the gas delivered and that tomorrow,” he said.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz immediately replied that European countries will continue to pay for Russian gas in euros and dollars as is “written in the contracts”.

In this context, the French Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire, on a trip to Berlin, signaled that France and Germany were “preparing” for a potential stoppage of Russian gas imports.

After five weeks of war, four million refugees have fled Ukraine, to which must be added almost 6.5 million internally displaced people, according to the UN. Some 90% of those who fled Ukraine are women and children.

Officials in Kyiv announced Thursday evening that Russian forces had left the Chernobyl nuclear power plant they had occupied since the first day of the invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

“They took with them members of the National Guard whom they had been holding hostage since February 24,” Ukrainian state agency Energoatom said on Telegram, citing employees. Their number is not known.

The NGO Human Rights Watch for its part called on Friday the Ukrainian authorities to investigate potential “war crimes” against Russian prisoners, after the broadcast of images appearing to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting them in the legs.